the subject.
‘Did Kirsty ever talk to you about anything that was worrying her?’ Solomon asked.
The old lady looked at him, troubled, as if such questions had never occurred to her before. Her eyes drifted away from them and looked out over the view of the water beyond the shore. Solomon and Lorimer watched her intently. Was there something she recalled? They waited.
‘I don’t know. Maybe there was something. I felt a sort of sadness in her a while back. I thought maybe she was homesick. She was so good to me, you know. Always wrote cheery letters. Kirsty wouldn’t have wanted to burden me with her troubles.’
‘She kept a diary,’ Lorimer began.
‘Ah, yes. Her five-year diary. I gave it to her one Christmas.’ Mhairi MacLeod narrowed her eyes. ‘You’ve been reading Kirsty’s diary?’ she asked, affronted.
‘This is a murder inquiry,’ Lorimer reminded her quietly.
‘Of course. It’s just…’ she bit her lip.
‘Just that we seem to be invading your great niece’s privacy,’ Lorimer finished for her.
Mhairi MacLeod nodded slowly. ‘Just that, Chief Inspector.’
Lorimer drew the red diary from his pocket. He’d read and reread the entries till the wee small hours but had found nothing enlightening in its pages.
‘She mentions someone named Malcolm. On the Hogmanay before last,’ Lorimer suggested.
‘Aye, she would. That’ll be Malcolm Munro from the store. He always brings the black bun. They were all here then, all the folks from Rodel.’
‘This Malcolm, he’s not an old boyfriend, then?’
Mhairi MacLeod’s eyes twinkled for a moment. ‘He’s sixty if he’s a day, Chief Inspector. Kirsty’s known Malcolm at the store since she was a wee girl spending her pennies on sherbet dabs.’
Solomon smiled and caught Lorimer’s eye. The picture of Kirsty MacLeod was beginning to take shape. Solly warmed to this island girl who had become a victim for no apparent reason.
‘There are several weeks missing,’ Lorimer opened the diary and showed her. ‘From May to late June.’
The old woman took the book from his hands and turned its thin pages, her gnarled fingers tracing the dead girl’s writing.
‘Why would she do that?’ Mhairi MacLeod asked, her eyes troubled.
‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us,’ he replied. ‘I thought something might have happened that she didn’t want to remember.’
‘Or let anybody else see,’ Solly put in.
‘Kirsty never did anything she’d be ashamed of,’ she said firmly. ‘And there were no affairs of the heart,’ she added, looking down at the diary. Solomon watched her stroke the pages as if she were giving comfort to a troubled mind. She wasn’t so certain of that, though, was she? What young woman was going to confide her most intimate secrets to an old lady? One she loved too much to burden with her own troubles, he thought, echoing the old woman’s words.
‘So there’s nothing you know that would have upset Kirsty to the extent of cutting up her diary?’ Lorimer asked.
Mhairi MacLeod shook her head slowly.
‘We think we know so much, don’t we? And all the time we really know nothing at all.’ She spoke softly to herself as if she’d forgotten their presence in the room. Then she turned and Lorimer could see tears in her eyes. ‘It’s not right, is it?’ she whispered. ‘Her mammy and daddy and now wee Kirsty. I should have been away long before them all.’ She lifted her hand as if in protest. ‘And here I am. An old, done woman taking up space.’
Lorimer didn’t reply. For how could he be expected to comment on the unfairness of life? That was what his job was about most of the time. Solomon’s eye caught his as Lorimer looked up and the psychologist inclined his head towards the door. Lorimer gave a brief nod in reply. It was time to go.
The early evening sun was glowing against the hillside as they stepped out of Borve Cottage.
‘Do you mind if we pay a short visit?’ Lorimer asked, indicating Saint Clement’s Church.
‘Why not,’ agreed Solly. The two men made their way over to the entrance, Lorimer stooping slightly as he ducked through the doorway. It was the smallest cathedral he’d ever seen, Lorimer thought, blinking as the gloom enfolded them. The stone flags that were polished from centuries of use gave a dull echo as they walked out of the light and into the shadows.
Neither of them spoke a word. It was as if these grey walls hadn’t noticed the passing of time. Lorimer had felt like this before. Sometimes standing by a mortuary slab he had that sense of being a tiny speck of dust in a swirling, meaningless universe.
Now here, as his footfall sounded on the worn stones, the Chief Inspector wondered at those Saints who had risked everything to try to bring their beliefs to these parts. What had it all been for? Was the so-called Christian West more law-abiding than in those far off pagan times? perhaps, just perhaps. He looked over to where Solomon stood poring over a leaflet that he’d picked up from a small wooden table. Did Solly have any religious beliefs? Judaism was so old and venerable. In all his dealings with human behaviour had Solomon retained something extra to sustain him against cynicism? Somehow Lorimer knew that was a question he’d be unable to ask.
As if aware of his companion’s scrutiny, Solly turned around, waving the leaflet in his hand.
Lorimer joined him, noticing that there were postcards for sale. An honesty box lay beyond them, fixed to the wall.
‘Listen to this,’ said Solly. ‘Tradition has it that Saint Clement of Rome was banished to the Crimea where he was put to death by being thrown into the sea with an anchor around his neck. The Church was built by MacLeod of Harris in the thirteenth century as Saint Clement was the patron saint of the MacLeods. Within the church is the tomb of Alexander Macclod, domino de Dunvegan 1528.’
As Solly picked up a few postcards and rattled in his pocket for change, Lorimer took a lingering look at the interior of the tiny, ancient cathedral. He tried to imagine all the folk who had come to worship here over the years. Then another thought came to him. Kirsty would have come here. And her old Aunty Mhairi. Lorimer chewed on a raggled nail. The MacLeods had been here for centuries. That meant that there would be a whole load of them outside. In the graveyard.
For a moment Lorimer stood with his face up to the last warmth of the setting sun. Heedless of his presence, a sheep cropped at the grass. Overhead a gull mewed. He took a deep breath and smelt something fragrant in the soft air. All his weariness seemed to fall away like a cloak being shed. He could so easily forget everything in this quiet corner away from the world. The sky and sea merged into one blur of blue. Somewhere beyond lay a world of offices, streets, computers, files, telephones…all the paraphernalia of his working life.
Lorimer gave himself a shake. He was in danger of being beguiled by the quiet of this island. It was a place like any other, he persuaded himself, inhabited by people as culpable as any in the city.
He stepped in among the lichened gravestones, looking at the names. He was right. There were lots of MacLeods. Some were so old that their inscriptions had faded into decay. He moved among them, shaking his head at all the infant deaths centuries before. Lorimer bent to read the carving on a stone that had leant over with years of westerly gales. The words were still clearly marked: Be Ye Also Ready The Small amp; Great Are Here
Lorimer gave a rueful nod of acknowledgement and passed on down the line.
There was another MacLeod, a Donald MacLeod who had fought in the ’45 rebellion. Several lines of inscription told any passerby that here lay a man who’d been preceded by three wives, who had borne him nine children. Lorimer gave a twisted smile. He was barely in his forties himself, but he’d long ago given up any hope of producing any kids to carry on his own name. He read on. The old man had died in his ninetieth year, it said.
‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ Solly was suddenly by his side. ‘What accounted for their longevity, do you think?’
‘The whisky?’ Lorimer joked.
‘I wonder. Did they have a healthier way of life, perhaps?’
Lorimer shrugged. The world that he and Solly came from wasn’t particularly healthy any more. The Sunday supplements were forever carrying a story about someone who had changed their city life for one in a remote part of Scotland. Taking another lungful of Hebridean air, Lorimer could understand why.
