The Blackhouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

our conversation that morning marked the beginning of a competition between us for Marsaili’s affections that would last through all our schooldays, and beyond.

THREE
     
    I
     
    Fin had barely lifted his bag from the luggage carousel when a large hand grabbed the handle and took it from him. He turned, surprised, to find a big friendly face grinning at him. It was a round face, unlined, beneath thickly oiled black hair that grew into a widow’s peak. It belonged to a man in his early forties, broad built, but a little shorter than Fin’s six feet. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and blue tie, beneath a heavy, quilted, black anorak. He thrust another large hand into Fin’s. ‘DS George Gunn.’ He had an unmistakable Lewis accent. ‘Welcome to Stornoway, Mr Macleod.’
    ‘It’s Fin, George. How the hell did you know who I was?’
    ‘I can spot a cop at a hundred paces, Mr Macleod.’ He grinned, and as they stepped out to the car park said, ‘You’ll probably see a few changes.’ He leaned into the strong westerly and grinned again. ‘One thing that never changes, though. The wind. Never gets tired of blowing.’
    But today it was a benign wind with a soft edge to it, warmed by an August sun that burst periodically through broken cloud. Gunn turned his Volkswagen on to the roundabout at the gate to the airfield, and they drove up over the hill that took them down again to Oliver’s Brae. They took a right towards the town, and the conversation turned towards the murder.
    ‘First of the new millennium,’ Gunn said. ‘And we only had one in the whole of the twentieth century.’
    ‘Well, let’s hope this is the last of the twenty-first. Where are post-mortems usually held?’
    ‘Aberdeen. We have three police surgeons here on the island. All doctors from the group practice in town. Two of them are locum pathologists. They’ll examine the bodies of any sudden death, even carry out a post-mortem. But anything contentious goes straight off to Aberdeen. Forrester Hills.’
    ‘Wouldn’t Inverness be nearer?’
    ‘Aye, but the pathologist there doesn’t approve of our locums. He won’t do any post-mortems unless he does them all.’ Gunn flicked Fin a mischievous look. ‘But you didn’t hear that from me.’
    ‘Hear what?’
    Gunn’s face split into a smile that told Fin they had connected.
    As they headed down the long straight road towards Stornoway, Fin saw the town laid out before them, built around the shelter of the harbour and the tree-covered hill behind it. The glass and steel ferry terminal at the head of the new breakwater which had been built in the nineties looked to Fin like a flying saucer. Beyond it, the old pier seemed neglected. It gave him an odd jolt seeing the place again. From a distance it appeared almost exactly as he remembered it. Only the flying saucer was new. And no doubt it had brought a few aliens with it.
    They passed the yellow-painted former mills of Kenneth Mackenzie Limited, where millions of metres of homespun Harris tweed had once been stored on thousands of shelves awaiting export. An unfamiliar terrace of new houses led down to a big metal shed where government money financed the production of television programmes in Gaelic. Although it had been unfashionable in Fin’s day, the Gaelic language was now a multi-million-pound business. The schools even taught maths and history and other subjects through the medium of Gaelic. And these days it was hip to speak it.
    ‘They rebuilt Engebret’s a year or two ago,’ Gunn said as they passed a filling station and minimarket at a roundabout that Fin did not remember. ‘It’s even open on a Sunday. And you can get a drink or a meal most anywhere in town now on the Sabbath.’
    Fin shook his head in amazement.
    ‘And two flights from Edinburgh every Sunday. You can even get the ferry from Ullapool.’
    In Fin’s day the whole island shut down on a Sunday. It was impossible to eat out, or go for a drink, or buy