we pull a few hundred in a season. The wild salmon’s a dying breed, Detective Sergeant. It’s my job to see they don’t become extinct.’
‘By beating the living daylights out of anyone you catch taking them illegally?’
‘You said that, I didn’t.’
Fin sipped reflectively on his tea, momentarily startled by the unexpected perfume of Earl Grey. He glanced at Gunn and saw that the detective constable had put his cup back on the table, the tea undrunk. Fin refocused on Minto. ‘Do you recall a man called Macritchie? You caught him poaching on the estate here about six months ago. Handed him over to the police, in a bit of a state apparently.’
Minto shrugged. ‘I’ve caught a few poachers in the last six months, mate. And every one of them’s been a Mac-something-or-other. Give me a clue.’
‘He was murdered in Port of Ness on Saturday night.’
For a moment, Minto’s natural cockiness deserted him. A frown gathered itself around his eyes. ‘That’s the guy that was in the paper the other day.’ Fin nodded. ‘Jesus Christ, and you think I had something to do with that?’
‘You got beaten up pretty badly a few weeks ago. By an assailant or assailants unknown.’
‘Yeh, unknown because you bloody people haven’t caught them yet.’
‘So they weren’t just poachers that you stumbled on?’
‘Nah, they was out to give me a doing. Lying waiting for me they were.’
‘And you couldn’t identify them, why?’ Gunn asked.
‘Because they was wearing bloody masks, wasn’t they? Didn’t want me to see their faces.’
‘Which means they were probably faces you knew,’ Fin said.
‘Well, knock me down with a feather. I’d never have thought of that.’ Minto took a large gulp of tea as if to wash away the bad taste of his sarcasm.
‘Must be a lot of folk around here who’re not too fond of you, then,’ Fin said.
And finally Minto saw the light. His green eyes opened wide. ‘You think it was this guy Macritchie. You think I knew it was him and killed him for it.’
‘Did you?’
Minto’s laugh was mirthless. ‘Let me tell you something, mate. If I’d known who did this to me,’ he pointed to his face, ‘I’d have dealt with it quickly and quietly. And I wouldn’t have left any marks.’
Outside, the wind was still bending the long grasses. The shadows of clouds raced across miles of compacted sand, and they saw that the tide had turned and was rushing across the flats with indecent haste. At the car they stopped and Fin said, ‘I‘d like to go up to Ness, George, and talk to a few folk.’
‘I’ll need to go back to Stornoway, sir. DCI Smith keeps us on a tight leash.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to ask him for a car.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Mr Macleod. He’d probably just say no.’ Gunn hesitated. ‘Why don’t you drop me off at the station and take my car. Better to be forgiven than forbidden, eh?’
Fin smiled. ‘Thanks, George.’ He opened the car door.
Gunn said, ‘So what do you think?’ He nodded towards the crofthouse. ‘About Minto.’
‘I think if it wasn’t for the drive down and back, we’d have been wasting our time.’ Gunn nodded. But Fin had the impression it was a nod of acknowledgement rather than of agreement. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘No, I think you’re probably right, Mr Macleod. But I didn’t like the fella much. Gave me the willies. With his kind of training he’d know how to use a knife alright, and I don’t believe he’d think twice about using it.’
Fin ran a hand back through the fine, tight curls of his hair. ‘They’re pretty highly trained, these SAS types.’
‘Aye, they are.’
‘And you think you could have broken his arms?’
Gunn shot him a look and blushed, a tiny smile stretching his lips. ‘I think he could have probably broken every bone in my body before I even got near him, Mr Macleod.’ He inclined his head slightly. ‘But he wasn’t to know that.’
II
The Pottery had been there at the foot of the hill for as long as Fin could remember. When he had first taken over the old croft, Eachan Stewart had been a long-haired, wild-eyed man of about thirty who had seemed very old to all the children of Crobost. Fin and the other boys in the village had thought him a wizard, and for once had obeyed parental advice and stayed away from the Pottery, fearing that he might cast an evil spell on them. He did not belong to the island, although his grandfather was said to have come from Carloway, which was the Lewis equivalent of the Wild West. Born somewhere in the north of England, he had been christened Hector, but returning to his roots had called himself Eachan, its Gaelic equivalent.
As he pulled Gunn’s car on to the grass verge opposite, Fin saw Eachan sitting outside the front door of his cottage. He was well into his sixties now. The hair was just as long, but pure white, and the eyes a little less wild, dulled like his brain by years of smoking dope. On the peeling white gable of the house, the red-painted legend,
A great attraction, then, for the kids on their way to school, had been the mysterious earthworks which Eachan Stewart had begun shortly after his arrival. Over a period of nearly two years, he had laboured in amongst the reedy and unproductive bog that surrounded his house, digging, and wheeling barrows of soil across the moor to pile in great heaps, like giant molehills, thirty or forty feet apart. Six of them altogether. The kids would sit up on the hill and watch him at work from a safe distance as he levelled them off and seeded them with grass, only realizing belatedly that he had built himself a mini, three-hole golf course, with tees, and greens with flagpoles stuck in the holes. They had gawped in amazement the first day he appeared with his chequered pullover and cloth cap, a golf bag slung across his shoulder, to tee up on the first hole and christen the course by playing his first round of golf. It took him only fifteen minutes, but from then on it became a routine that he followed with religious fervour every morning, rain or shine. After a while, the novelty of it wore off for the kids, and they found other things to engage their interest. Eachan Stewart, eccentric potter, had stitched himself into the fabric of life there and become, to all intents and purposes, invisible.
Fin saw that the golf course the mad potter had laboured so hard to create all those years before was drowning now amongst a sea of long grasses, neglected and left to grow wild. Eachan glanced up when his gate scraped across an overgrown path. His eyes narrowed quizzically as Fin approached. He was threading pottery windchimes to hang amongst the two dozen or more already lined up along the front of the cottage. The dull pitch of colourfully glazed terracotta pipes rattling in the wind filled the air around him. He looked Fin up and down. ‘Well, from the look of those shoes you’re wearing, lad, I’d say you were a policeman. Am I right?’
‘You’re not wrong, Eachan.’
Eachan cocked his head. ‘Do I know you?’ His Lancashire accent had never left him, even after all these years.
‘You did once. Whether you’ll remember me is another matter.’
Eachan looked hard into his face, and Fin imagined he could almost hear the wheels of his memory creaking and grinding. But he shook his head. ‘You’ll need to give me a hint.’
‘My aunt used to buy, shall we say, some of your more unusual pieces.’
Lights appeared in the old man’s eyes. ‘Iseabal Marr,’ he said. ‘Lived in the old whitehouse up by the harbour. Got me to make her those big pots in primary colours for her dried flowers, and she was the only local ever to buy one of my pairs of fucking pigs. An eccentric creature she was, right enough. God rest her soul.’ Fin thought it was
