The Blackhouse

running alongside a broad, swift-moving shallow river, which tumbled and smashed itself over jagged chunks of stone that rose in steps and clusters from the river bed.

‘Do you get much wild salmon in Edinburgh, Mr Macleod?’

‘No, we don’t. All we seem to get these days is the farmed stuff.’

‘Aye, hellish, isn’t it? All those bloody chemicals and antibiotics, and them making the poor wee things swim in circles. The flesh is that soft you can just poke your fingers right through it.’ He glanced across at the river rushing past them. ‘I suppose that’s why some folk’ll pay so much money to come and catch the real thing.’

‘And why others’ll risk so much to poach it.’ Fin avoided looking at Gunn. ‘You had much of the real thing recently, George?’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Och, you know, a wee taste of it now and then, Mr Macleod. My wife knows someone who can get us the odd bit of it from time to time.’

‘Your wife?’

‘Aye.’ Gunn sneaked a glance across the car. ‘I never ask, Mr Macleod. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

‘Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.’

‘Aye, and sometimes the law’s an ass. God didn’t put the world’s finest salmon in our rivers, Mr Macleod, so that some Englishman could come here and charge other Englishman a bloody fortune to take them away.’

‘And if you knew someone was poaching them?’

‘Oh, I’d arrest them,’ Gunn said without hesitation. ‘That’s my job.’ He kept his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Maybe you’d like to eat with me and my wife tonight, Mr Macleod. I daresay she might be able to dig up a piece of the real thing from somewhere.’

‘A tempting offer, George. I might take you up on it. But let’s see how the day pans out first. You never know, they might be putting me on a plane home this afternoon.’

They came up over a rise in the road, and there below them, nestling on the shore of a tiny scribble of grey loch, was Suainaval Lodge, a cluster of Scots pines growing around it, carefully cultivated in the shelter of the surrounding hills. The lodge was based upon what must once have been an old farmhouse, extended and built out and up. It was an impressive property, freshly painted, a brilliant white that stood out in the gloom of this tenebrous place. A metalled road ran down to a parking area at the side of the house and a landing stage where a cluster of small boats bobbed on the ruffled surface of the loch. There was only one vehicle parked there, a battered-looking Land-Rover. Gunn pulled in beside it and they stepped out on to the tarmac. A big man in blue overalls and a tweed jacket, a matching peaked cap pulled down over his ruddy, round face, came hurrying out of the lodge.

‘Can I help you folks?’ To Fin he appeared to be in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His face was weathered and broken-veined. What hair could be seen beneath his cap was gingery, flecked with white.

‘Police,’ Gunn said. ‘From Stornoway.’

The man breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Well, I’m right glad to hear it. I thought you were from the ministry come a day early.’

‘What ministry is that?’ Fin asked.

‘Agriculture. They come and count the sheep to calculate the subsidy. They were at Coinneach Iain’s place yesterday, and I haven’t had a chance to move his beasts over to my place yet.’ He nodded towards a small crofthouse on the opposite shore, a strip of land marked off on the hill above it, white sheep dotted amongst the heather.

Fin frowned. ‘There are sheep there already.’

‘Oh, aye, they’re mine.’

‘So why would you want to bring Coinneach Iain’s sheep here?’

‘So the man from the ministry’ll think I’ve twice as many as I have, and give me twice the subsidy.’

‘You mean the same sheep get counted twice?’

‘Aye.’ The man seemed surprised by Fin’s slowness.

‘Should you be telling us this?’

‘Och, it’s no secret.’ The man was dismissive. ‘Even the fella from the ministry knows. If the sheep are here when he arrives, he’ll count them. It’s the only way any of us gets to make a living. That’s how I’ve had to take this job at the lodge.‘

‘What job’s that?’ Gunn asked.

‘Caretaker. I look after the place while Sir John’s not here.’

‘Sir John who?’ Fin said.

‘Wooldridge.’ The caretaker chuckled. ‘He tells me just to call him Johnny. But I don’t like to, him being a Sir and all.’ He thrust out a big hand. ‘I’m Kenny, by the way.’ He grinned. ‘Another Coinneach, so folk just call me Kenny. Big Kenny.’

Fin withdrew his crushed hand from the iron grip of Kenny’s monstrous paw. ‘Well, Big Kenny,’ he said, flexing his fingers, ‘is Johnny around?’

‘Oh, no,’ Big Kenny said. ‘Sir John’s never here in the summer. He always brings a party in September. The autumn’s best for the hunting.’

Gunn drew a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it up. ‘What about a James Minto?’

Big Kenny’s face clouded, the broken veins around his nose turning a dark purple. ‘Oh, him. Aye, he’s around. He’s always around.’

‘You don’t sound particularly pleased about that,’ Fin said.

‘I’ve no beef with the man myself, sir. But no one likes him very much. Someone’s got to put a stop to the poaching, and he’s done a good enough job of it, I suppose. But there’s ways of doing things, and ways of doing things. If you get my meaning.’

‘And you don’t like his way of doing things,’ Gunn said.

‘No, sir, I do not.’

‘Where can we find him?’ Fin asked.

‘He’s in an old crofthouse among the doons on the south side of Uig beach.’ He stopped, mid-flow, as if suddenly remembering who he was talking to. He frowned. ‘What’s he done? Killed someone?’

‘Would it surprise you if he had?’ Fin said.

‘No, sir, it would not. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.’

Minto’s crofthouse was a former holiday let set amongst the dunes at the end of the shore road. It looked out over the whole expanse of Uig beach, from the distant ocean in the west to Uig Lodge in the east, an impressive hunting lodge that stood in splendid isolation on a bluff overlooking the sands, mountains rising behind it in layer upon undulating layer of pastel purple and blue, like paper cut-outs laid one behind the other. Immediately opposite, on the far side of the beach, was a collection of white-painted buildings at Baile-na-Cille, the birthplace of the Scottish prophet Kenneth Mackenzie.

‘Of course,’ Fin’s father had told him, ‘we know him in the Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar, and the world knows him as the Brahan Seer.’ Fin remembered as clear as day sitting on the edge of the machair as his father assembled their kite, hearing the story of how a ghost, returning to her grave at Baile-na-Cille one night, had told Coinneach’s mother to look for a small, round, blue stone in a nearby loch. ‘She was told that if she gave this stone to her son and he held it to his eye he would be able to see the future.’

‘And did she?’ a wide-eyed Fin had asked his father.

‘Aye, son, she did.’

‘And could he really see the future?’

‘He predicted many things, Fionnlagh, that have come true,’ his father told him, and he reeled off a whole list of prophecies that meant nothing to the young Fin. But as the adult Fin stood now and gazed off towards the gravestones on the far machair he recalled one prophecy that his father had never lived to see fulfilled. The Brahan Seer had written, When men in horseless carriages go under the sea to France, then shall Scotia arise anew, free from all oppression. The Channel Tunnel had been the merest twinkle in Margaret Thatcher’s eye when he and his father were flying kites on the beach, and not even the most ardent nationalist could have predicted then that a Scottish parliament would be sitting again in Edinburgh before the end of the century. Coinneach Odhar had been burned to death for witchcraft nearly three hundred years before any of it.

‘It’s a kind of magical place, this,’ George Gunn said, raising his voice to be heard over a wind that rippled like