The unforgiven dead, p.9
The Unforgiven Dead, page 9
A lump formed in his throat as the helicopter buzzed inland, over regimented swathes of pine forest, a patchwork of fields flecked with sheep, isolated crofts, and drab brown moorland. Thick clouds blanketed the islands to the west, but the chopper ranged north and was soon swallowed by mountain clefts. Great walls of stone towered around them, the rock callused and wrinkled like the face of an old crone, the streams gushing down the mountainside her wisps of hair.
As the helicopter swung low over the shoulder of the hillside, he spotted a large herd of red deer. Startled by the sound of the chopper, the deer were on the move, a brown mass that surged across the heather like a great beast. Perhaps, if James Chichester had his way, it would soon be wolves, not a helicopter, that spurred the herd on.
Nadia turned to him. “Tell me, Angus,” she said, fighting to be heard over the chopper’s rotors, “why are you still a constable?”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“You used to be so ambitious. This case is the type of thing we always talked about. Something big. Something that makes a difference. So why do I get the impression you’d rather be anywhere else? Is it because of me?”
Angus clamped a hand on his thigh to stop it vibrating. “No, no—it’s not you. I mean, it’s a surprise to see you, of course, but no, it’s not that. . . .”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“Folk change, Nadia. Priorities . . . wither away.”
She searched out his eyes. “Jeez, Angus. You always were a little distant, but since when did you become such a gloomy bawbag?”
The insult made him smile, as he knew she’d intended it to.
“Anyway,” she said, the mood lightened, “I forgot to ask, what does Teine Eigin mean? Gaelic, right?”
“Aye, it means ‘need fire’ and refers to a ritual performed at Beltane. In the old days, villagers would douse their hearth and relight it from a communal bonfire known as Teine Eigin, symbolically binding themselves to the community.”
“Right, and how long has the commune been here?”
“Not long. Couple of years. I remember it caused a bit of a stooshie at the time. We have a small but vocal Free Kirk in the village. The minister wasn’t too happy that pagans were moving in next door.”
Nadia returned her gaze to the window. “This is hardly next door. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Said like a proper city girl.”
From above, Teine Eigin looked like something out of Lord of the Rings—twenty or so dwellings huddled around the shores of Loch Dubh, surrounded by arable plots and linked by a network of paths. A crannog stretched on stilts out onto the loch with various small boats or coracles moored alongside. The whole community was encircled by what looked like a boundary wall, as if the inhabitants feared imminent attack from marauding clansmen.
Not that the pagans were a warlike lot. He’d occasionally spot them about the village, stocking up on provisions at Moira Anderson’s shop, or selling crafts at Highland Games and agricultural shows.
His stomach again lurched as the helicopter dropped. He saw people in the fields down tools, and others emerge from doorways, as the chopper descended onto a flat patch of moorland on the outskirts of the village. The thwump of the chopper’s rotor slowed, spluttered, then fell silent.
“Tourists would pay good money for that trip,” Nadia said, unbuckling her seat belt and hauling open the chopper door. She hopped down and Angus followed, glad to feel the soft moss and heather under his feet.
A knot of people stood at the edge of the commune, staring blank-faced at the chopper as if it were an alien spacecraft.
“They don’t look too welcoming,” he said.
“You’ll just have to use that famous Angus MacNeil charm on them, then.”
He answered her sarcasm with a cool glance. She brushed past him and picked her way through the hummocky heather and mountain grass. He followed, careful to avoid the peaty pools of water. The last thing he needed was to fall in a bog.
As they neared the villagers, he clocked a huge man with a bald head and bushy ginger beard. He stood a good foot taller than the others and looked like a giant out of one of Gills’s Highland folktales. However, it was an athletic woman with braided hair who stepped forward to greet them. She was in her mid-thirties, with the tanned, leathery skin of someone accustomed to outdoor work. Although it was freezing, she wore a vest top, her bare arms covered in swirling Celtic tattoos that reminded him of the symbol Faye had sketched in her art pads.
The woman eyed them with suspicion as Nadia took out her police ID.
“I’m DI Sharif, and this is Constable MacNeil,” she said, brandishing the ID. “Are you in charge here?”
The woman gave a curt nod.
“And you are . . . ?”
“Chris . . . Chris Kelbie,” came her reluctant reply. Her accent was odd—local, Angus thought, but with a foreign inflection. Scandinavian, perhaps?
“Is there somewhere we can talk, Miss Kelbie?” Nadia asked. “It’s important.”
“Must be, for you to come all the way up here in a helicopter.”
Kelbie turned abruptly on the heel of her mud-caked boot. Her braids whipped out behind her head. “This way.”
The rest of the villagers parted for Kelbie, who led them into the commune. Angus felt as if he were stepping back in time. A dirt path meandered through the village, past ramshackle dwellings thrown together using stone, wood, and corrugated iron. Some had thatched roofs, others turf. Many were painted in bright colours, the walls covered in arcane symbols or depictions of deities and animals. Swags of rowan and juniper hung over doorways, whilst garlands of pine cones and twigs twisted into stars and crude figures looped from under thatch roofs. Smoke puttered from the chimneys and the smell of peat hung in the air, undercut with something acrid, like charred timber. Somewhere, he heard the manic bray of a donkey.
He glanced over his shoulder and found the residents following a couple of meters behind. He couldn’t help thinking of The Wicker Man, and Ed Woodward screaming as the flames engulfed his tomb in the final act of the movie. He tried to ignore the cold bead of sweat trickling down his spine.
It struck him that he was already lost. From above, the commune appeared small, but down here, amongst the higgledy-piggledy houses, it felt enclosed. He was glad when they emerged from the maze of houses into an open area near the loch, dominated by a stone circle. There were perhaps twelve standing stones in total, rough granite slabs, each seven or eight feet tall, forming a circle about twenty meters in diameter. There was something eerie about the stones, as if they were a council of elders formed to pass judgment on some unfortunate soul.
In the centre, he noted a large burnt patch where a bonfire had recently stood. Probably lit during the Samhain celebration that Faye had attended.
His eyes darted around the stone circle. He sensed the girl’s presence in the prickling of the hair on his forearms, but she was nowhere to be seen. That sense of being watched lingered as he followed Kelbie and Nadia onto the wooden walkway that led to the crannog on the loch. At last, the snow that had been threatening all day began to fall, light flakes that landed on his cheeks and forehead like cold kisses of the dead. Beneath his feet, the dark water of the loch lapped against the wooden stilts on which the crannog stood. At the end of the walkway was a timber-built roundhouse with a conical thatched roof. A stag’s skull leered down at him from above the entrance. Its eyes were dark pits, and a row of yellow teeth were set in a malevolent grin.
Angus’s legs felt suddenly weak, as if he’d reached the end of a hard shinty match. He hauled himself along the walkway, and stumbled after Nadia through a small doorway. It took his eyes a second to adjust to the gloom. The space was divided up with wattle-and-daub walls, but the room he was in was surprisingly spacious, kitted out with mismatched furniture, a long rustic table, and macabre wood carvings. One wall was dominated by a bookcase, crammed with titles, some of which he recognised from Gills’s library—The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, The Mabinogion, Carmina Gadelica, The Secret Commonwealth. His fingers twitched, as if recalling the texture of the books’ spines.
“Do you know why we’re here, Miss Kelbie?” Nadia asked.
Kelbie gestured for them to sit. “No, but I imagine we’re being blamed for something.”
Angus slid out his notebook and lowered himself down next to Nadia on a tattered sofa.
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
Kelbie sat opposite them on a chaise that looked as if it had been rescued from a skip. “Past experience.” She sighed.
Angus waited for Kelbie to elaborate, but she folded her arms and clamped her lips shut.
“So, you haven’t heard the news?” Nadia asked.
“We’re kind of remote up here. No Wi-Fi, no mobile connection. No TV. Look, what’s happened?”
Nadia’s eyes, he noticed, never left Kelbie’s face. “We’re investigating a murder.”
For the first time, he saw a flicker of apprehension in Kelbie’s gaze.
“What, like a cold case or something?”
“No, recent. Last night, in fact.”
The tightness in Kelbie’s bearing seemed to loosen.
“Well, no one here can have anything to do with that. It was Samhain last night. The biggest night of our year. We were all here.”
“Yes, I know. We believe the victim attended the festivities. Her body was found on a beach this morning.”
Kelbie picked at the blistered welt of the chaise, a dawning realization in her eyes. “The only nonresident here last night was Faye.”
Nadia gave the briefest of nods. For a long second, Kelbie sat in stunned silence. Her braids hung over her face like rough cords. Was this woman really capable of such brutality? Physically, yes—her arms were knotted with muscle, like a boxer’s. There was anger in Kelbie too, that much had been evident in the hostile reception he and Nadia had received. But you needed more than anger to kill a girl like that. You needed fury, or a belief in the righteousness of the act.
“What time did she arrive?” Nadia asked gently.
Kelbie flicked the braids away from her face. Her eyes were glassy. “Must have been around half ten. Made quite an entrance on her horse.”
“How long did she stay?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I had quite a bit to drink. We all did. She was definitely here at midnight, though.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We had a countdown, like you do at Hogmanay. I remember her dancing around the fire. . . . Wait—”
Kelbie sprang to her feet and walked to the bookcase. She hauled open a drawer, but rather than a book she slid out a thin tablet. “Rhiannon took some video footage on my iPad around that time. We have a Facebook page. Every so often someone takes a run into Silvaig to update content at an internet café.”
She crouched next to them and tapped play on the iPad. Her strong-boned features were bathed in light from the screen. Her eyes, Angus noticed, were now dry. The sound of guitar and fiddle blared from the device, accompanied by the tribal rap of a bodhrán drum and whoops from costumed figures dancing in front of a large bonfire. The flames spat twenty feet into the sky, casting an eerie glow on the crannog and loch in the background as the revellers weaved in and out of the standing stones. Sparks floated above their heads like fireflies. Three musicians sat to the right of the fire on a large log, the bodhrán player’s arm a blur as he beat out the rhythm. Angus recognised him as the giant from earlier. His face and bald head were painted with blue woad, a stark contrast to his orange beard. Round his neck dangled a gold torc that shimmered in the firelight. Beside him, the fiddle player’s elbow jerked like a butcher sawing bone as she cut out the tune. Her face was painted metallic silver and crisscrossed with lines of black symbols and runes. Blond plaits of hair curled down her shoulders from under a headdress of leaves and branches. Completing the sinister triumvirate was a guitarist, his face half-covered by a demon mask with ram’s horns. The black pupils behind the mask looked dilated. His skin was painted red and his lips were twisted into a rictus grin.
“That’s Howie, Hazel, and Glen,” Kelbie said.
The camera then swung around the scene, before resting on the revellers who pranced and spun around the flames.
“That’s me,” Kelbie said, pointing to a figure wearing a headdress of gold leaves. Her face was painted green. Shimmering gold lipstick and eye shadow highlighted the whiteness of her eyes. Her arms and midriff were bare, with strips of leather covering her breasts and hips, as if she were enwrapped in tree roots. A swirling mass of tattoos seemed to writhe around her body. As she spun past the camera, Angus thought he saw that same triple-spiral symbol Faye had drawn in her sketch pads etched onto the small of Kelbie’s back. He looked up and found the woman watching him with cold, feral eyes. Almost immediately her expression softened.
He returned his eyes to the iPad, his heart beating quicker now, almost in time to the bodhrán.
Kelbie twirled away, powerful and terrifying, and soon Faye came into the shot. She was equally distinctive in her long green cloak. She danced gracefully around the fire, outstretched arms making sinuous loops and spirals in the air.
“We’ll need to know the names of all these people,” Nadia said. “And we’ll need to speak to them.”
Kelbie nodded, but her brow was knitted.
“What’s up?” Nadia asked.
“It’s probably nothing—”
Kelbie’s eyes were still on the dancers.
“This guy here,” she said, “appears to be dressed as Donn Fírinne, the Dark One—a god of death. But I don’t know who’s behind the mask.”
Angus squinted at the screen, a chill creeping across his shoulder blades. The figure Kelbie indicated wore a long black cloak and a deer-skull mask like the creature from his vision. It lurched around the bonfire behind Faye, its movements jerky, discordant, somehow inhuman.
“We spend a lot of time on our costumes for Samhain, Detective,” Kelbie said. “They mean something to us. No one was wearing this costume. And they couldn’t have been here earlier in the night, or I’d have noticed.”
“But I thought you said Faye was the only nonresident to attend?”
Kelbie tugged her eyes away from the screen. “Aye, she was . . . although we did have an unwanted visitor earlier in the evening.”
He stared at Kelbie, willing her to talk, his pen poised over a page of his notebook.
“That Free Kirk minister who hates us,” she said.
“Reverend MacVannin. He was here?” Angus asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.
“Aye. He started raving at us. All the usual stuff—how we were heathens who were going to burn in Hell for all eternity.”
“What did you do?”
“I calmly asked him to leave.”
“And he did?”
Kelbie offered a ghost of a smile. “Howie is six three and built like a brick shithouse. It helps when you have him standing by your side.”
Nadia gave a slight chuckle. “Tell me, was Faye here when this altercation occurred?”
Kelbie sank down onto the chaise, the iPad held loosely in her hand. “Aye. Aye, she was. MacVannin grabbed her at one point. Told her there was still time to save her soul.”
Angus gave Nadia a sidelong glance. “What did she do?”
Kelbie’s eyes were hard as quartz.
“She laughed in his face.”
Chapter 13
Gills swung his 1967 baby-blue Ford Anglia down the Rhu peninsula. Loch nan Ceall flashed by in the driver’s-side window—a palette of blues, greys, and scuzzy whites, darkened by the snow clouds edging closer to landfall. His mind, though, was not on the scenery. He was thinking about DI Sharif. She seemed nice. Sharp too. And those eyes! He could see why Angus had fallen for her. He remembered him coming home from Tulliallan one weekend, unusually cheerful because he’d met a girl. Angus had had girlfriends before then, of course. Whenever there was a ceilidh at the village hall, he was always in high demand amongst the young woman as a partner for a Gay Gordons or Strip the Willow. But this girl had been different; Gills had read it in his smile. And in his eyes, which were so much like his mother’s, it hurt. His face had lit up when he talked about Nadia and that had made Gills happy. There had been too much darkness in Angus’s life.
He remembered, too, the black mood that had engulfed Angus when college was over. The lad had never spoken about that, but Gills had guessed its cause. Only a romance snuffed out could bring such despair. His biggest fear was that he was to blame—that Angus had decided what they were doing was too important to jeopardize, even for someone he loved. He’d been unable to drag Angus out of that dark place, but Ashleigh had succeeded where he’d failed. She had saved him.
Some nights Gills lay awake in bed as that guilt stalked his consciousness like a starving wolf. It hung at the fringe of his memories, a shadow tainting fond recollections. He would whisper Caitlin’s name into the still air on those hunted, insomniac nights, his mind’s eye conjuring up her face. Burnished copper irises. Dimpled cheeks. Smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and forehead. Full lips always on the verge of breaking into a smile. But then the idealized vision would blow away like dust. The sweet wild strawberries they’d feasted on that summer at Roshven turned putrid in his mouth. The sea stirred, the sensual calmness broken by something writhing, unseen, just below the surface. Flies and insects descended upon the picnic rug on which they’d sat. They crawled across the food and drowned in the elderflower wine she had made from swags of flowers plucked from the tree behind the Old Manse. Still he whispered her name until the image dissolved and he was left, lying in his bed, an old man with tears in his eyes and a foul aftertaste in his mouth.
