for wreckage out at sea now.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

The wind buffeted and bullied Donald and Fin as they walked down through the dying light towards Port of Ness, and Fin told Donald about the discovery that he and Whistler had made that morning. The street lamps were already on, all the way along to the big white house at the end of the road. They turned off before then, opposite Ocean Villa, and followed the winding band of tarmac down to the harbour. Lobster creels were piled up against the inner wall of the jetty. There had been some repair work done where the weather had wreaked its damage. But the far wall, standing against the furious assaults of the north-easterlies, was smashed beyond any redemption. Fin had seen waves fifty feet high breaking over it when he was a boy, white spume rising twice that height, to be whipped away by force-ten gales and carried off across the cliffs.

Tonight, with the wind blowing from the south-west, the harbour was relatively sheltered, although the few crabbers tied up within its walls were rising and falling on the swell, and tugging determinedly at their ropes. When they reached the end of the jetty wall, Donald cupped his hands around a cigarette and made several attempts to light it. When finally he did so, the smoke was whipped away from his mouth. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he’s dead. Even after all these years.’ He shook his head. ‘Everything about Roddy was larger than life. His talent, his ego, his ambition. Talk about blind ambition! That was Roddy. It consumed him to the point where nothing else mattered. Where he couldn’t see the hurt he was inflicting on the people around him.’

‘People like you?’

Donald flicked him a look. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Fin laughed out loud. ‘Donald, I never thought for a minute that you did. Whoever killed him could fly an aeroplane and land it on water. Even if you could fly, in those days you were in no state to ride as much as a bicycle.’

Donald looked away, clenching his jaw. It was not something in which he took pleasure of being reminded. ‘He cut me loose without a word, Fin. There was no contract with the band, then. Just trust. And he betrayed that trust. The first I knew about it was when I read in the NME that Amran had signed with the Copeland Agency in London. They had some tie-in with CAA in Los Angeles, and that’s what brought Amran the film deal.’

‘Maybe you hadn’t been doing a whole hell of a lot to earn their trust, Donald. Or advance their career.’

Donald pulled on his cigarette and shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, I know. I was an ass, Fin. In almost every possible way. I did things, said things in those days that. . well, that I still can’t forgive myself for. It fills me with shame every time I look back on how I was.’

‘I’m sure God knows it was just a passing phase.’

Donald’s head snapped around, anger blazing in his eyes. But all he said was, ‘Don’t be so cynical, Fin. It’s ugly.’

Fin said, ‘So you never actually had it out with him face to face?’

Donald sucked more smoke into his lungs. ‘Never. I probably deserved his anger, though he never had the guts to face me with it. But it was me who got them that first recording deal, Fin. They would just have been another university band otherwise, all going their separate ways when they got their degrees.’ He flicked his cigarette away into the wind. ‘When they signed for Copeland it was the beginning of the end for me. I got the boot from the Joey Cuthbertson Agency not long after that. Went down to London. But that was just tipping myself out of the wee frying pan into the big fire.’ He snorted his self-contempt. ‘Addictive personality, you see. Never could resist a temptation.’ The same addictive personality, Fin thought, which made him cling now to his religion. And then Fin heard the irony in his chuckle. ‘Strange that it was Catriona who proved to be my salvation. Or, at least, a drunken night of unbridled passion and unprotected sex that got her pregnant. There’s nothing like having responsibility for another life to make you start caring about your own.’

Fin wondered if feeling responsibility for Fin’s life had made Whistler care any more about his. Somehow he didn’t think so. But he didn’t share the thought with Donald.

‘Pure chance, too, that I met her down there,’ Donald said. ‘You must remember her from school. She was a couple of years behind us at the Nicolson.’

Fin nodded.

‘I used to think that God had sent her to rescue me.’ He paused. ‘But maybe I was wrong about that.’

‘Did you ever go flying with Roddy, Donald?’

‘Hell, no! I’ve got no head for heights, Fin. I hate flying at the best of times.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘As I recall, after he and Mairead split up he had his own circle of friends. Whether he went flying with them or not, I wouldn’t know. I remember he got involved with some Glasgow girl. No idea what her name was. But she was quite classy. A real looker. And not short of a few quid.’

‘Yes, I remember her.’ Fin had a picture of her in his mind’s eye at a party in a large sandstone villa on the south side of Glasgow. A beautiful, willowy, blonde girl.

‘That was just before I left for London.’ Donald smiled. ‘Roddy never did have any trouble finding himself a woman.’

‘Neither did you, Donald.’

There was a flicker of his old self in Donald’s eyes before he forced the focus back on Roddy. ‘It’s strange, though.’

‘What is?’

‘How the band went from strength to strength without Roddy. Just goes to show that for all his high opinion of himself, it was Strings who was the bigger musical influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t listened to them once in all these years. God teaches us to forgive, but it’s very hard to forget. And I know that just the sound of Mairead’s voice would bring it all back. And I don’t need that pain as well.’

He tried to light another cigarette, but the wind was too ferocious now and he gave up. They felt the first spots of rain whipping into their faces.

‘Roddy wasn’t universally popular, Fin. I know that. God knows, I had reason enough to hate him myself. But who would have wanted to murder him? And why?’

Fin shook his head. ‘I haven’t the first idea, Donald.’

The rain turned into a deluge then, and the two men ran from the jetty towards the boat shed at the end of the beach. Donald slid one of the doors open and they slipped inside, soaked already. It smelled of diesel and fish in here, and the shadows of small boats were canted at odd angles between windows that gave out on to the beach and the sound of the sea. There was almost no light left before Donald’s lighter suddenly illuminated his face, painting it orange by its flickering light, then red in the glow of the lit tobacco, before fading back into darkness.

Neither spoke for a moment, gripped unexpectedly by a sense of being in the presence of the dead. For it was here that Angel Macritchie had met his death. The murder that had brought Fin back to the island of his birth after an absence of eighteen years. In the dark, with their memories, the ghost of Macritchie made its presence felt, the chill wind whipping through ill-fitting doors and open windows, wrapping itself around them.

Fin stamped his feet, more to exorcize the ghost than to warm himself. His voice sounded abnormally loud. ‘I don’t suppose the Presbytery have fixed a date for your hearing yet?’

‘It’ll be within the fortnight. In the Free Church hall in Kenneth Street in Stornoway.’ As Donald pulled on his cigarette his face again reflected its glow. ‘They’ve engaged legal counsel, I’m told. I’ve read up on the Acts of Assembly that set out the conditions for establishing a judicial commission. It seems that the hearing will pretty much follow the same course it would in a court of law.’

‘Then presumably you can appoint counsel yourself?’

Donald’s laugh came like a gunshot out of the dark. ‘Aye. If I could afford it.’

‘They’ll be calling Fionnlagh and Donna to give evidence, too, I suppose.’

‘I’ve asked them not to.’

Fin was astonished. ‘Why not? There’s nobody closer to what happened that day than the two of them.’

‘They’ve suffered enough,’ Donald said. ‘I’ll not put them through it all again.’

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