The Chessmen Read Online Free PDF Page B

explosions sitting in water now where the inferior loch had burst its banks and flooded the lower reaches. Above that, beyond the giant slug trail through the peat, lay the simmering black hole left by the empty loch. It looked even more unnatural from the air, like the cavity left by a dental extraction.
    The plane at the bottom of it, starkly visible in its final resting place among the rocks, seemed unreasonably small.
    The pilot circled the valley looking for a place to set the chopper down, before finally deciding on the relatively flat and stable shelf above the loch where Whistler and Fin hadsheltered from the storm. It was a soft landing among the high grasses, the broken mounds of ancient beehive dwellings all around, and when the rotors finally came to a stop, they all jumped down to look out over the gaping hollow of the valley below.
    It was late afternoon by now. The sun was well up in the sky and tipping gently to the west, creating a subtle change in the angle and direction of the shadows in the valley. They had come equipped with boots and waders and stout sticks, and Fin led them down the same way that he and Whistler had gone that morning, carefully picking their way over rocks that had dried in the warmth of the sun, the surface of the peat at the bottom of the loch already starting to crust and crack.
    There was not a breath of wind down here, and the midges clustered around them, getting into their hair and their clothes, biting, biting, biting, like myriad needles piercing their skin, not painful exactly, but irritating almost beyond endurance.
    ‘For Christ’s sake, did no one think to bring any bloody repellent?’ Professor Wilson glared at Gunn as if it were his fault. His face was red with irritation and exertion, his unruly copper beard exploding from it like wire bursting through its cable sheathing. A frizzy halo of ginger grew around a head that was otherwise bald across the top, white and splattered with big brown freckles. He slapped at it with open hands. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’
    But by the time Fin had given him a hand up on to the nearside wing, he had forgotten about the midge clouds,and was absorbed by the scene that confronted them. His eyes darted about, taking in every visible detail of the plane, before slipping on a pair of latex gloves and pulling open the door to the cockpit. Even he, used as he was to the multifarious perfumes of post-mortem, recoiled from the smell that struck them almost like a physical blow. In the enclosed space of the cockpit, baking as it had been for hours now in the sun, the rate of decomposition had accelerated, catching up on seventeen lost years. The smell was much worse than when Fin and Whistler had opened it up that morning.
    ‘We’re going to need to get him back to Stornoway double quick, or we’re going to lose what’s left of him,’ the professor said. ‘Let’s make this as fast as we can.’ He clambered carefully over the roof of the cockpit to the far wing and tried to open the door at the pilot’s side. It was stuck fast. Fin and Gunn scrambled over after him, and between them managed to prise it open. They moved back, then, to give the pathologist access to the corpse.
    It was a grim sight, the mostly decayed body still fully dressed, the natural fibres of the clothes having survived better in the cold water than the flesh of the dead man.
    Professor Wilson opened up the jacket to reveal a white T-shirt beneath it bearing a Grateful Dead logo. ‘Dead he certainly is, but I doubt if he’s very grateful.’ He pulled up the T-shirt to expose the cheesy white tissue still clinging to the fatty areas of the torso. He explored the mush with fingers that simply disappeared into it. ‘Adipocere,’ he said, apparently undisturbed. ‘There’ll be more of that aroundhis thighs and buttocks, but the internal organs’ll be long gone I think.’
    He moved the head very carefully to one side, revealing the bones of the spinal column at