The Chessmen (5 page)

‘We’re going to need to get him back to Stornoway double quick, or we’re going to lose what’s left of him,’ the professor said. ‘Let’s make this as fast as we can.’ He clambered carefully over the roof of the cockpit to the far wing and tried to open the door at the pilot’s side. It was stuck fast. Fin and Gunn scrambled over after him, and between them managed to prise it open. They moved back, then, to give the pathologist access to the corpse.

It was a grim sight, the mostly decayed body still fully dressed, the natural fibres of the clothes having survived better in the cold water than the flesh of the dead man.

Professor Wilson opened up the jacket to reveal a white T-shirt beneath it bearing a Grateful Dead logo. ‘Dead he certainly is, but I doubt if he’s very grateful.’ He pulled up the T-shirt to expose the cheesy white tissue still clinging to the fatty areas of the torso. He explored the mush with fingers that simply disappeared into it. ‘Adipocere,’ he said, apparently undisturbed. ‘There’ll be more of that around
his thighs and buttocks, but the internal organs’ll be long gone I think.’

He moved the head very carefully to one side, revealing the bones of the spinal column at the neck. Just a few remnants of grey-white tissue were left holding the skeleton together. The pathologist removed a long, pointed instrument from his breast pocket and gently poked about among the bones. ‘Pretty porous and brittle. These are going to break very easily, and the remaining tissue’s not going to hold them when we start moving him. Best leave him in these clothes for transporting him. They’re about the only thing that’s keeping him in one piece. If this water had been any warmer, all we’d have found here would be a pile of bones.’

He turned his attention, then, to the skull.

‘Massive trauma,’ he said. ‘Half his jaw’s gone. His brain on this side would have been pulverized.’

‘Is that what killed him?’ Fin asked.

‘Impossible to say, Fin. The injury could have been inflicted after death for all we know. All the same, it might be a good guess.’

‘Any idea what could have done it?’

‘Something blunt. Big. The size of a baseball bat, though flatter I’d say. But the force that was used to inflict an injury like this . . .’ He shook his head.

‘Not the result of a plane crash then,’ Gunn said.

The professor threw him a look. ‘Does this plane look to you like it’s crashed, Detective Sergeant?’

Gunn glanced at Fin. ‘No, sir, it doesn’t.’

‘No, it fucking does not! I’m no expert, but I’d say this plane didn’t crash into the loch. It landed on it and sank. And one thing’s for sure, this fella wasn’t flying it.’ He eased open the jaw with his metal probe. ‘And all this damage to the jaw and the teeth means we’ll not be able to make a positive ID from any dental records that might exist.’

‘What about DNA?’ Fin said.

‘We can extract some from the bones, for sure. And there is a little hair left. But what do we have to compare it to?’

Gunn said, ‘His parents are dead. No brothers or sisters.’

‘So no immediate familial match possible. And I don’t suppose he’ll be in the database. What about personal items? Comb, hairbrush, shaver? Anything that might have remnants of his DNA.’

Gunn shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, sir. The parental home would have been cleared out for sale after their death. And who knows what happened to Mr Mackenzie’s personal items from Glasgow?’

Professor Wilson scowled at him. ‘Not much bloody use are you, Detective Sergeant?’ Then he turned back to the corpse and slipped two fingers very carefully into the inside pocket of the leather jacket. By gentle increments, he eased out a bleached leather wallet. ‘We might just have to rely on this.’ He opened it up. If there had been paper money in it once, it was long gone. There was a handful of coins, and three credit cards all in the name of Roderick Mackenzie. From an inside flap the pathologist drew out a plasticized card with Roddy’s photograph on it. Membership of a Glasgow fitness club. He looked back at Fin. ‘You knew him?’

Fin nodded.

‘I guess that’s him, then?’

‘It is.’ Fin found himself staring at the faded face of the once handsome young man, with his head of blond curls and slightly lopsided smile. And, as before, when Gunn had referred to him as
the deceased
, he felt an odd sense of grief.

‘So . . .’ Professor Wilson turned towards Gunn. ‘What do you think, Detective Sergeant?’

‘I think he was murdered, sir.’

The pathologist shrugged, for once finding himself in accord with the policeman. ‘Not conclusive, of course, but I’d say there was a damned good chance of it. What do you think, Fin?’

‘It’s what I thought the moment I opened the door of the cockpit, Angus. And I’ve not seen anything to change my mind.’

The professor nodded. ‘Right, then. We want that recovery team up here as quickly as possible. Photograph the body, then get it back to Stornoway, and we’ll see if there’s anything else we can divine on the autopsy table.’

As the pathologist slithered down off the wing, Gunn caught Fin’s arm. ‘So he was up here poaching was he, Mr Macleod? Your pal Whistler.’

‘He was.’

‘In a storm?’

Fin nodded, but knew that Gunn could sense he was being evasive.

‘Not that simple, George.’

Where Whistler was concerned, nothing was ever simple. And Fin turned his thoughts back to the events of two days before, wondering how he could ever have been so foolish as to have taken the bait.

As he drove home the night after that first encounter with Whistler, Fin’s thoughts had been dominated by him. The way he lived, the imminent eviction from his home.

The sun cast lengthening shadows among the dried grasses on the rise as he passed the turn-off to the Crobost Free Church. He cast a glance towards the manse standing on the hill above it, and the Reverend Murray’s car parked at the foot of the steps. Although they had never seen eye to eye on God and faith, Fin felt enormous empathy for his childhood friend, and each time he passed the church shared something of Donald’s hurt. Along with anger that people could so lack understanding.

The collection of houses and crofts that made up the village of Crobost, treeless and exposed to the wind, was strung along half a mile of clifftop above the beach at Port of Ness, the most northerly port on the island. But the harbour was storm-damaged and these days used only by the odd crabber. From here Fin could see a few small boats
dragged up on to the sand, or bobbing in the shelter of the harbour wall, tugging gently on creaking ropes.

A good hundred yards or so closer to Port of Ness than Fin’s parents’ croft stood Marsaili’s bungalow, just below the road. It had belonged to Artair’s parents. But both they and Artair were gone now, and Marsaili lived there with her son. Who was Fin’s son, too.

The old crofthouse up the road where he had lived until the death of his parents was only partially restored. Fin had stripped it back to its stone walls. He had put a new roof on it. But it wasn’t yet habitable, and he had moved in with Marsaili. A temporary arrangement, they had both agreed. He was to have had Artair’s mother’s old room. But in no time he had found himself in Marsaili’s bed. As if all the years which had passed since the summer of love they had shared before leaving for university had never been. The people they had become in between, the separate lives they had led, seemed unreal now. Like phantoms in a bad dream. And yet, Fin knew, there was something missing. Whether it was something in him, or in Marsaili, or something in the way they had never quite been able to recreate the magic of that lost summer, he could not have said. But whatever it was, it troubled him.

Marsaili’s car stood on the gravel at the top of the path down to the bungalow, its tailgate raised. Fin drew in behind it. He crossed the grass to the path and felt it almost brittle underfoot, the peaty soil beneath it hard after so long without rain. The kitchen door stood open and he could hear Marsaili’s voice calling from somewhere
deeper in the house. ‘And don’t forget that knitted jumper. It’s warm now, but it’ll be cold in no time, and you’ll need it.’

As he stepped into the kitchen he heard Fionnlagh’s shouted response from the bedroom upstairs. ‘There’s not enough room in the case.’ Fin smiled. Knitted jumpers were not exactly fashionable, and Fionnlagh was nothing if not a young man of his times.

‘I’ll come up if you want!’

‘No, no, it’s all right. I’ll get it in somehow.’

Fin was quite sure that Marsaili would find that knitted jumper at the bottom of a drawer in days to come. She came into the kitchen sighing her exasperation. ‘Boys!’ The word exploded from her, and she threw a dangerous look in the direction of Fin’s laughter. It was a look he loved. Full of the spirit of the Marsaili of old, auburn hair swept back from a fine face with smiling lips, and cornflower-blue eyes filled with the fire of ice. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘You.’

‘Thank you.’ She gave him an ironic little smile without humour and returned to a worktop where she was in the process of preparing sandwiches for the ferry trip. ‘So how does it feel to have a real job again?’

Fin leaned against the fridge. ‘Doesn’t feel like a real job. No office, no telephones, no one counting my hours.’

‘When they’re not counting them it usually means you’re working far more than you should.’

Fin smiled and nodded. ‘I probably will be.’ Then he said, ‘I met an old schoolfriend today.’

‘Yes?’ Marsaili was still focused on her sandwiches, and he sensed that she wasn’t really interested.

‘John Angus Macaskill. Everyone knew him as Whistler.’

‘Oh, yes. Played the flute with – what were they called then – Sòlas?’

‘That’s him.’

‘Good-looking big lad. But not right in the head, I think.’

Fin grinned at her description of him. ‘Too clever for his own good, he was. Still is.’

‘I never really knew him. We didn’t mix in the same circles at school.’ She began wrapping the sandwiches in tinfoil.

‘No, you were too busy with Artair in those days.’

There was an almost imperceptible pause in the wrapping of the sandwiches, but she didn’t turn. ‘What’s he doing now?’

‘Living like a tramp in a tip of a croft down in Uig.’

She turned, holding the wrapped sandwiches in her hands, a glint of curiosity in her eyes. ‘Like a tramp?’

Fionnlagh dragged an enormous brown suitcase into the kitchen. He was as tall as Fin. Perhaps taller. With his tight blonde curls gelled into points, and his mother’s blue eyes. He nodded acknowledgement to his father as Fin expanded on his description of Whistler for Marsaili. ‘He’s sort of dropped out. Self-sufficient. Poaching, of course. And locked in some kind of custody battle for his daughter.’

‘With his wife?’

‘No, she’s dead. Kenny John Maclean’s her legal guardian.’

Fionnlagh broke in. ‘Are we talking about Anna Bheag?’

Fin looked at him, surprised. ‘You know her?’

‘Anna Macaskill, from Uig?’

‘That would be her.’

Fionnlagh nodded. ‘She’s trouble that one. In third year at the Nicolson. Never seen so many tattoos to the square inch on a lassie in my life. A good-looking girl, too, but wears her hair cropped, like a boy’s, and got a face-full of metal.’

Fin was taken aback. It wasn’t the image conjured up by Whistler’s ‘wee Anna’. ‘What age is she?’

Fionnlagh shrugged. ‘About fifteen, maybe. But no virgin, that’s for sure. Hangs about with a druggie crowd. So God knows what she’s on. Shame. Smart kid. But brains are wasted on her.’ He glanced at his mother. ‘Will I just take this out to the car?’

‘On you go,’ Marsaili said. ‘I’ll put the sandwiches in your rucksack.’

Fionnlagh started heaving his case out of the door. ‘I don’t need sandwiches. I can buy something on the boat.’

Marsaili headed for the living room and threw her riposte over her shoulder. ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees, Fionnlagh. You’ll find that out soon enough when you’re trying to live on a budget down in Glasgow.’

Fifteen minutes later they all walked up to the road with the last of Fionnlagh’s stuff as Donald’s car pulled in ahead of them and he helped Donna out with her case. Every time Fin saw Donald these days it appeared he had lost more weight. Gone were his boyish good looks, and more of his fine sandy hair. And Fin was struck, as he always was, by how young Donna looked. Hardly old enough to be the
mother of Fin’s granddaughter. Seventeen going on twelve. In spite of the long, hot summer, she had a winter pallor about her, as if she had never been over the door. And he wondered how much of himself there was in Fionnlagh, and whether his relationship with Donna would survive the years at university. At least, he thought, they had the glue of a child to hold them together. Unlike Fin and Marsaili. Maybe things would have been different had Fin known back then that Marsaili was carrying his child.

They transferred Donna’s case to Marsaili’s car. She was driving them to the ferry in Stornoway. Then they all stood around for an awkward moment, none of them wanting to initiate the goodbyes, and yet they would have to be said. Eventually, they went through the ritual hugs and kisses, and before she slipped behind the wheel Marsaili said to Donald, ‘Tell Catriona I’ll pick up Eilidh in the morning.’ It was the last night the baby would spend at the Murrays’. Marsaili had agreed to look after her granddaughter during Fionnlagh and Donna’s university years. An unwanted second motherhood, crushing the desire she had expressed only a few months before to resume her own studies, and go in search of the young woman whose potential she had wasted. She was sacrificing her second chance at life in order to give them their first.

Fin and Donald stood watching the car as it rounded the bend where the single-track road dipped down towards the Crobost Stores and the main road that would take them to Stornoway. This time tomorrow night their children would be in Glasgow, embarking on new lives, leaving their parents
behind to come to terms with the mess they’d made of theirs.

Fin glanced up at the sun sinking now towards the west. The days were long still, and there were perhaps another several hours of daylight remaining. But soon those days would start shrinking fast, and the islanders would take badly to the onset of another long, bleak winter in the aftermath of the best summer in living memory.