recollection of scenes from a nightmare in the moments of waking. He felt bile filling the emptiness inside him, as images flickered across his retinas, like a faded family video out of sync with its playhead. He could smell the dust off the books in Mr Macinnes’s study, the stink of stale tobacco and alcohol on his breath as it burst hot on his face. His could feel the touch of his cold, dry hands, and recoiled from them even now. And he saw again the image of the funny man with the impossibly long legs who had haunted his dreams ever since Robbie’s death, like the harbinger of his returning memory. That figure who stood silently in the corner of his study, head bowed by the ceiling, arms dangling from the sleeves of his anorak. And he recognized him now for the first time. He was Mr Macinnes. With his long, grey hair straggling over his ears, and his dead, hunted eyes. Why had he not seen it before?
He opened his eyes now to find tears streaming from them, burning his cheeks like acid. He scrambled to his feet and staggered to the door, pulling the tarpaulin aside and emptying his stomach into the storm. He dropped to his knees then, retching and retching until his stomach muscles seized and he could not draw a breath.
Hands lifted him gently to his feet and steered him back into the warmth. A blanket was placed around his shoulders, and he was guided again to sit sobbing at his place by the fire. His trembling was uncontrollable, as if he were in a fever. A sheen of fine sweat glistened on his brow.
He heard Gigs’s voice. ‘I don’t know how much you remember of it now, Fin, but that night, when you told me, I was so angry I wanted to kill him. To think that a man could do something like that to children! To his own son!’ He drew in a deep, scratching breath. ‘And then I wanted to go to the police. To have charges brought. But you begged me not to. You didn’t want anyone to know. Ever. Which was when I realized that the only way to deal with it was here on the rock. Among ourselves. So that no one else
Fin nodded. He didn’t need Gigs to tell him the rest. He remembered now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, a film of obfuscation peeled away from every year which had passed since. He remembered the men gathered around the fire on that first night, and Gigs laying his bible down after the reading and shocking them all by confronting Artair’s father with his crimes. A ghastly silence, a denial. And Gigs badgering and threatening like an advocate in the High Court, physically menacing, evoking God’s wrath, facing him with everything Fin had told him, until finally the older man cracked. And it all poured out of him like poison. Prompted by fear and by shame. He couldn’t explain why he had done it. He had never meant it to happen. He was so, so sorry. It would never happen again. He would make it up to the boys, both of them. Mr Macinnes had simply disintegrated in front them.
Fin remembered, too, the look that Artair had given him across the fire, the sense of hurt and betrayal in his eyes. Fin had broken their bond of silence. He had shattered the only thing which had allowed the Macinnes family still to function. Denial. If you denied it, it never happened. And Fin realized now, perhaps for the first time, that Artair’s mother must have known, and that she too had been in denial. But Fin’s confession to Gigs had meant that denial would no longer be an option. And every other alternative was unthinkable.
Gigs let his gaze wander around the faces at the fire, flames reflecting the horror in their eyes. He said, ‘We sat in judgement on him that night. A jury of his peers. And we found him guilty. And we banished him from the blackhouse. His punishment was to live rough on the rock for the two weeks that we were here. We would leave him food out by the cairns, and we would take him back with us when we were finished. But he would never return to the rock. And he would never, ever, lay a hand on either of those boys again.’
Fin realized why Mr Macinnes had never reckoned in his memory of their two weeks on the rock. But now he saw again the fleeting glimpses of the ghostlike figure of Artair’s father climbing up from the caves below to collect the food left for him up by the cairns. A shambling figure stooped by shame. Although he had never said anything, Gigs must have sensed Artair’s hostility towards Fin after his confession, and kept them always on separate work gangs.
Fin looked across the peats at the flames throwing their light in Gigs’s face. ‘The day I had the accident on the cliffs. After Mr Macinnes had tied me to the rope. He didn’t fall, did he?’
Gigs shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know, Fin. I really don’t. We didn’t know how we were going to get down to you. And then someone spotted him climbing up from below. He must have heard the commotion from the caves down there. I guess he was trying to redeem himself somehow. And in a way he did. He probably saved your life. But whether he fell, or whether he jumped, well that’s anyone’s guess.’
‘He wasn’t pushed?’
Gigs canted his head just a little to one side and stared back at Fin. ‘By who?’
‘By me.’ He had to know.
Outside, the storm was blowing itself out. But the wind still whistled and screamed in every crack and crevice in the rock, through all the gullies and caves, among all the cairns left by the generations of guga hunters who had gone before. Gigs said, ‘We’d hauled you up fifty feet by the time he went, Fin. No one pushed him, except maybe the hand of God.’
TWENTY
I
He heard someone call his name. Bright, hard and clear.
When Gigs had said they should try to get some sleep before dawn, Fin had been unable to imagine how that might be possible. And yet now he could not even remember curling up on the stone shelf along the far wall. Some self-protective mechanism had simply shut him down. The same mechanism, perhaps, which had hidden all his troubled memories in a dark and inaccessible corner of his mind for eighteen years.
‘Fin Macleod!’ The voice called again, but this time Fin detected the wheeze in it. Artair. Fear slid through him like a frozen arrow. He jumped down from the shelf and staggered across to the door, pushing past bodies to reach it. Gigs and several others were already outside. Fin put a hand up to shade his eyes from a sun still low in the eastern sky and saw, out on the edge of the cliff beyond the lighthouse, two men silhouetted against the dawn. The sky was almost yellow, streaked with pink cloud, and ten thousand gannets filled it with their huge beating wings, screaming their contempt for the men below.
Artair and Fionnlagh were a good two hundred yards away, but Fin could see the rope tied around Fionnlagh’s neck, looping into his father’s hands. The boy’s own hands were bound behind his back and he was teetering perilously close to the edge of the cliff, kept from tipping over the edge and dropping the three hundred feet to the rocks below only by the tension that Artair maintained on the rope.
Fin stumbled and slid across the boulder-strewn soup of mud and seaweed that lay between him and the two figures on the clifftop. Artair watched him with a strange smile fixed on his face. ‘I knew it was you. When we saw the trawler come in last night. We watched you trying to land the dinghy. Fucking mad! But we were rooting for you, boy.’ He looked at Fionnlagh. ‘Weren’t we, young Fin? It’s better than I could ever have hoped for. A father’s first-hand fucking view of his boy going over the edge.’ He turned back towards Fin. ‘Come on, Macleod. Closer. You’ll get a grandstand view. I suppose the DNA results are through.’
Fin was no more than fifty feet away now. He could almost smell the boy’s fear in the wind. He stopped, gasping for breath, and looked at his old schoolfriend with a mixture of hatred and disbelief. ‘No,’ he shouted back. ‘You threw up one of your pills, Artair. Prednisone. For asthmatics. It could only have been you.’
Artair laughed. ‘Christ, I wish I’d thought of that. I’d have done it on purpose.’
Fin began moving more cautiously towards them now, anxious to keep Artair talking for as long as he could. ‘You killed Angel Macritchie just to get me here.’
‘I knew it wouldn’t take you long to work that one out, Fin. You always were too fucking smart for your own good.’
‘Why Macritchie?’
Artair laughed. ‘Why the fuck not? He was a piece of shit, Fin. You know that. Who’d fucking miss him?’
