‘It was like looking at a stranger. The Fin Macleod you must have been all these years when I didn’t know you. Married to someone else, raising a kid, being a policeman.’
He was almost startled by the sudden touch of her hand on his face.
‘I’m not sure I know you at all. Not any more.’
And those few moments of passion they had shared that afternoon, pencil-thin lines of sunlight zigzagging across their frantic lovemaking, already seemed like a lifetime ago.
THIRTY-THREE
Paul Kelly lived in a detached yellow sandstone house built on three levels, with gables and dormers, an elaborate entrance porch, and a conservatory at the rear that extended right out into a mature, well-maintained garden.
A semicircular drive led up to the front door from Tipperlinn Road, with wrought-iron electronic gates at each end of it. Sunlight tipped down over azaleas in bloom, green-dappled by young beech leaves.
Their taxi dropped Fin and Marsaili at the south gate, and Fin asked the driver to wait. But he shook his head. ‘Naw. You’ll pay me now. I’m no hanging around.’ It seemed that he knew the address and was anxious not to linger. They stood and watched as he drove off and swung into Morningside Place.
Fin turned to the intercom set in the stone gatepost and pressed the buzzer. After a moment a voice said, ‘What d’ye want?’
‘My name’s Fin Macleod. I used to be a cop. I’d like to speak to Paul Kelly.’
‘Mr Kelly disnae speak tae anyone without an appointment.’
‘Tell him it’s about something that happened on the Dean Bridge fifty-odd years ago.’
‘He’ll no see you.’
‘Just tell him.’ There was an imperative quality to Fin’s voice. A tone that brooked no argument.
The speaker went dead and Fin glanced self-consciously at Marsaili. He was again being that Fin Macleod she didn’t know. And he had no idea how to bridge the gap between the two.
They seemed to wait an inordinately long time before the speaker crackled again and the voice returned. ‘Okay,’ was all it said, and the gates immediately began to swing open.
As they walked up the drive, Fin noticed the security lights and CCTV cameras mounted around the house and in the grounds. Paul Kelly was evidently keen to avoid unwanted visitors. The front door opened as they reached the entrance porch, and a young man in an open-necked white shirt and sharply creased grey trousers folding neatly over Italian shoes surveyed them with cautious eyes. His black hair was cut short, and gelled back from his forehead. An expensive haircut. Fin could smell his aftershave from six feet away.
‘Need tae frisk you.’
Without a word Fin moved forward, legs apart, arms raised to either side. The young man patted him down carefully, front and back, along each arm and down each leg.
‘The woman, too.’
Fin said, ‘She’s clean.’
‘I need to check.’
‘Take my word for it.’
The young man looked at him very directly. ‘More than my job’s worth, pal.’
‘It’s okay,’ Marsaili said. And she presented herself for the search.
Fin watched with a simmering anger as the man put his hands on her. Front and back, buttocks, legs. But he didn’t linger where he didn’t have to. Professional. Marsaili remained expressionless, although her face coloured slightly.
‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Follow me.’
He took them through a cream and pale-peach hallway with a thick red carpet and a beechwood staircase rising through two floors.
Paul Kelly was lounging on a white leather settee in the conservatory at the rear of the house smoking a very large Havana cigar. Although a light breeze rustled through the spring leaves in the garden outside, Kelly’s smoke hung in still strands, blue-grey where it was caught by the sunlight that angled through the trees. There was an impression here almost of being in the garden itself, although you could neither smell nor hear it. Red plush armchairs sat around a brushed steel table, and bright daylight reflected off a polished wooden floor.
Kelly stood as his flunky showed them in. He was a giant of a man, well over six feet tall, and although a little overweight still in good condition for someone in his mid to late sixties. His florid round face was shaved to a shine, steel-grey hair cropped to bristle. His starched pink shirt was stretched a little too tightly over an ample belly, his jeans ironed to an incongruous crease.
He smiled, a slight query in the tilt of his head, and he offered a large hand to each of them in turn. ‘An ex- cop and tales of the Dean Bridge. I must admit, you’ve aroused my curiosity.’ He waved the same big hand towards the red armchairs. ‘Take a seat. Can I offer you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?’
Fin shook his head, ‘No thanks.’ He and Marsaili perched uncomfortably on the edge of the armchairs. ‘We’re trying to establish the identity of a man, now living on the Isle of Lewis, who was at the Dean Orphanage some time in the mid 1950s.’
Kelly laughed. ‘Sure you’re not still in the force? You don’t sound like an
‘I can assure you I am.’
‘Well, then, I’ll take your word for it.’ He drew reflectively on his cigar. ‘What makes you think I can help?’
‘Your family was living in old millworkers’ tenements in the Dean Village at that time.’
Kelly nodded. ‘We were.’ He chuckled. ‘Wouldn’t recognize the place now, though. A yuppie paradise it is these days.’ He paused. ‘Why do you think I would know some boy from The Dean?’
‘Because I believe he was involved in an incident on the Dean Bridge that affected your family.’
There was the merest flicker of something in Kelly’s eyes, the slightest heightening of the colour on his face. Fin wondered if it was pain he saw there. ‘What’s his name?’
Marsaili said, ‘Tormod Macdonald.’ And Fin flicked her a look.
He said quickly, ‘But you wouldn’t know him by that name.’
Kelly’s eyes turned towards Marsaili. ‘What’s he to you, this man?’
‘He’s my father.’
The silence that ensued hung heavy in the air, like Kelly’s cigar smoke, and lingered for longer than was comfortable. Finally, Kelly said, ‘I’m sorry. This is something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget. It’s not easy to lose a big brother so young. Especially when he was your hero, too.’ He shook his head. ‘Patrick meant the world to me.’
Fin nodded. He said, ‘We think the boy’s first name was John. Something. That’s what we’re trying to find out.’
Kelly took a long slow pull on his cigar and let the smoke leak from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth before blowing a grey stream of it into the pregnant atmosphere of the conservatory. ‘John McBride,’ he said at last.
Fin tried to control his breathing. ‘You knew him?’
‘Not personally. I wasn’t on the bridge that night. But three of my brothers were.’
‘When Patrick fell to his death?’ Marsaili said.
Kelly turned his focus from Fin to Marsaili. His voice was barely audible. ‘Yes.’ He sucked in some more smoke, and Fin was shocked to see what looked almost like moisture gathering in his eyes. ‘But I haven’t talked about that in more than fifty years. And I’m not sure I want to start now.’
Marsaili nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I can understand that.’
They walked in silence up Tipperlinn Road, stone villas brooding privately behind high walls and tall trees, past the old coach-house at Stable Lane to where the cobbled Albert Terrace ran off up the hill to their right in a profusion of green.
