The unforgiven dead, p.7
The Unforgiven Dead, page 7
He strode past them and pushed open the double doors to the auditorium, which was about the size of two badminton courts, with a small stage at the front. Wooden beams ran up the walls to meet at a vaulted ceiling, giving the impression of being in an upturned boat. No, not a boat, he thought. A coffin.
He remembered the press of warm bodies in the darkness. The smell of sweat and lager. The wolf whistles as a woman with a tumult of auburn hair took the stage. The hair on the nape of his neck standing on end as Ashleigh began to sing . . .
He blinked away the happy memory and grabbed a harassed-looking policewoman heading for the exit. “Who’s in charge?”
She gestured over her shoulder to a petite woman with long raven-black hair who was busy sticking crime scene photos to the murder board. Unlike the rest of the officers, she was dressed casually in jeans, ankle boots, and a thick sweater.
“Shortie over there.”
He dredged up a smile. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Here to help.”
Angus ignored the sarcasm and walked over to the woman. He stopped a few feet away, waiting for her to turn around. When she didn’t, he cleared his throat. “Eh, ma’am. I—”
The woman spun around, her smile melting like snow off a dyke. Her eyes widened, gold flecks dancing in the almond brown of her irises. She quickly recovered her composure.
“Angus MacNeil. Fancy meeting you here.”
He tried to speak, but his throat felt like a drain clogged with dead leaves. He forgot how strong her Glaswegian accent was, how much he loved the lilting cadence. He worked saliva into his mouth and swallowed. “Hello, Nadia.”
She folded her arms across her chest and gave him a penetrative stare.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding, Angus?”
His name on her lips sent a quiver through him. “Err . . . aye.”
“How long’s it been? Eight, nine years?”
He shrugged, remembering that awful car journey home from Tulliallan in his father’s old Volvo, when the pain was raw and he could hardly see the road for tears.
He didn’t need this right now. Today had already been full of ghosts from his past.
“Aye, something like that.”
“Long time.”
“Aye.”
“You look like shite, by the way.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “Thanks.”
“No, seriously. Do folk age quicker up here in the Highlands or something?”
“It’s nice to see you, too, Nadia.”
Nadia gave him a faint smile, then turned her back on him and resumed studying the crime scene photographs, hands on hips. He recalled his own hands on those hips, the chamomile and lavender scent of her hair.
“So, why are you here, Angus?”
“This is my patch. I was first officer on the scene. It was Gills who found her—”
She turned around. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Is it that Gills?”
“Aye.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sarky WPC from earlier approach. She thrust a mobile phone towards Nadia. “DI Sharif, you’re ringing.”
Nadia took the phone with a nod of thanks. “Wait here a sec,” she told him.
He almost flinched as she brushed past him, that lightest of touches catapulting him back to Tulliallan, to the tiny creaking bed, the taste of peach schnapps, and the sound of Cowboy Junkies drifting from her old Sony stereo. He blinked away the memory and stepped towards the murder board. Faye’s laughing green eyes beamed from the photograph pinned to the centre of the board. Suddenly he felt a presence. His body went rigid.
Why was this happening again, after all these years? He’d been punished enough already, hadn’t he?
A waft of familiar perfume caught in his throat. Slowly, he twisted his head to the left. The background churn of the incident room faded. Faye stood next to him, staring at her own photograph. She wore the same green cloak as when he’d found her on the beach, but the colour had faded. She appeared so real but less substantial somehow, a washed-out image of the vibrant young woman in the photograph.
All in your head, son.
“Who was that?” she asked.
Angus opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but no words came out.
“She’s very pretty,” Faye said.
She dragged her eyes away from her own image and gave him a tepid smile. “You oughta watch yourself there, Constable MacNeil.”
Angus shook his head in disbelief. He closed his eyes for a brief second, and when he opened them again, she was gone. See, all in your head, son. He glanced around the room in panic and saw Nadia walking back towards him.
“My boss is still stuck on Loch Lomond-side. C’mon,” said Nadia. “You can take me to see Gills. It’ll be nice to put a face to a name. At last.”
“Constable MacNeil! Constable MacNeil!”
They had barely set foot outside the hall when Alice Seaton’s phlegmy rasp lassoed him from across the car park. The reporter stood outside a police cordon, cigarette glowing from between her bony fingers. She was only in her late-thirties but looked twice that age. Her face was pale and thin. From this distance, she looked to Angus more like a wraith than Faye had moments earlier.
“Do you know her?” Nadia asked.
“Aye, chief reporter for the local rag.”
He gave Alice a baleful look and shook his head.
Nadia took a set of car keys from her pocket and bleeped open a black Audi.
“Come on, Angus, give me a break!” Alice yelled. “There are rumours it’s Chichester’s daughter. Is that true?”
He hauled open the door of the Audi. “No comment!”
He folded himself into the passenger seat beside Nadia. She crunched the Audi into gear and drove out of the car park. Angus gave the reporter a blank look on the way past. Alice snarled something he couldn’t hear, but he didn’t need to be a lip-reader to comprehend the insult.
“She seems friendly,” Nadia commented.
He gave her a sidelong glance. “You made DI already.”
“Yeah, but I had to sleep my way to promotion.”
“So that’s where I’ve been going wrong.”
The laugh died on her lips. “Do you live around here?”
He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Back there. The cottage up on the hill.”
“A wee bit remote.”
An awkward silence hung between them as they drove towards Silvaig, where Gills was lecturing the class of exchange students.
Suddenly Nadia broke the silence. “You’re married.”
It was a statement, not a question, but he nodded anyway.
“Kids?”
“No. You?”
She gave a humourless laugh. “Nah, I’ve not even been married off yet.”
He heard the barb in her tone. “Nadia, it was never about that—”
“It was a long time ago, Angus. Water under the bridge and all that.”
She leaned forward and fiddled with the heating dial. He caught a whiff of her perfume, delicate and fresh, familiar even after all these years. She used to wear his old shinty hoodie so often that it had become infused with her scent. After it had all fallen apart and he’d returned home, he’d found the hoodie scrunched up at the bottom of his rucksack. For weeks he’d kept it under his pillow, breathing her in as he fell asleep and cursing his cowardice.
“Anyway,” Nadia said. “Tell me about the victim. I’ve read about Chichester and this wolf reserve but know nothing about his daughter.”
“Aye, she was a good one. Only sixteen. She grew up in New York but otherwise lived with her father and stepmother at Dunbirlinn Castle.”
“No siblings?”
He shook his head. “There’s been some bother up at the estate recently. Vandalism and the like. Not everybody’s happy about the nature reserve. I spoke to Faye just last week when I was there investigating an arson attack.”
“What was she like?”
It was the second time that day he’d been asked that question.
“Not the spoiled heiress you might think. She was down-to-earth, friendly. A fine painter, too. Wanted to go to art college . . .”
“Any boyfriend?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Bit strange for a sixteen-year-old girl, no?”
He shrugged.
“Who was the last person to see her alive?”
“Her parents saw her at dinnertime yesterday. She was supposed to be going out last night to a party at Teine Eigin—”
“Teine what?”
“Eigin. It’s a pagan commune out in the wilds of the estate. Faye was a frequent visitor, apparently. Last night was Samhain.”
“That’s Gaelic Halloween, right?”
“Aye, it’s where Halloween has its origins—an ancient Celtic festival marking the start of winter.” He suddenly recalled the Quran that had sat on Nadia’s shelf in her room at Tulliallan, next to Blackstone’s Police Manual. The books had been equally well thumbed. “Samhain’s pagan Muharram if you like.”
“Except we don’t dress up as witches and devils.”
“What do you do?”
“Fast. Pray. At least I used to.”
He couldn’t miss that sadness in her tone. “Used to?” he asked gently.
She had her eyes fixed on the road. “My dad died a couple of years ago. Massive stroke. He was the one who brought me to the mosque.”
“I remember.”
“Aye, well, I can’t bring myself to go back without him.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been”—he fumbled for the right words—“fucking awful.”
The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Aye, that about sums it up. Anyway, do we know if Faye actually made it to this commune?”
“No, although the housekeeper says she heard someone passing her house on horseback around ten. I checked earlier, and Faye’s horse is gone.”
Nadia puffed out her cheeks. “A dead heiress, some pagans, and a missing horse.”
“You can add witchcraft to the list.”
She frowned a question at him.
“Faye was found holding a small effigy. Gills recognised it as a corp creadha, or clay corpse. It’s basically a Highland voodoo doll.”
Nadia made a clicking sound with her tongue, a quirk he remembered she had when she was deep in thought. She caught his look and gave a faint smile. “Sorry. Old habits . . .”
He shook away the apology.
“Is this your first murder victim?” she asked.
He hesitated, images of all those he could not save flashing through his mind—Ethan Boyce’s limp body lying in the shallows, his Spider-Man T-shirt plastered to his thin frame; Lewis Duncan’s charred corpse seared into his wheelchair; Barbara Klein sprawled in the dew-soaked grass—smudged pink lipstick, hoop earrings, dead eyes staring at him.
“Aye,” he lied, “first one.”
Nadia wound the Audi through the campus of Silvaig University and parked in front of the main building, in a bay reserved for the vice-chancellor. She glanced at Angus and shrugged. “What? We’re on important police business.”
“I didn’t say anything,” he replied, climbing from the car. The university towered over him, a huge Gothic pile with elongated arched windows, gargoyles, and flying buttresses.
“This way,” he said, leading Nadia towards a side entrance that opened onto the cloisters and the west quadrangle. An ancient oak grew in the middle of the quadrangle—a tree of knowledge in Celtic mythology according to Gills. Fitting for a university, then.
“This place reminds me of Glasgow Uni,” Nadia said wistfully.
“Do you ever wish you’d finished medical school?” he asked.
She gave a bitter laugh. “Every day. But you know why I couldn’t.”
“Aye, I know,” he replied.
Their eyes met briefly, and he felt that old, instinctive sense of understanding flow between them. He glanced away, embarrassed. “The lecture hall’s over there,” he said, pointing to a small arched doorway in the corner of the quadrangle.
They walked towards the door, climbed a flight of dusty steps, and slipped into the lecture theatre. The tiered seating was almost empty, a group of thirty or so exchange students occupying the first few rows. Gills leaned casually against a lectern, a large screen behind his head. He wore a loose-fitting tweed suit, and his white hair stuck up at all angles. Angus lowered himself into a seat in the back row, Nadia next to him. Gills’s voice carried to the back of the lecture hall, his strong Highland brogue rich with humour.
“When Saint Columba landed on Iona’s sandy shores in AD 563, he stepped into a pagan world controlled by fearsome monsters and wrathful deities,” Gills intoned. “The druids—a learned caste of priests, teachers, and judges—held sway. Their rigorous training lasted twenty years, and covered everything from natural philosophy and astrology, to ancient verse and divination. They were the conduits to the gods, of which there were many.
“In this world, magic was real and to be mollaichte—cursed—was greatly feared. Shape-shifting was unquestioned. Seals were the souls of people drowned at sea. Crows were messengers from the otherworld. Deer and hares were fairy women in disguise. Lochs were populated by human-eating water horses, and the sea by giant serpents. The shore, in particular, was a dangerous, liminal place, where the known and unknown worlds collided. It was the haunt of the nuckelavee, a skinless half-man, half-horse creature with black blood squirming through its veins. Lonely waterfalls were plagued by glaistigs and brownies. Mountains were the abodes of giants. Rocks contained the souls of our ancestors. Trees were sacred. Caves were entrances to the underworld.”
Gills began pacing in front of the students, smiling amiably. “I’m sure much of this resonates with German mythology, and the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Take, for example, changelings: Highland folklore is full of stories about babies, and sometimes adults, being inhabited by entities from the Gaelic otherworld, usually elves and fairies. Some academics have argued that this changeling motif developed amongst rural societies as a way to discuss mental illness. Even today people considered mad are said to be away with the fairies. Stripped of its supernatural associations, a changeling becomes a euphemism for a mentally handicapped person. However, in the Victorian era, there developed a strand of academic thought that posited that fairy possession was real in the truest sense: that certain entities could inhabit the minds of people and compel them to act in certain ways. In many different cultures, these entities would be equated with demons and aligned with the devil, which owes much to the burgeoning influence of Christianity.
“However, before the first missionaries arrived, these fairies and elves would have been nature deities worshipped by the native tribes. An echo of this remains in the name of the river that flows through Glasgow—the Clyde—named after the goddess Clota. Trees, lochs, mountains, as well as rivers, would all be associated with specific deities. Highland fairies are a folk memory of these old gods, denuded of their power by Christianity, stripped of their associations, until we are left with nothing but the slightly absurd creatures we know today.”
Gills ambled across to a laptop and tapped a key. The screen behind him sprang to life, revealing costumed figures dancing around a bonfire. The word “Samhain” was written above the flames. “Who can tell me what this word refers to?”
A goth girl in the front row raised her hand. “Samhain is the pagan festival that spawned Halloween,” she said in German-accented English.
“You’re quite right, my dear, although to be pedantic, it’s pronounced sow-een, or sow-in. The festival ushers in the dark half of the year, when the veil between our world and the otherworld is at its thinnest. On this date, the dead are free to roam between the physical and spiritual realms, as are a whole gamut of supernatural beings. Perhaps most fearsome was a fairy host known as the Sluagh, or the Unforgiven Dead. They were said to come from the west, often appearing as a flock of starlings.”
Gills tapped a key, and the picture changed to that of a hideous old crone with blue-tinged skin, rust-red teeth, and one eye. She carried a staff and rode on the back of a wolf.
“Wolves played a prominent role in the Celts’ belief system,” Gills said. “In the Highlands, they were associated with one figure in particular—this fearsome crone behind me. She is known as the Cailleach, a name derived from Old Irish and meaning ‘the veiled one,’ although to modern Gaelic speakers it translates simply as ‘old woman’ or ‘hag.’ She is the oldest goddess we have, perhaps worshipped by the first settlers who wandered to the frozen north after the retreat of the polar ice caps. She is also an expression of the crone archetype found throughout world cultures, such as the Slavic witch Baba Yaga, who is crone guardian to the otherworld, or the cave-dwelling Black Annis from English folklore who eats children, or the Inuit Mistress of Life and Death, Sedna, or the Egyptian funerary goddess, Nephthys.
“The crone guardian is one of countless mythologies common across ancient religions—a universality that should make us modern humans wonder whether our ancient, primitive—savage, even!—ancestors knew things we have forgotten. Alas, I digress. . . .”
Memories flitted through Angus’s head like the starlings in Gills’s lecture, dark shapes he refused to give colour to. He would not go back there.
“Like your Germanic god Woden, the Cailleach goes by many names—Beira, Queen of Winter, the Thunder Hag, and the Bone Mother, to name but a few. She is a complex deity, a creator goddess who fashioned the mountains and glens of Scotland, and a protector of deer. But she is also wrathful—a bringer of storms, destruction, and death. Samhain, ladies and gents, is the Celtic new year. It celebrates the arrival of the Cailleach to rule over the winter months. Sacrifices would have been made in her honour, fires lit, and rituals enacted.”
