The Blackhouse

And Fin thought about the tears in the eyes of the boy that Angel had crippled all those years before.

‘And anyway …’ Artair’s smile curdled on his lips, ‘he had it coming. He was here, remember, eighteen years ago. He knew what really happened that year. And there wasn’t a day went by that he didn’t remind me of it, that he didn’t hold out the prospect of public humiliation.’ His face was twisted by anger and hate. ‘Do you remember now, Fin? Did Gigs tell you?’

Fin nodded.

‘Good. I’m glad you know. All that loss of memory shit. I thought for a long time you were putting it on. And then it came to me. Naw, it was real. And you’d fucking escaped. The memory, the island, everything. And here was me, stuck looking after a mother who needed fed through a straw, married to the only woman I ever loved — a Fin Macleod cast-off, pregnant with his son instead of mine. Stuck with the memory of everything my father did to us. Stuck with the humiliation of knowing that a whole lot of others knew it, too. Because of you. And you got off scot-fucking-free. Jesus!’ He tipped his head back and glared at the heavens. ‘Well, not any more, Fin. You’re going to get to watch your boy die, just as I watched my father die on these same cliffs. Because of you.’

‘I suppose you knew about my kid being killed in the hit and run.’

Artair grinned. ‘Saw it in the paper, boy. Punched the fucking air when I read it. At last some shit was sticking to the teflon kid. It’s what crystallized the idea for me. The chance to ruin your life the way you ruined mine.’

Fin was no more than ten feet away now. He saw the madness in Artair’s eyes. And the terror in Fionnlagh’s.

‘That’s close enough,’ Artair said sharply.

Fin said, ‘If you’d wanted the pleasure of seeing me watch my own son die, you should have been at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary last month. He was just eight, that wee boy. I was there in intensive care when he flatlined.’ And he saw the merest hint of humanity flicker for the briefest moment in Artair’s eyes. ‘You could have seen my misery close-up, Artair. You could have known for yourself how my life was blighted for ever by the loss of my child. But you won’t see that today.’

Artair frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It would make me sick to my stomach to see young Fionnlagh die here like this. But I wouldn’t be witnessing the death of my son.’

Artair’s consternation was turning to anger. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Macleod?’

‘I’m talking about the fact that Fionnlagh’s not my son, Artair. Marsaili only told you that in a fit of anger. Some stupid revenge for having to settle for what she saw as second-best. For having to settle for you. Just so you wouldn’t think it had all come too easy.’ He took several more tentative steps towards them. ‘Fionnlagh is your boy, Artair. Always has been, always will be.’ He saw the look of shock on the boy’s face. But he pressed on relentlessly. ‘All those years of beating that poor kid. Taking out your revenge on the boy instead of the father. And all the time it was your own son you were abusing. Just like your father before you.’

Fin could see from Artair’s face that every conviction he had ever held, every certainty he had ever known, had just been stripped away. Leaving him to face a truth that he could never live with.

‘That’s crap! You’re lying!’

‘Am I? Think about it, Artair. Remember how it was. Remember how many times she tried to take it back. How many times she told you she’d only said it to hurt you.’ Fin took two more steps.

‘No!’ Artair turned his head slowly to look at the boy he had punched and kicked and punished for seventeen hellish years, and his face contorted with pain and misery. ‘She told me the truth. Then realized it was a mistake.’ He turned wild eyes on Fin. ‘And you can never take back the truth, you know that, Fin.’

‘She lied to hurt you, Artair. You were the one who wanted it to be true. You were the one who wanted the boy to blame in my absence. To have a scapegoat. To have a punchbag for all the hate you had for me.’

‘No!’ Artair almost screamed it now. And he released a feral howl that raised all the hairs on Fin’s arms and legs and back. He dropped the rope and Fin stepped quickly forward to pull the boy away from the edge of the cliff. He immediately felt the shivering that racked the teenager’s fragile frame. Whether from fear or from cold, he couldn’t tell. Artair stood staring at them bleakly, his eyes burning with tearful fury.

Fin reached out a hand towards him. ‘Come on, Artair. It doesn’t have to end like this.’

But Artair was staring right through him now. ‘Too late. Can’t take it back.’ He looked at the boy hanging grimly on to Fin for support. And all the tragedy of his life was captured in his eyes, every nuance of every moment of pain, every twist of a knife he had ultimately turned on himself. ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was barely a whisper carried on the wind, a distant echo of his own father’s apology to Fin eighteen years earlier. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He met Fin’s eye for the briefest of moments, before turning without another word and dropping into the void, gannets rising up around him like the fiery angels that would carry him to Hell.

Fin untied Fionnlagh and led him back across the rock towards the blackhouse. Several men came to meet them and put blankets around the boy’s shoulders. He had not spoken, but his pain was clear for all to see. His face was a bloodless grey-white. Two hundred feet below, in the creek between the promontories, the crew of the Purple Isle stood watching on the deck, and from somewhere out of the wind in the south-west, they heard the sound of blades beating turbulent air.

Fin turned as the Sikorsky dropped from the sky, scattering clouds of seabirds before it, a great red and white bird whose motors thrummed and filled the air with their roar. He saw the words H.M. Coastguard emblazoned black on white along one side beneath the rotors as it dipped and bucked in the air rising from beneath the cliffs, before settling finally with a gentle grace on the helipad beside the lighthouse. A door slid open, and uniformed and plain-clothes police officers streamed out on to the concrete.

Fin and Fionnlagh and the guga hunters stood and watched as the policemen picked their way across the glaur towards them, slithering and stumbling among the rocks. DCI Smith led the party, his raincoat blowing out behind him, hair whipping around his head in spite of his Brylcreem. He slid to an unsteady halt in front of Fin and glared at him. ‘Where’s Macinnes?’

‘You’re too late. He’s dead.’

Smith cocked a head full of suspicion. ‘How?’

‘He jumped off the cliff, Detective Chief Inspector.’ And when he saw Smith purse his lips, Fin added, ‘Every man here saw him do it.’ He glanced at Gigs, who gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. Whatever ended up on the police report would only ever be half the story. The whole truth would never leave the rock. It would stay here among the chaos of boulders and birds, whispered only in the wind. And it would die in the hearts and minds of the men who were there that day, when they died. And then only God would know.

II

He looked down on the steel-cold waters of Loch a Tuath, the downdraught from the rotors sending concentric circles of broken light across the bay, and then they tipped and veered east, swinging sharply to drop down to the apron behind the terminal building. A clutch of police vehicles and an ambulance were gathered there, blue lights flashing in the sunlight that fell in handfuls through flitting gaps in the cloud, sprinkling like fairy dust across the moor before vanishing again in an instant.

Fin glanced once more at the boy, wrapped in blankets by the door. He had remained impassive for the duration of the flight. Whatever turmoil there might have been in his head was not reflected outside it. Fin himself felt hollowed out. A husk. Emptied of everything that might once have defined him. He looked away again in despair and saw Marsaili waiting for them by the ambulance, George Gunn standing awkwardly at her side. She was wrapped in a long black coat over jeans and boots, and her hair blew back in a stream from a face as pale as an August moon. She looked tiny beside Gunn. And Fin saw in her again the little girl with the pigtails who had sat beside him that first day at school, full of stubborn determination, but vulnerable now in a way she had never been as a child. Artair’s death had been radioed ahead. She averted her face from the blast of air and dust thrown out by the blades as the coastguard helicopter touched down on the tarmac.

Fin turned and saw Gigs and Pluto sitting in grim silence at the back of the cabin, their presence demanded