expression in his eyes. ‘Listen, Fin. What I said last night … I was drunk, okay? Just forget it.’
Fin returned his gaze. ‘Was it true?’
‘I was drunk.’
‘
Artair lost patience. ‘Look, I was fucking pissed, alright? It hasn’t mattered for seventeen years, why the fuck should it matter now?’ Fin heard the phlegm crackling in his throat as he turned away and abruptly left the room. And he heard him sucking twice on his puffer out in the hall before his footsteps receded angrily towards the living room.
Fin got dressed, and in the bathroom slunged his face with cold water, and found bloodshot eyes staring back at him from the mirror. He looked terrible. He squeezed some toothpaste on to his finger and rubbed it around his teeth and his gums, swilling out his mouth to try to get rid of the bad taste from the night before. He wondered how he was going to be able to face Fionnlagh in the cold light of day, knowing what he knew now. He glanced at himself in the mirror and looked quickly away again. He hardly knew how to face himself.
The Astra was idling on the road above the house. The growl of the engine through the exhaust sounded as rough as Fin felt. Artair was sitting sullenly behind the wheel, Fionnlagh in the back in his hooded sweatshirt, clasped hands resting on the seat between his legs, his face puffy from lack of sleep. Yet, still, he seemed to have found time to gel his hair into spikes. Fin slipped into the passenger seat and glanced in the back. ‘Hi,’ was all he said, turning in his seat to face front, and feeling hopelessly inadequate as he snapped the seatbelt into its clasp.
Artair crunched into first gear and released the handbrake, and they lurched off down the road. Fin was quite sure that if he was stopped, Artair would not pass a breathalyser.
The sky was leaden, but it did not look like rain. Somewhere away on the ocean, sun slanted through a break in the cloud that you couldn’t see, like an invisible spotlight casting a circle of illumination on the water. A strong wind tugged at the summer grasses. As they passed the church, they could see all the way across to the Port, and the Astra bumped its way down the single-track towards the main road.
Fin found the silence in the car almost unbearable. Without turning he said to Fionnlagh, ‘So how did you get on with the computer?’
‘Great.’ Fin waited for him to go on. But that was it.
Artair said, ‘He’s not looking forward to going to An Sgeir.’
Fin craned round to look at the boy. ‘Why?’
‘Not my scene. I’m not much into killing things.’
‘The boy’s soft,’ Artair said scornfully. ‘It’ll be good for him, make a man of him.’
‘Like it did us?’
Artair cast Fin a look of disdain, then fixed his eyes again on the road. ‘Rite of passage, that’s what it’s all about. Boys becoming men. No one said it had to be easy.’
There was no policeman on duty in Port of Ness. Maybe they thought it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they did not believe that anyone would be up this early. The crime-scene tape at the shore road had been drawn aside and wrapped around an orange traffic cone. The narrow road twisted down to the harbour, and they saw a lorry drawn up on the quay, and seven or eight vehicles pulled up alongside the boatshed. The shed was still marked off by black and yellow tape fluttering in the wind, and as they parked and walked past it, they each glanced in. A man had been murdered here. A man they knew. And each of them was touched by the sense that somehow Angel Macritchie still lingered there in the shadows, like a ghost unable to rest until his killer had been found.
His presence was there, too, among the ten men gathered around the lorry, if only through his absence. He had been one of them for eighteen years, and should have been among them today, helping to load the supplies stacked up along the quayside: bags of peat to fuel the fires, drinking water in metal casks, mattresses, tarpaulins, boxes of food, tools, a car battery to power the radio link, more than forty sacks of curing salt piled a metre high against the harbour wall.
Fin found that he knew many of the faces of the men on the quay. Some of them were in their fifties, veterans from the year when Fin and Artair had gone out to the rock, still making the annual pilgrimage. There were one or two of Fin’s contemporaries from school, and younger men in their twenties whom Fin did not know. But there was an unspoken bond between them all. It was a very exclusive club whose membership extended to a mere handful of men going back over five hundred years. You only had to have been out to An Sgeir one time to qualify for membership, proving your courage and strength, and your ability to endure against the elements. Their predecessors had made the journey in open boats on mountainous seas because they had to, to survive, to feed hungry villagers. Now they went out in a trawler to bring back a delicacy much sought after by well-fed islanders. But their stay on the rock was no less hazardous, no less demanding than it had been for all those who had gone before.
Fin said his hellos and solemnly shook all their hands. The last of them took Fin’s in both of his. A thickset man of medium height, heavy black eyebrows beneath a head of dense black hair touched only here and there by grey. Physically he was not a big man, but he was a huge presence. Gigs MacAulay was in his early fifties. He had been out to the rock more often than anyone else on the team. He had already made some fourteen or fifteen trips to An Sgeir by the time Fin and Artair were initiated into the ancient rite. He was recognized then as the unspoken team leader. And he was still. There was an additional firmness and warmth in his handshake, and he fixed Fin with sharp, deeply blue Celtic eyes. ‘Good to see you, Fin. You’ve done well, I hear.’
Fin shrugged. ‘I suppose.’
‘If we do our best, God can’t ask that we do any more.’ His eyes flickered away towards Artair and then back to Fin. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘It has.’
‘Must be, what? Seventeen, eighteen years?’
‘Must be.’
‘Artair’s boy’s coming with us for the first time.’
‘Aye, I know.’
Gigs looked at the boy and grinned. ‘Though he’ll not be needing his hair gel out on the rock, will you, son?’ The others laughed, and Fionnlagh blushed, turning his head away to stare mutely out across the ocean. Gigs clapped his hands together. ‘Right, we’d better get this lot on the lorry.’ He looked at Fin. ‘Are you going to give us a hand?’
‘Sure,’ Fin said, and he took off his parka and his jacket, tossing them on to a stack of empty creels, and rolled up his sleeves.
They worked methodically, in a chain, like any good team, passing the sacks and the boxes one to the other, and up to the men stacking them on the lorry. Fin found himself watching Fionnlagh, looking for something of himself in the boy, some sign that this was, indeed, his flesh and blood. They had similar colouring, but then Marsaili was fair, too. And they were his mother’s pale blue eyes that he had. Fin’s were green. If he had anything of Fin in him, perhaps it wasn’t physical. More like something in his demeanour, in his quiet reticence.
Fionnlagh caught Fin watching him, and Fin immediately turned away, embarrassed. Gigs heaved a bag of salt into his arms. It was heavy, and Fin grunted. ‘It was easier in my day,’ he said, ‘when you just had to load straight on to the trawler here at the Port.’
‘It was that.’ Gigs shook his head gravely. ‘But with the damage to the harbour the trawlers can’t get in any more, so we’ve got to haul it all to Stornoway now.’
‘But you guys still leave from here?’
‘Most of us do, aye. In the small boat.’ Gigs nodded towards an open boat tied up at the quay, her outboard motor tipped clear of the water. ‘We motor out to meet the trawler there in the bay and haul the wee boat aboard. We still need her to ferry everything on to the rock at the other end.’
‘So, are you any nearer to catching Angel’s killer?’ one of the younger men suddenly asked Fin, his curiosity getting the better of him.
‘I’m not leading the investigation,’ Fin said. ‘I don’t really know how things are going.’
‘Aye, well, they seem to think this DNA test’s going to get him,’ one of the others said.
Fin was surprised. ‘You know about that already?’
‘Sure do,’ said Gigs. ‘I think every man in Crobost got a call yesterday from the incident room. Got to go into the police station in Stornoway, or the doctor’s surgery up at Crobost sometime today to give a sample.’
