The Lewis Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the skull to remove the brain. When he went back in, the professor was examining it in a stainless-steel bowl.
    ‘Yes … as I thought. Here …’ He poked at it with his finger. ‘Cystic encephalomalacia of the left frontal lobe.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘Meaning, my friend, that this poor bugger didn’t have much bloody luck. He had some kind of head injury that damaged the left frontal lobe, and probably left him … how can I put it … one sandwich short of a picnic?’
    He returned to the skull, and with a delicate scraping of his scalpel, pared away the film of tissue growing over the metal plate.
    ‘If I’m not mistaken, this is tantalum.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘A highly corrosion-resistant metal pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century in cranioplasty. Quite often used during the Second World War to repair shrapnel wounds.’ He leaned closer in as he scraped deeper into the metal. ‘Highly biocompatible, but tended to produce terrible headaches. Something to do with electroconductivity, I think. The development of plastics in the sixties superseded it. Now it’s used mainly in electronics. Aha!’
    ‘What?’ Gunn overcame his natural reticence to get even closer.
    But Professor Mulgrew simply turned away to rummage in his pathologist’s toolkit, which sat up on the counter beside the sink. He returned with a three-inch-square magnifying glass which he held between thumb and forefinger to hover it over the tantalum plate.
    ‘Thought so.’ There was a hint of triumphalism.
    ‘Thought what?’ Gunn’s frustration was evident in his voice.
    ‘The manufacturers of these plates often engraved them with serial numbers. And in this case a bloody date.’ He stepped back, inviting Gunn to take a look.
    Gunn took the magnifying glass and held it gingerly above the skull, screwing up his face as he leaned in close to see for himself. Beneath a ten-digit serial number were the Roman numerals MCMLIV.
    The pathologist beamed. ‘That’s 1954 in case you hadn’t worked it out. About two years before he had his Elvis tattoo. And judging by the amount of tissue growth, three years, maybe four, before he was murdered on the beach.’

SIX
     
    At first Fin was completely disorientated. There was an intermittent beating in his ears above the sound of wind and water. He was hot, sweating profusely beneath the covers, but his face and hands were cold. A strange blue light permeated the brightness that dazzled him when he opened his eyes. It took a full thirty seconds before he remembered where he was, and saw the white lining of his tent breathing erratically in and out like a runner gasping for air at the end of a race. All around him was a shambles of clothes, a half-unpacked canvas satchel, his laptop, and a scattering of papers.
    In the failing light he had chosen a patch of ground which had seemed relatively flat for the pitching of his two-man tent. But now he realized that it sloped with the land down towards the cliffs and the sea beyond. He sat upright, listening for a moment to the guy ropes creaking and straining at their pegs, then slipped out of his sleeping bag and into some fresh clothes.
    Daylight blinded him as he unzipped the outer shell and crawled on to the hill. There had been rain during the night, but already the wind had dried the grass. He sat in it, barefoot, pulling on his socks, and screwing up his eyes against the glare of sunlight on the ocean, a burned-out ring of luminescence that flared briefly before the gap in the clouds above it closed, like turning off a light switch. He sat, knees pulled up to his chest, forearms resting on top of them, and breathed the salt air, and smelled peat smoke and damp earth. The wind tugging at his short, fair curls stung his face and sent a wonderful sense surging through him of simply being alive.
    He looked back over his left shoulder and saw the ruins of his parents’ crofthouse, an old whitehouse, and beyond it the remains of the