‘But you got everything?’
Gunn glared at him. ‘The social work report is redundant now as far as the courts are concerned. Mr Macaskill is dead, so the case disputing custody has fallen by default. It was, however, considered relevant to the murder inquiry, and so is still part of the evidence.’
‘And you got a look at it?’
‘I have a copy of it right here.’ He patted the green folder.
‘And?’
‘The social worker was recommending that the Sheriff grant custody of his daughter to John Angus Macaskill, on the basis of the girl’s own wishes.’
Fin let his head drop and closed his eyes. And he wondered if his own intervention had maybe led to all of this. He took a deep breath and raised himself to his feet. ‘And the crimescene pics?’
‘I have them, too.’
Fin took Gunn by the arm. ‘Come inside and show me.’
He cleared a space on Whistler’s table, and Gun spread out half a dozen eight-by-ten colour prints over a surface scarred and stained by decades of use. It was shocking to see Whistler lying there among the debris. His blood was lurid and unnaturally red in the glare of the police photographer’s lights, his face brutally pale by comparison, the blood around his mouth and nose almost black. Such a big man reduced to nothing. All that intelligence lost in the halt of a heartbeat. The mosaic of memories that comprised his life gone for ever, as if they had never existed. Fin found himself wishing that he had Donald’s faith. That there was some purpose to all this, and that it wouldn’t all be lost like so many tears in rain.
He examined all the photographs carefully before picking out the third of them. ‘Look George. You can see clearly in this one. The outstretched hand is almost touching the fallen chessman.’
Gunn frowned. ‘Why would he have been trying to reach a wooden chessman, Mr Macleod? He was dying for Christ’s sake!’
‘And probably knew it. He was trying to tell us who killed him, George.’
Gunn turned a look of consternation on the younger man. ‘By pointing to a chess piece?’
Fin felt sick. ‘No ordinary chess piece.’ He stabbed a finger at the fallen carving. ‘This one here is what they call a Berserker. The fiercest of all the Viking warriors. They whipped themselves up into a trancelike state, it seems, so they felt no fear or pain. Whistler faithfully replicated all the others, but he did his own version of the Berserker.’ He paused. ‘In the likeness of Kenny John Maclean. His own small revenge for Kenny stealing his wife and his daughter.’
Gunn’s mouth hung half open as he absorbed this. ‘Are you saying Kenny John killed Whistler Macaskill?’
Fin nodded. ‘I am, George.’
‘Why?’
Fin sucked in a long, slow breath and tried to make sense of it himself. ‘I’m guessing, but I figure Big Kenny must have found out what was in the social work report.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe Anna said something. Maybe she told him what she’d told the social worker.’
‘And you think Kenny John killed Whistler to stop him getting his daughter back?’
But Fin shook his head. ‘No, not as a simple as that. But I think that when we found that body in the plane it gave Kenny a leverage he never dreamed he had. Something that would ruin Whistler’s chances of ever getting custody of Anna. My guess is he must have confronted Whistler with it. I can’t believe he ever meant to kill him. But I know Whistler. And I can only imagine how he must have reacted.’ He closed his eyes and had a picture of it in his mind. Two giant men, friends since childhood, crashing about this very room, locked in desperate conflict. Furniture flying. Plates and cups and glasses smashing around them.
Gunn’s voice crashed into his imagination. ‘There’s no proof of any of this.’
Fin opened his eyes, almost startled. ‘It’s only a few days since Whistler was killed, George. There must have been a terrible bloody fight in here. Kenny’s still going to bear the scars and bruises of that. And there’s bound to be forensic evidence in whatever the Scenes of Crime boys pulled out of here. If only your boss would stop trying to pin it on me and start looking in the right places.’
There was a long silence, then, in the still of the blackhouse. ‘What leverage, Mr Macleod?’
Fin’s gaze flickered towards Gunn.
‘You said the discovery of the body in the plane gave Kenny John a leverage he didn’t know he had.’
And Fin knew that there was no way he could keep Roddy’s secret.
IV
The drive to Suaineabhal Lodge took less than fifteen minutes, enough time for Fin to tell Gunn the potted version of the story that Roddy had told him not twenty-four hours earlier.
When they pulled up outside the lodge, Gunn turned off his motor and sat behind the wheel staring out through the windscreen beyond the trees to the ruffled surface of the loch. ‘Jesus, Mr Macleod, that’s one hell of a story.’ He turned his head towards the younger man. ‘And Roddy Mackenzie’s been living all these years in Spain when the rest of the world thought he was dead?’ It wasn’t so much a question as a reiteration of his disbelief. ‘He’s going to be in big trouble now.’
Fin nodded. He was. And Fin felt a fleeting pang of guilt. But none of it was of his doing, and all of it was out of his hands now.
They walked up the path to Kenny’s house and banged on the door. When there was no response Gunn opened it and stepped into the gloom of the hallway. ‘Hello? Mr Maclean?’ His call was greeted by silence, and after a moment he stepped back out into a freshening, blustery wind. ‘Let’s try the estate office.’
Jamie Wooldridge’s secretary looked up, surprised to see them. Neither Jamie nor Kenny John were at the lodge, she said. Both were at the chessmen gala day at the beach. Fin was taken aback. ‘What’s Kenny John doing there?’
‘He’s driving one of the boats for the gala day, Mr Macleod.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The boats seemed to be a long way off as Fin and Gunn walked across the sand. It was firm and dry underfoot, and only faintly ridged by the underlying currents of the outgoing tide. The gala day was in full flow by now, and the crowds on the beach had swelled in number. The bouncy castle swarmed with youngsters, their shouts of excitement rising above the drone of the pipes that drifted across Traigh Uige in the wind. There was accordion music belting out from speakers at one of the stalls, and as they passed the giant chessboard, from somewhere they heard the plaintive purity of Mairead’s voice rising above the throng, the wail of a violin, the moan of a Celtic flute. A Roddy Mackenzie song playing on some stall owner’s sound system. His music, finally, come home.
Fin paused for a moment by the chessboard, and Gunn had taken several more strides before he noticed and stopped to look back. He followed Fin’s gaze to the three-foot carved figure of the Berserker being moved from one square to another by two volunteers on instructions from the girl with the walkie-talkie. There was no mistaking the thick-lipped features of Kenny John Maclean, and the characteristic scar that followed the line of the cheekbone. Protruding teeth bit down hard on the top of his shield.
The two men exchanged glances, and something about the Berserker seemed to instil a greater sense of urgency in them. Gunn turned and lengthened his stride towards the distant shore. Fin hurried to catch him up.
A framework of stout wooden stakes had been hammered into the sand to provide an anchor for pontoons which had been lashed together to create a floating jetty for the boats. A long ramp with rope rails fed back to the sands, rising and falling with the jetty. A wooden hut on a low-loader was a dispensary for life jackets and waterproofs for the long lines of people awaiting their turn for the ride out into the bay.
