The Blackhouse

‘Jesus,’ he heard someone say. ‘How in God’s name did you get here?’

They were all awake now. Several men sat up and swung their legs around and slid down to the floor. Fin made a quick head count. There were ten of them. ‘Where’s Artair and Fionnlagh?’ Someone lit a tilley lamp, and by its spectral light, Fin could see all their faces through the smoke, staring back at him as if he were a ghost.

‘We don’t know,’ Gigs said. Another lamp was lit, and someone stooped to rake the fire and pile on fresh peats. ‘We were working almost until dusk setting up the pulleys. Artair and Fionnlagh left our group, and we all thought they’d come back to the blackhouse. But when we got here, there was no sign of them. Their kit was gone, and the radio smashed.’

‘And you don’t know where they went?’ Fin was incredulous. ‘There aren’t exactly many places to hide on An Sgeir. And they wouldn’t have lasted long out there in this weather.’

One of the other men said, ‘We think they must be somewhere down in the caves.’

‘But we’ve no idea why.’ Gigs fixed his eyes on Fin. ‘Maybe you can tell us.’

‘How in the name of the wee man did you get here, Fin?’ It was Asterix. ‘I didn’t see any wings on you yesterday.’

‘Padraig brought me.’

‘In this weather?’ Pluto peered at Fin through the gloom. He had been with the hunt the year that Fin was with them. ‘Are you insane?’

Fin’s sense of urgency grew to something approaching panic. ‘I think Artair is going to kill Fionnlagh. I’ve got to find them.’ He pulled aside the tarpaulin to head back out into the storm. Gigs crossed the blackhouse in three strides and grabbed his arm.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool, man! It’s pitch out there. You’ll kill yourself before you’ll find them.’ He pulled him back inside and dragged the tarpaulin across the doorway. ‘There’s no one going out there looking for anyone until we’ve got light to see by. So why don’t we all sit down and brew ourselves some tea, and we’ll hear you out?’

Flames were licking up around the dry slabs of peat as the guga hunters gathered around the fire and Asterix lowered a pot of water over the heat. Some of the men had blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Others pulled on flat caps or baseball caps. Several lit cigarettes to breathe more smoke into air already thick with it. And they sat in a strange, tense silence, waiting for the water to boil, and for Asterix to fill the pots. Fin found an odd reassurance in their quiet patience, and he tried to let a little of the tension drain out of muscles screwed taut by the events of the last hour. It seemed barely possible to him that he was here at all.

When the tea had masked, Asterix filled their mugs, and the tins of dried milk and sugar were passed around. Fin made his tea sweet, and took big gulps of the syrupy, milky liquid. It did not taste much like tea, but the heat of it was comforting, and he felt a kick as the sugar hit his bloodstream. He looked up and found them all watching him, and he had the strangest sense of deja vu. He had sat around the fire in this shelter on the rock every night that he had been on the island eighteen years ago, but this was different. This had the quality of a dream. Of something not quite real. And the dark spectre of apprehension began clouding his thoughts. He had been here before, but not in any way that he remembered.

‘So …’ Gigs broke the silence. ‘Why is Artair going to kill his son?’

‘Two nights ago he told me that Fionnlagh was my son.’ The wind outside seemed like a distant cry. The air in the blackhouse was as still as death, and smoke was suspended in it almost without movement. ‘And for some reason-’ Fin shook his head, ‘-I don’t know why, he seems to hate me beyond reason.’ He breathed deeply. ‘It was Artair who murdered Angel. He did it by copying a murder in Edinburgh that I had been investigating, to try and draw me back to the island. I’m pretty sure he wanted me to know that Fionnlagh was my son, so that by killing him he could make me suffer.’

There was a stirring of unrest around the fire. Fin saw several of the men glancing at each other, dark looks laden with meaning. Gigs said, ‘And you can’t think of a single reason why Artair might hate you so much?’

‘I can only think that somehow he must blame me for the death of his father.’ Fin had a sudden sense that perhaps there were others around the fire who might also think that. ‘But it wasn’t my fault, Gigs. You know that. It was an accident.’

And still Gigs stared at him intently, a look of incomprehension in his eyes. ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’

Fin was aware of his breath coming fast and shallow now, fear beginning to wrap itself around him with long, cold fingers. ‘What do you mean?’

Gigs said, ‘I was never sure if it was the knock on the head. You know, the concussion. Or if it was something deeper. Something in your mind. Something psychological that was making you blank out the memory.’ Fear flooded every locker in Fin’s mind. He had a sense of some long-forgotten wound being opened up to recover a piece of hidden shrapnel, and he could hardly bear it. He wanted to scream for Gigs to stop. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. Gigs rubbed his unshaven jaw. ‘At first, when I came to see you at the hospital, I thought you must be faking it. But I’m pretty sure now that you weren’t. That you genuinely don’t remember. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe not. Only you’ll know that in the end.’

‘For God’s sake, Gigs, what are you talking about?’ The mug was trembling in Fin’s hand. Something unspeakable hung above them in the smoke.

‘Do you remember that night I found you drunk at the side of the road? Babbling about not wanting to go to the rock?’ Fin nodded mutely. ‘You don’t remember why?’

‘I was scared, that’s all.’

‘Scared, yes. But not of the rock. When I got you back to the croft, you told me something that night that caused you pain that I can’t imagine. You sat in the chair in front of my fire and cried like a baby. Tears like I’ve never seen a grown man cry. Tears of fear and humiliation.’

Fin sat wide-eyed. It was someone else Gigs was talking about. Not him. He was there that night. There were no tears. He was drunk, that was all.

Gigs let his gaze drift darkly around all the faces circling the fire. ‘Some of you were out on the rock that year, so you know what I’m talking about. Some of you weren’t. And to them, I’ll say now what I said then. Whatever happens on this rock, whatever passes between us, stays here. On the island. It’ll be in our heads, but it’ll never pass our lips. And if any man here breathes a word of it to another living soul, then he’ll answer to me before he answers to his maker.’ And there was not a single man around the fire who did not believe that to be true.

As the flames devoured the peats, so the shadows of the men assembled there danced on the walls like silent witnesses to an oath of silence, and the dark beyond the light seemed to draw the blackhouse tight in around them. Eyes turned back towards Fin, and they saw a man lost in a trance, trembling in the dark, all blood drained from a face as white as bleached bone.

Gigs said, ‘He was the devil himself, that man.’

Fin frowned. ‘Who?’

‘Macinnes. Artair’s father. He did unimaginable things to you boys. In his study. All those years of tutoring, shut away behind a locked door. First Artair, and then you. Abuse the like of which no child should ever have to suffer.’ He stopped to pull in a breath, almost suffocated by the silence. ‘That’s what you told me that night, Fin. You never talked about it, you and Artair. Never acknowledged it. But each of you knew what was going on, what the other was suffering. There was a bond of silence between you. And that’s why you were so happy that summer. Because it was over. You were leaving the island. You never had any reason to see Macinnes ever again. It was an end to it once and for all. You’d never told a soul. How could you have faced the shame of what it was he’d done to you? The humiliation. But now you would never have to. You could put it behind you. Forget it for ever.’

‘And then he told us we were going to the rock.’ Fin’s voice was the merest whisper.

Gigs’s face was set grim in deeply etched shadow. ‘Suddenly, after the relief, you were faced by two weeks with him here on An Sgeir. Living cheek by jowl with the man who had ruined your young life. And God knows, we’re in one another’s pockets here. There’s no escape. Even if he couldn’t lay a finger on you, you would have had to suffer the man nearly twenty-four hours a day. For you it was unthinkable. I didn’t blame you then, and I don’t blame you now, for how you felt.’

Although Fin’s eyes were closed, they were open wide for the first time in eighteen years. The sense that he had had all his adult life, of something that he could not see, something just beyond the periphery of his vision, was gone. Like removing blinkers from a horse. The shock of it was physically painful. He was rigid with tension. How could he not have remembered? And yet all his conscious thoughts were awash now with memories, like the vivid