both knew he was a good cop, it had just taken Fin longer to realize that it wasn’t his metier. It had taken Robbie’s death to do that.
‘Records tell me you pulled the file on your son’s hit-andrun three weeks ago.’ Black paused, waiting perhaps for an acknowledgement. When it didn’t come he added, ‘They’d like it back.’
‘Of course.’ Fin slid the file out of his bag and dropped it on to the desk. ‘Not that anyone’s ever likely to open it.’
Black nodded. ‘Probably not.’ He hesitated. ‘Time you closed it, too, Fin. It’ll just eat you up inside, and fuck with the rest of your life. Let it go, son.’
Fin couldn’t meet his eye. He lifted his box of belongings. ‘I can’t.’
Outside, he went around the back of the building and opened the lid of a large green recycling bin to empty the contents of his cardboard box, and then chuck it in after them. He had no use for any of it.
He stood for a moment, looking up at the window from which he had so often watched the sun and the rain and the snow sweep across the shadowed slopes of Salisbury Craggs. All the seasons of all the wasted years. And he slipped out into St Leonard’s to flag down a taxi.
His cab dropped him on the steep cobbled slope of the Royal Mile, just below St Giles’ Cathedral, and he found Mona waiting for him in Parliament Square. She was still in her drab winter greys, almost lost among the classical architecture of this Athens of the north, sandstone buildings blackened by time and smoke. He supposed it reflected her mood. But she was more than depressed. Her agitation was clear.
‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry.’ He took her arm and they hurried across the deserted square, through arches beneath towering columns. And he wondered if his lateness had been subliminally contrived. Not so much an unwillingness to let go of the past, as a fear of the unknown, of leaving the safety of a comfortable relationship to face a future alone.
He glanced at Mona as they entered the portals of what had once been the home of the Scottish Parliament, before the landowners and merchants who sat here had succumbed three hundred years before to the bribes of the English and sold out the people they were supposed to represent to a union they didn’t want. Fin and Mona’s, too, had been a union of convenience, a loveless friendship. It had been driven by occasional sex, and held together only by the shared love of their son. And now, without Robbie, it was ending here, in the Court of Session. A decree nisi absolute. A piece of paper bringing to a close a chapter of their lives which had taken sixteen years to write.
He saw the pain of it in her face, and all the regrets of a lifetime came back to haunt him.
In the end it took only a few minutes to consign all those years to the dustbin of history. The good times and bad. The struggles, the laughs, the fights. And they emerged into brilliant sunlight spilling down across the cobbles, the rumble of traffic out on the Royal Mile. Other people’s lives flowing past, while theirs had been shifted from pause to stop. They stood like still figures at the centre of a time-lapse film, the rest of the world eddying around them at high speed.
Sixteen years on and they were strangers again, unsure of what to say, except goodbye, and almost afraid to say that out loud, in spite of the pieces of paper they held in their hands. Because beyond goodbye, what else was there? Fin opened his leather bag to slip the paperwork inside, and his photocopied sheets in their beige folder slid out and scattered around his feet. He stooped quickly to gather them up, and Mona crouched down to help him.
He was aware of her head turning towards him as she took several of them in her hand. It must have been clear to her at a glance what they were. Her own statement was among them. A few hundred words that described a life taken and a relationship lost. The sketch of a face drawn from her own description. Fin’s obsession. But she said nothing. She stood up, handing them to him, and watched as he stuffed them back in his bag.
When they reached the street, and the moment of parting could no longer be avoided, she said, ‘Will we stay in touch?’
‘Is there any point?’
‘I suppose not.’
And in those few words, all the investment they had made in each other over all these years, the shared experiences, the pleasure and the pain, were lost for ever like snowflakes on a river.
He glanced at her. ‘What will you do when the house is sold?’
‘I’ll go back to Glasgow. Stay with my dad for a while.’ She met his eye. ‘What about you?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do.’ It was almost an accusation. ‘You’ll go back to the island.’
‘Mona, I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding that.’
She shook her head. ‘But you will. You know it. You can never escape the island. It was there between us all those years, like an invisible shadow. It kept us apart. Something we could never share.’
Fin took a deep breath and felt the warmth of the sun on his face as he raised it for a moment to the sky. Then he looked at her. ‘There was a shadow, yes. But it wasn’t the island.’
Of course, she was right. There was nowhere else to go, except back to the womb. Back to the place that had nurtured him, alienated him, and in the end driven him away. It was the only place, he knew, that there was any chance of finding himself again. Among his own people, speaking his own tongue.
He stood on the foredeck of the
Fin peered intently into swirling grey, feeling the wetness of it on his face, until finally the faintest shadow emerged from its gloom. The merest smudge on a lost horizon, eerie and eternal, like the ghost of his past come back to haunt him.
As the island took gradual shape in the mist he felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and was almost overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming.
FOUR
Gunn sat at his desk squinting at the computer screen. Subliminally he registered the sound of a foghorn not far out in the Minch, and knew that the ferry would be docking shortly.
He shared his first-floor office with two other detectives, and had a fine view from his window of the Blythswood Care charity shop on the other side of Church Street.
Bog bodies, also known as bog people, were preserved human bodies found in sphagnum bogs in northern Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, he read on the Wikipedia page on the subject. Acidic water, low temperatures and lack of oxygen combined to preserve the skin and organs, so much so that it was even possible in some cases to recover fingerprints.
He wondered about the body laid out in the cold cabinet in the autopsy room at the hospital. Now that it was out of the bog, how quickly might it start to deteriorate? He scrolled down the page and looked at the photograph of a head taken from a body recovered sixty years ago from a peat bog in Denmark. A chocolate-brown face remarkably well defined, one cheek squashed up against the nose where it had lain in repose, an orange stubble still clearly visible on the upper lip and jaw.
‘Ah, yes, Tollund Man.’
Gunn looked up to see a tall, willowy, lean-faced figure with a halo of dark, thinning hair leaning down to get a closer look at his screen.
‘Carbon dating of his hair placed him from around 400 BC. The idiots who performed the autopsy cut off his head and threw the rest of him away. Except for his feet and one finger, which are still preserved in formalin.’ He grinned and held out a hand. ‘Professor Colin Mulgrew.’
Gunn was surprised by the strength of his handshake. He seemed so slight.
Almost as if he had read his mind, or detected his wince as they shook, Professor Mulgrew smiled and said,
