The unforgiven dead, p.18
The Unforgiven Dead, page 18
Chichester swung his walking stick at a stray nettle that leaned over the path, scything the stingy stem in half. The movement was rapid, a mere flick of the wrist, like a cobra’s strike. “It’s not always straightforward,” Chichester murmured. “Faye was an only child. She always wanted a little sister. That was the one thing I couldn’t give her.”
Would that have made a difference? he wondered. Single children—like Faye, like him—were often alone. They made their own decisions and mistakes. They carried their problems around like a loaded mule.
Chichester glanced at him. “Have you and your colleagues identified any suspects?”
“She was at Teine Eigin on the night she died. We have video footage of the celebrations and there’s one person on there we’ve not managed to identify.”
“The killer?”
“We’re keeping an open mind.”
Chichester swiped at another weed. “So why hasn’t this person’s picture been released to the media? Surely someone must know who he is?”
“We’re not even sure it is a ‘he.’”
Chichester gave him a sidelong glance. “What else could it be?”
“What I mean is, we can’t tell whether the figure is male or female because they’re wearing a full-length cloak and mask.”
Chichester pondered this as they neared the wolf enclosure. Angus heard rustling in the tangle of rhododendrons that now fringed the path. He peered into the undergrowth. Branches and boughs twisted up from the ground, dark and alive, like the symbol Faye had drawn in her sketch pads. He heard scurrying feet. A high-pitched yip. Then silence.
Chichester pointed with his stick. “This way.”
He bounded up a flight of wooden steps to a viewing platform, a curved timber structure with information boards and binoculars on revolving metal posts positioned every twenty yards or so. Angus could smell the musky scent of the wolves on the breeze, like wet dog, but stronger and redolent of damp forests, of Nature herself. Away in the distance, he glimpsed movement at the edge of a small copse that grew in the enclosure. A second later a howl that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end rang out across the landscape. The lone cry was taken up by others, and soon the chorus filled the twilight. It seemed to reverberate around the rocks and hills like a proclamation, a warning to all the other species in the vicinity, including man. It struck a chord deep within him, touching some lost nerve, a race memory perhaps of a time when humans shared the land with these predators.
Chichester watched him, eyes smiling. “Amazing sound, isn’t it? Wolves haven’t been heard here in three hundred years.”
“Aye,” he said. “It’s . . . quite something.” He knew it was a tame response, but he couldn’t put into words the impression the howling made on him. It was like hearing an ancient language, one he’d spoken and dreamt in but had somehow lost.
Chichester took a hip flask from his inside pocket. “They know this place: instinctively, they can tell this was once wolf country. I’m so proud these animals are back where they belong, back in my native land.”
He screwed off the lid and took a sip, then offered the flask to Angus. “Macallan 1926.”
Angus accepted the hip flask. It felt heavy and was decorated with intricate Celtic motifs, which wound around the flask and framed hunting and battle scenes, like a miniature Bayeux Tapestry etched in silver. He lifted the flask to his lips and drank deeply. Vanilla, woodsmoke, and marzipan burned deliciously down his throat, and for a brief second he forgot about the shadows stalking his subconscious—about the girl with the garrotte around her throat, about Ewan and the Dark One. He longed to drink the hip flask dry, let the alcohol smog fill his mind the way the yellow pills used to. No. Reluctantly, he handed the flask back to Chichester.
“What did you mean when you said ‘my native land’? I thought you were as American as apple pie.”
Chichester’s lips twitched upwards. “True, but I’m descended from the notorious Dòmhnall MacRuari.”
Angus now recalled the family tree he’d seen in the library, not to mention the portrait of the scary clan chief that greeted visitors to Dunbirlinn.
“The Druid,” he said.
“That’s right.” Chichester nodded. “A genealogist friend’s been helping me research him. I think I’ve read everything there is about Dòmhnall, and he’s not the monster many academics make out. He is . . . misunderstood.”
Chichester shook his head, as if dislodging the thought. “Anyway, at one time the MacRuaris were lords of all this—” He swept his stick out, as if to encompass the landscape. Dying light clung to the rocky shoulder of the hillside, like a child hanging on to his mother. For a second it appeared as if the rock were on fire.
“Was that why you decided to buy the estate?”
Chichester pursed his lips. “Certainly, the symmetry appealed to me. But, no, it was something deeper, fated even, if you believe in that kind of thing.”
He smiled at Angus’s confused expression. “My life had no meaning until I came to these shores. Everything before then—my media empire, the mansions around the globe, the yachts, the parties, the women—none of it gave me anything but the most fleeting satisfaction. It’s a cliché, but money really can’t buy you happiness. Sure, you can have fun testing the theory, but that’s all it is—fun. And there’s only so much fun you can have before you crave something deeper, something that feeds the soul. Believe me, you can’t buy that kind of purpose.”
He felt Chichester’s gaze slide over him, sharp eyes evaluating. “You have a purpose too, Angus Dubh.”
He tensed. How many times over the years had Gills said these exact same words? Too often, perhaps, because he had crumpled under the weight of the responsibility. No, that wasn’t fair on Gills—Angus had crumpled because he was weak and selfish.
Chichester handed the hip flask across to Angus, who raised it to his lips. The scent of the whisky drifted from the open cap, like the whisper of a lover, or a siren’s call. He tipped the hip flask back, but allowed only a dribble to pass his lips. Something that tasted so good had to be dangerous.
“I discovered my purpose quite by chance,” Chichester continued. “A decade back I had a health scare, which forced me to think about my mortality. Until then I’d never considered myself old, you know? Naively, I thought I’d go on forever, a mighty oak that just kept growing. But when one gets old, Angus, they no longer reach for the sky anymore; they look to the roots. And that’s what I did.”
Chichester’s fingers caressed the silver wolf’s head atop his cane. “I’d always been aware of my Scottish ancestry,” he said, eyes fixed on the middle distance. “One of the enduring memories of my childhood is my grandpa standing in our front room on what he called Hogmanay. He’d be dressed in a kilt, his cheeks inflating like a balloon as he played Auld Lang Syne on the bagpipes.”
The laird seemed lost in some bittersweet remembrance. In profile, his nose thrust up slightly, as if he were sniffing the air for predators. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his cheek and eye socket. Wrinkle lines around his mouth yanked his lips downwards. “He was originally from Canada, Grandpa,” Chichester went on. “His ancestors were amongst a group of Scottish colonists who settled Prince Edward Island in the first decade of the 1800s. He spent his early years in the province of Manitoba, but his father was a cattle dealer and decided to move the family south to Texas just before the turn of the century. Grandpa went into the same business, but he was no simple cowboy. He was well-read—self-taught, all of it, but he could debate philosophy and religion as well as any sonofabitch from Yale. I remember him reading me bedtime stories—tales about giants and banshees from the old country, passed down to him from his own grandfather.”
Chichester smiled at the memory, but then his face clouded over. “Grandpa passed when I was ten. My own father had no interest in our Scottish heritage, and I was too young to care either way. It was only later, after the health scare, that I felt compelled to delve deeper.”
He half-turned towards Angus. His sinewy neck twisted, the skin puckering into deep creases. Specks of light shone from his eyes, like the stars coming alive above the viewing platform. In that moment he resembled his murdered daughter. It was something in the expression, an almost childlike earnestness.
She was part of him, that’s why. His blood. Gone, because of you!
Angus felt the guilt etched across his face, but the laird did not seem to notice.
“I felt a burning desire to see the land of my kinsfolk then,” he said, “so strong, it was almost as if something were calling me here. Of course, I’d been to the UK a hundred times before—I own a town house in Knightsbridge and a stud farm in Kent—but I’d never been north of Edinburgh. This place”—he threw out his arms—“blew me away. Like the wolves, I felt a sense of coming home. But you know what my first thought was?”
Angus shook his head and handed back the hip flask.
“I thought this would be an amazing location for a championship golf course.” Chichester guffawed. “Can you imagine anything more pointless than golf? Yet I used to obsess over the damn sport—spent tens, hundreds probably, of thousands on coaching, hours on the range, all to shave a couple of points off my handicap.”
“What changed your mind about the golf course?”
He traced his gnarled fingers around the hip flask, like a blind man reading braille. “I was out hiking, alone, when I was caught in a storm. The mist was so thick, I could hardly tell which way was up and which was down. The wind was fierce, and the sleet soon soaked through my clothes. I was close to death from exposure when I stumbled across a cave. I later discovered that this was the exact cave where my ancestor Dòmhnall MacRuari met a grisly end, but that’s another story. Anyway, I lay down to wait for the weather to change. I remember shivering uncontrollably, my teeth chattering so hard, I thought they’d shatter. Then I fell into this trancelike state of hyper-awareness. I started hallucinating, seeing all kinds of strange things. It was . . . spiritual. I made a pact, right there and then, that if I made it out of that cave alive, I’d change my ways. I would use my influence and money to do good in the world, to protect the environment and ignite the rewilding movement. That’s where my plan to reintroduce the wolves was born—there, in that cave.”
He glanced at Angus. “The idea did not come quite as out of the blue as it sounds. I’ve always had an interest in wolves, and several years previously I had donated to a wolf reintroduction project in Yellowstone Park. That initiative had been a remarkable success, and my notion was to create a Scottish Yellowstone, right here.”
Angus gave an awkward-sounding cough. “Full disclosure, sir. My wife, Ashleigh, is one of those placard-wavers outside Dunbirlinn. In fact, she’s a founding member of the Glenruig Community Trust.”
Chichester grinned, then surprised him by clapping him on the shoulder. “I know. Mrs. MacCrimmon told me. I did wonder whether you’d mention it.”
“You’re not—”
“Angry?” Chichester interjected. “Of course not. I’ve heard your wife speak at one of the meetings. She’s articulate, passionate, and a talented musician, too, I hear. Not to mention beautiful. You must be very proud of her?” He thought of the trauma Ash had endured after her parents had died when she was so young. It took a warrior to emerge intact from that battle. And now, scathed though he knew she was, she spent her time fighting for the underdog, championing those without a voice. Ashleigh was a better, stronger soul than he was.
“Aye,” he said. “I’m proud of her. She’s the most selfless person I’ve ever met. Sometimes I think I’ve held her back.”
“In what way?”
“Ach, I don’t know. Before we met, she had plans to go to music college. She could have done anything, but she wanted to get married and raise a family here, in the Highlands. But that’s not quite panned out.”
Chichester nodded, as if to himself. “Nothing in life ever turns out exactly as planned.”
He took a long drink from the hip flask, then wiped a sleeve across his mouth. “The irony is, your wife and I are fighting for the same thing.”
He surveyed the barren panorama. “Tourists come to the Highlands, Angus Dubh, to bask in the wilderness, but this”—he swept his walking stick across the landscape again—“is not wilderness. This is make-believe, an artificial creation of man, first branded by the Victorians and flogged to death by successive governments ever since. No landscape can truly be called a wilderness when its top predator has been eradicated.”
Angus saw a flash of ruthlessness in the American’s eyes that sent a chill down his spine. It was a mere flicker, but in that moment he saw something wild and untamed. The incandescent light fizzled and seemed to ripple across Chichester’s face before his expression returned to urbane neutrality.
“The wolf kept this ecosystem in balance for centuries. She drove the deer through the wooded glens, picked off the weakest with an efficiency no gamekeeper—not even your pal Ewan Hunter—could match. Red deer were forest dwellers back then, perhaps a third bigger than the deer that ravage the hillsides now. They would still be here, had the wolf not been hunted to extinction, like so many other species—moose, reindeer, wild goat, wild boar, lynx, bear.
“These deer were conditioned not to linger for fear of wolf attack. Constantly on the move, they had no time to graze on these lower slopes as they do nowadays, destroying the forests before they’ve even had a chance to take root.”
His eyes narrowed to slits, like the arrow loops in Dunbirlinn Castle. “In ten years” time—if the reintroduction project is allowed to progress unhindered—the view from here will be quite different. Where there is barren moorland, there will be trees and grass. Insects will flourish, as will the birds that feed on them. Wolves have a symbiotic relationship with nature, Angus. Rather than decimating deer numbers, they will keep the herds fit and healthy. She is the missing link in the chain.”
Angus shifted nervously from foot to foot. He didn’t disagree with Chichester, but he was also beginning to see why some newspapers had branded him a crazed environmentalist.
“What about the crofters?” he asked. “Won’t the wolves kill their sheep?”
“Perhaps.” Chichester shrugged. “But they’ll be compensated for their losses. I appreciate they fear for their livelihoods, of course I do, but it is their mindset that must change. For too long, land managers have put the interest of people first. And have failed spectacularly. The Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only destroyed the ecosystem with the introduction of large-scale sheep farming, it also broke communities. We’ve learnt very little since then. Sheep farmers, hillwalkers, hunters, billionaires like me, they must learn this land is not here to serve them. They have taken everything from nature and given nothing back. If a wolf takes a sheep, it is not the fault of the wolf. It is only doing what comes naturally. The fault, Angus, lies with the shepherd who has failed to protect his flock.”
“I doubt that argument will float with the likes of John MacVannin.”
A muscle in Chichester’s jaw tensed. “An odious little man. Sheep farmers and preachers have been the wolves’ biggest enemies—he is both. Christian propaganda poisoned minds against the wolf, created the conditions where the extermination of a species was seen as a noble pursuit, a crusade, even. Christianity perverted our relationship with the natural world. Suddenly God gave us dominion over all the other creatures and if Christ was the Good Shepherd, then the wolf was an agent of the Devil.”
Chichester’s tone was level but flint-edged, as if he were challenging Angus to disagree.
“Human beings used to revere wolves,” he continued. “She was the first mammal we ever domesticated, long before horses or cattle. All dogs are descended from that source, but here’s the irony”—he turned to him, his furrowed handsome face incised with sorrow—“over the centuries through selective breeding, we’ve fashioned dogs for our specific needs—guard dogs, retrievers, scent hounds. Eventually we got around to breeding the wolfhound, an animal designed to kill wolves.” He shook his head sadly. “How did we ever reach this point? How did our relationship with wolves change from one of respect and admiration, to one in which we wanted to annihilate the species? By its own descendants, no less.”
Angus had no answer. He tugged his gaze away from Chichester and watched the animals in the distance. The sunlight had dipped below the shoulder of the hillside, but slivers of pewter and gold still feathered the sky. Stars blinked between the clouds as shadows swallowed the moorland. From here, the wolves looked like grey ghosts—insubstantial, as if made of vapor.
“They’re smaller than I imagined,” Angus said at last.
Chichester grinned, showing little canine teeth. “Everything about the wolf is exaggerated, especially their size. The mature European wolf is around five and a half feet from nose to tail and weighs about eighty-five pounds on average. But when people are asked—and, boy, have I asked—they’ll say wolves weigh around two hundred pounds.”
Angus squinted into the distance. One of the wolves had split from the pack and loped towards the viewing platform. The creature was graceful, feet hardly seeming to touch the ground as it glided across the heather.
“Ah, here she comes, the alpha female,” Chichester said. The skin around his eyes crinkled and a wide smile broke like a wave across his face. “She does this as a show of strength,” he said, like a proud parent watching a child perform onstage. “A quiet reminder that this is her territory.”
The wolf halted some ten yards from the platform. She raised her head and sniffed the air. Her coat was a striking blue-grey colour, apart from her neck, which was lighter, almost white. The amber eyes, which were now looking straight at him, were outlined in black, as if painted with kohl. They seemed transfused with an otherworldly light. He held the wolf’s gaze, transfixed. There was wisdom in those eyes, but something feral, too, a cold ruthlessness, like the brief glimpse that had flickered across Chichester’s face.
