The Blackhouse

IV

It was after seven when they left port, tipping past Cuddy Point into the outer harbour and facing into the rising swell that drove in off the Minch. By the time they had cleared Goat Island and motored out into deeper water, the sea was rising and breaking about them as they ploughed their way through the advance regiments of the storm. Padraig stood at the wheel, his face furrowed in concentration, green in the reflected phosphor of the battered radar screens that flashed and beeped all around the console. There was a little light left in the sky, but it was impossible to see anything. Padraig was guiding them by instruments and instinct. ‘Aye, she’s wild, right enough. Not so bad here in the lee of Lewis. It’ll be a lot worse when we round the Butt.’

Fin could not imagine anything much worse. He had thrown up twice by the time they passed the Tiumpan Head Lighthouse, and he declined Archie’s offer of fried egg and sausage that the boy was somehow managing to conjure in a galley that no longer had any fixed point of reference.

‘How long’s it going to take?’ he asked Padraig.

The skipper shrugged. ‘Took us just under eight hours last night. Could be nine or more tonight. We’ll be heading right into the teeth of the storm. It’ll be well into the early hours before we get to An Sgeir.’

Fin remembered how it had felt eighteen years before when they had rounded the Butt of Lewis, and the beam of the lighthouse had finally faded into darkness. The security of the island behind them, they had set out into the vast wilderness of the North Atlantic, kept safe and dry only by a few tons of rusting trawler and the skills of her skipper. He had felt scared then, lonely, incredibly vulnerable. But none of that prepared him for the fury with which the ocean would fling itself upon them this time as they rounded the northern tip of Lewis. Diesel engines hammering in the dark, they fought against seemingly impossible odds, water rising sheer all around them, like black, snow-capped mountains, crashing over the bow and hammering into the wheelhouse. He hung on to whatever he could, wondering how Padraig could remain so calm, and tried to imagine how it might be possible to survive, sanity intact, another seven or eight hours of this.

‘Before my father died,’ Padraig had to shout above the roar of the engines and the anger of the storm, ‘he bought another boat to replace the Purple Isle.‘ He nodded and smiled to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the screens in front of him and the blackness through the glass. ‘Aye, she was a right beauty, too. The Iron Lady he called her. He spent a lot of time and money making her just the way he wanted her.’ He flicked a glance at Fin. ‘There are times you wish it was that easy with a woman.’ He turned and grinned back into the darkness, and then his smile faded. ‘He was going to sell this old dear when he got the chance. Only he never did. Cancer of the liver. He was gone in a matter of weeks. And I had to step into his shoes.’ He took a crumpled-looking cigarette one-handed from a Virginia tobacco tin and lit it. ‘Lost the Iron Lady first time I took her out. A ruptured pipe in the engine room. By the time we got to it, there was more water coming in than we could pump out. I told the rest of them to get the dinghy out, and I tried everything I could to save her. I was up to my neck in the engine room before I finally baled out. Just made it, too.’ Smoke swirled from his mouth in the turbulent air of the wheelhouse. ‘We were lucky, though. The weather was good, and there was another trawler within sight. I watched her go down. Everything that my father had put into her. All his hopes, all his dreams. And all I could think was, how was I going to tell my uncles I’d lost my father’s boat? But I needn’t have worried. They were just glad that we were safe. One of them said, “A boat’s just a bunch of wood and metal, son. The only heart it has is in those who sail her.”’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Still, I get goosebumps every time I go over the spot where she went down, and I know she’s just lying there on the seabed, right beneath where we last saw her. All my father’s dreams, gone for ever, just like him.’

Fin felt the young skipper’s intensity like a third presence in the wheelhouse. He looked at him. ‘We just went over that spot, didn’t we?’

‘Aye, Mr Macleod, we did that.’ He snatched a quick look at the policeman. ‘You should go and lie down in one of the berths for a while. You never know, you might get a bit of sleep. It’s going to be a long haul.’

Duncan took his place in the wheelhouse as Fin went below and pulled himself up into the same berth he had occupied the only other time he had made the journey. He had no expectation of sleep, just the knowledge that in the long, slow hours ahead of them he would have plenty of time in which to turn over, again and again in his mind, all the unanswered questions that plagued him. Questions he knew would not be answered until they got to An Sgeir. And even then, there was no guarantee. Artair and Fionnlagh might already be dead, and he would never know. And never forgive himself for not having had at least some inkling of what was to come.

He was surprised, then, when Archie shook him awake. ‘Nearly there, Mr Macleod.’

Fin slid out from his berth, startled, disorientated, and sat rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. The steady, rhythmic pounding of the engines seemed to have become a part of him, thudding inside his head, jarring his soul. The trawler was tipping and pitching wildly, and it was all he could do to climb back up into the galley without falling. Duncan was at the wheel, his face a study of concentration. Padraig sat beside him staring bleakly into the darkness. He was a bad colour. He saw Fin’s reflection in the glass and turned. ‘I’ve been trying to get them on the radio for the last hour, but all I’m getting is white noise and static. I don’t like it, Mr Macleod. It’s not like Gigs.’

‘How long?’ Fin said.

‘Ten minutes, maybe less.’

Fin peered into the black but could see nothing. Padraig, too, was straining to see in the dark. ‘Where’s the fucking lighthouse?’ He flicked a switch, and all the Purple Isle’s lights blazed into the night. The three hundred feet of cliff on which Fin had so nearly perished rose out of the sea almost immediately ahead of them, black and glistening and slathered in streaks of white guano. He was startled by how close they were.

‘Jesus!’ he said involuntarily, taking a step back and clutching the door frame to steady himself.

‘Fuck sake, pull her round!’ Padraig screamed at Duncan. His brother swung the wheel hard left, and the Purple Isle yawed dangerously, careening side-on through the waves that pounded and broke all around them. ‘There’s no light!’ he bellowed. ‘No bloody light!’

‘Was she working last night?’ Fin shouted.

‘Aye. You could see her for miles.’

Duncan had control of the trawler again, setting her into the wind once more, and they ploughed around the southern tip of the rock, circumventing Lighthouse Promontory and cruising finally into the comparative shelter of Gleann an Uisge Dubh. Here there was a noticeable respite from the wind. But the rise and fall was still ten feet or more, and they could see the swell breaking white at the point where usually they would land supplies, smashing and splintering all around the entrance to the caves that cut deep into the underbelly of An Sgeir.

Padraig shook his head. ‘There’s no way you’re going to get the dinghy in there tonight, Mr Macleod.’

‘I didn’t come all the way out here,’ Fin shouted above the thud of the engines, ‘to sit in a bloody boat while that man murders my son.’

‘If I take the Isle in close enough to put you down in a dinghy, there’s every chance we’ll all get smashed to pieces on those rocks.’

‘I saw your father back a trawler up to the quay at Port of Ness in a storm one year,’ Fin said. ‘In the days when they brought the guga back to Ness.’

‘You remember that?’ Padraig’s eyes were shining.

‘Everyone remembers that, Padraig. I was just a boy then. But folk talked about it for years.’

‘He had no fear, my father. If he thought he could do something, then he just did it. Folk said he must have nerves of steel. But that wasn’t true. He didn’t have any nerves at all.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘He dropped the anchor first, and then reversed in. He figured if he got into trouble he would just slip gear and haul anchor, and it would pull him straight out to safety.’

‘So, how much of your father do you have in you, Padraig?’

Padraig gave Fin a long, hard stare. ‘Once you’re in that dinghy, Mr Macleod, you’re on your own. There’s not a damned thing I can do for you.’

Fin wondered if he had ever been more frightened. Out here, with a monstrous sea smashing itself over the