The Blackhouse

died.

They stepped over the tape and followed the winding road down to the shelter of the quay. The tide was in, green water over yellow sand. A crabber and a group of dinghies were tied together at the inner wall, creels piled on the quay above them beside a tangle of green netting, and pink and yellow marker buoys. A larger boat, dragged up out of the water, was tilting at a dangerous angle in the sand.

The boatshed was much as Fin remembered it. Green corrugated-iron roof, white-painted walls. The right- hand side of it was open and exposed to the elements. Two window slits in the back wall opening out to the beach beyond. There were two large wooden doors on the left-hand side. One was shut, the other half-open, revealing a boat on a trailer inside. There was more crime-scene tape here. They stepped into the semi-dark of the closed-off half of the building. Angel’s blood still stained the floor, and the smell of death lingered with the diesel fumes and the salt water. The wooden cross-beam overhead revealed a deep groove cut by the rope where Angel’s murderer had hauled him up to hang there. The sounds of the sea and the wind were muted in here, but still a presence. Through the narrow window openings, Fin could see that the tide was just turning, seawater starting to recede over smooth wet sand.

Apart from the staining, the concrete floor was unnaturally clean, every scrap of debris carefully collected by men in Tyvek suits for scrupulous forensic examination. The walls were scarred with the graffiti of a generation. Murdo’s a poof; Annaloves Donald; and that old classic, Fuck the Pope. Fin found it almost unbearably depressing. He stepped outside and into the open half of the shed and took a deep breath. A crudely fashioned swing hung from the rafters, two strips of wood bound together with plastic orange rope to create the seat. The same orange rope which had been used to suspend Angel from the rafters next door. Fin became aware of Gunn at his shoulder. He said, without turning, ‘So have we any idea why someone might have wanted to kill him?’

‘He wasn’t short of enemies, Mr Macleod. You should know that. There’s a whole generation of men from Crobost who suffered at one time or another at the hands of Angel Macritchie or his brother.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Fin spat on the floor as if the memory brought a bitter taste to his mouth. ‘I was one of them.’ He turned and smiled. ‘Maybe you should be asking me where I was on Saturday night.’

Gunn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Maybe I should, Mr Macleod.’

‘Do you mind if we walk along the beach, George? It’s been a long time.’

The beach was bordered on the landward side by low, crumbling cliffs no more than thirty feet high, and at the far end the sand gave way to rocky outcrops that reached tentatively into the water, as if testing it for temperature. Odd groups of rock, clustered together at points in the bay, were always just visible above the breaking waves. Fin had spent hours on this beach as a boy, beachcombing, catching crabs in the rock pools, climbing the cliffs. Now he and Gunn left virgin tracks in the sand. ‘The thing is,’ Fin said, ‘being bullied at school twenty-five years ago is hardly a motive for murder.’

‘There were more people it seems, Mr Macleod, who bore him a grudge, than just those he bullied.’

‘What people, George?’

‘Well, for a start, we had two outstanding complaints against him on the books at Stornoway. One of assault, one of sexual assault. Both, in theory, still subject to ongoing inquiry.’

Fin was surprised only by the complaint of assault. ‘Unless he’d changed since I knew him, Angel Macritchie was always fighting. But these things were aye settled one way or another, with fists in the car park, or a pint in the bar. No one ever went to the police.’

‘Oh, this wasn’t a local. Not even an islander. And there’s no doubt that Angel gave him a doing. We just couldn’t get anyone to admit they saw it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Och, it was some bloody animal rights campaigner from Edinburgh. Chris Adams is his name. Campaigns Director of a group called Allies for Animals.’

Fin snorted. ‘What was he doing here? Protecting sheep from being molested after closing time on a Friday night?’

Gunn laughed. ‘It would take more than an animal rights campaigner to put an end to that, Mr Macleod.’ His smile faded. ‘No, he was here — still is — trying to put a stop to this year’s guga harvest.’

Fin whistled softly. ‘Jesus.’ It was something he hadn’t thought about in years. Guga was the Gaelic word for a young gannet, a bird that the men of Crobost harvested during a two-week trip every August to a rock fifty miles north-north-east of the tip of Lewis. An Sgeir, they called it. Simply, The Rock. Three hundred feet of storm-lashed cliffs rising out of the northern ocean. Encrusted every year at this time by nesting gannets and their chicks. It was one of the most important gannet colonies in the world, and men from Ness had been making an annual pilgrimage to it for more than four hundred years, crossing mountainous seas in open boats to bring back their catch. These days they went by trawler. Twelve men from the village of Crobost, the only remaining village in Ness to carry on the tradition. They lived rough on the rock for fourteen days, clambering over the cliffs in all weathers, risking life and limb to snare and kill the young birds in their nests. Originally, the trip was made out of necessity, to feed the villagers back home. Nowadays the guga was a delicacy, in great demand all over the island. But the catch was limited by Act of Parliament to only two thousand, a special dispensation written into the Protection of Birds Act, passed in the House of Commons in London in 1954. And so it was only by good luck, or good connections, that a family would get a taste of the guga now.

Fin could still recall with mouth-watering clarity the oily flavour of the flesh on his tongue. Pickled in salt, and then boiled, it had the texture of duck and the taste of fish. Some said it was an acquired taste, but Fin had grown up with it. It had been a seasonal treat. Two months before the men left for the rock, he would begin to anticipate the taste of it, just as he relished each year the rich flavour of the wild salmon during the poaching season. His father always managed to acquire a bird or two and the family would feast on them in the first week. There were those who would store them in kegs of salt water and ration them through the year. But stored like that, they became too gamey for Fin’s taste, and the salt would burn his mouth. He liked them fresh from the rock, served with potatoes and washed down with milk.

‘You ever tasted the guga?’ he said to Gunn.

‘Aye. My mother had Ness connections, and we usually managed to get a bird every year.’

‘So these Allies for Animals are trying to stop the trip?’

‘Aye, they are.’

‘Angel was a regular on the rock, wasn’t he?’ Fin remembered that the only time he had been among the twelve men of Crobost, it was already Angel’s second time there. The memory was like a shadow passing over him.

‘Regular as clockwork. He was the cook.’

‘So he wouldn’t take too kindly to someone trying to sabotage it.’

‘He didn’t.’ Gunn shook his head. ‘And neither did anyone else. Which is why we couldn’t find anyone who saw what happened.’

‘Did he do much damage?’

‘A lot of bruising about the body and face. A couple of broken ribs. Nothing too serious. But the boy’ll remember it for a while.’

‘So why’s he still here?’

‘Because he’s still hoping to stop the trawler from taking the men out to the rock. Mad bloody fool! There’s a bunch of activists arriving on the ferry tomorrow.’

‘When are they due to leave for An Sgeir?’ Just forming the words in his mouth sent a slight shiver through Fin’s body.

‘Sometime in the next day or two. Depending on the weather.’

They had reached the far end of the beach, and Fin started climbing up over the rock.

‘I’m not really wearing the right footwear for this, Mr Macleod.’ Gunn slid dangerously on slick black rock.

‘I know a way up to the top of the cliff from here,’ Fin said. ‘Come on, it’s easy.’

Gunn scrambled after him, almost on his hands and knees as they struggled up a narrow scree path that cut back on itself before leading to a series of natural, if uneven, steps that took them finally to the top. From here they could see across the machair to where the houses of Crobost nestled in the dip of the cliff road, gathered around