The Black Loch

by Peter May

Genres: Mystery; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

THE RETURN OF FIN MACLEOD, PETER MAY'S MUCH-LOVED HERO OF THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING LEWIS TRILOGY.

A MURDER

The body of eighteen-year-old TV personality Kathleen is found abandoned on a remote beach at the head of An Loch Dubh - the Black Loch - on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. A swimmer and canoeist, it is inconceivable that she could have drowned.

A SECRET

Fin Macleod left the island ten years earlier to escape its memories. When he learns that his married son Fionnlagh had been having a clandestine affair with the dead girl and is suspected of her murder, he and Marsaili return to try and clear his name.

A TRAP

But nothing is as it seems, and the truth of the murder lies in a past that Fin would rather forget, and a tragedy at the cages of a salmon farm on East Loch Roag, where the tense climax of the story finds its resolution.

Release date: September 12, 2024

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

PROLOGUE

The sun set some time ago. Although it is not yet dark enough, somehow, for murder.

The east side of the island lies in dusky purple shadow, with the rising of the moon still hours away. But what little light remains in the sky is reflected pale and pink upon the unusually still waters of An Loch Dubh, making silhouettes of the man and woman as they run from the house. For more than an hour, only the single lit pane of a downstairs window has broken the twilight, seeming to flicker feebly, like a candle, in its fight against the smothering half-­light.

It burns still as the figures flee the hulking shadow of the house that stands black against the sky. And the silence of the night is breached only by the sigh of the sea loch surging between headlands to drown the tiny sandy beach below at high tide.

Out across the clifftops they run, oblivious to the phosphorescence of salt water breaking white against the rocks thirty feet beneath them, the sound of it masking the shouted words exchanged. Until he reaches her with longer strides and catches her arm, turning her towards him. Then the shrillness of her voice rises into the night. Words lost, but meaning clear. He takes her other arm and shakes her. She tears it free and swings an open palm towards his face. The force of its impact is discernible in the sudden turn of his head.

 

There is a moment, then. A hiatus that might have lasted half a second or a whole lifetime. Before he lifts a hand to strike her back. She staggers away, caught either by surprise or by the strength of the blow, half ­turning and losing her footing as she does. It is almost possible to feel his panic as he lunges forward to try to catch her. But she escapes his grasp, as elusive as redemption, and topples sideways from the cliff, spinning into the night to vanish beyond an outcrop of black, Lewisian gneiss. The oldest rock on earth, witness to the snuffing out of a life, like the briefest flare of a match struck in the darkness of eternity.

 

CHAPTER ONE

I.

It was early. The exceptional spell of warm, still weather had brought tourists and midges in almost equal number to this island off an island on the north-­west coast of the most north-­westerly outpost of the European continent. The voices of children rang out in the bright, clear morning, tiny footprints left in wet sand. A shouted warning rose above the rush of the sea, as parents laden with folding chairs and rugs and a hamper hurried down the tiny single-­track road towards the shore. But a solitary, sharp scream sent back fear like an arrow, and everything was dropped, sand flying in the wake of swift feet as they sprinted towards the water’s edge.

The children were standing either side of a human shape lifting and falling only slightly on the ebb and flow of the sea, hair fanned out like seaweed in the sand. The young woman stared up into a sky reflected in the blue of her wide-­open eyes. A pretty face, but bruised on the left side, the blood leached from a gash on her cheek by seawater. Her T-­shirt was torn, ripped away at the neck, one breast exposed. She was barefoot, white panties shredded in bloodstained ribbons.

 

One of the children turned a pale face towards her parents, the death of innocence already apparent in dark eyes. And in a tiny voice said, ‘Will she be alright?’

II.

George Gunn folded his jacket and laid it carefully on the driver’s seat before swinging the door shut. It was not gone nine-­thirty, and yet the morning sun was already hot. He clipped his Motorola Airwave to his belt and folded up each sleeve of his blue shirt to just a fraction below the elbow.

‘It’s going to be another hot one, George.’ Detective Constable Louise McNish appeared pleased by the prospect.

Gunn grunted and glowered at her across the roof of the car. He preferred the wind blowing in off the sea, the sting of rain in his face. All a matter, he supposed, of what you were used to. McNish, a good twenty years his junior, was a mainlander. From the soft south. Sometimes known as Glasgow. They ran for cover at the first sign of real rain there. He turned his gaze towards the shore.

From the gravel parking area above the beach he saw the black rock exposed at low tide breaking through a skin of sand, high tide delineated by the seaweed it had left behind in wavy lines. The smell of it carried on the breeze, salty and familiar. Next to a white Nissan X-­Trail, the ambulance was parked almost on the sand itself, the flashing of its blue light nearly lost in the brilliance of this late August sunshine. A woman crouched at the tideline, leaning over a figure that lay prone on the gentle shelving of the sand. A uniformed police officer and two ambulance men stood watching

Death seemed particularly inappropriate on such a morning.

 

Gunn picked his way across the beach, Louise following in his wake, black boots leaving deep treads in soft sand. The uniform nodded acknowledgement and stepped aside. The doctor looked up from the body. Fair hair dragged back and held out of her face by clasps. A strong face, pale, without make-­up. She looked weary. ‘Just a lassie,’ she said.

Gunn let his eyes fall to the body and felt something turn over in his stomach. He knew this girl. Not personally. But her face was very familiar. A striking face, full lips that he had seen often parted in laughter. Her long silken chestnut hair lay tangled among the seaweed, blue eyes gazing up at him, almost in accusation. He knew, of course, that was just in his mind. The guilt he always felt when confronted by a death he had not been there to stop. He closed his eyes. What was her name again?

‘Caitlin Black, Detective Sergeant,’ the doctor said, as though she had overheard his thought.

Gunn nodded. Yes, he remembered now. He opened his eyes and ran them over the familiar contours of her face, taking in the bruising below her left eye and the gash on her right cheek. ‘How did she die, Sam?’

 

Dr Samantha Blair had been on the island for a full year now, filling a vacancy at the GP practice in Stornoway, and bringing the invaluable expertise of three years working as a pathologist’s assistant in Aberdeen. The powers that be in Church Street had immediately enlisted her services as police surgeon. In that capacity she had attended suicides and accidental deaths. But it seemed as though this might be her first murder. ‘Violently,’ she said. ‘Much of the contusion you can see, the abrasions about her body and the wound on her face, occurred ante-­mortem.’ She pursed her lips. ‘And she may well have been raped. Quite brutally.’ She tugged at the girl’s torn T-­shirt, drying now in the sunshine. ‘Ripped nearly off her. Panties torn. Vaginal damage.’

‘Cause of death?’

Sam shrugged. ‘Impossible to say. Could have been a blow to the head. She might have drowned. Her lungs are filled with water, though that doesn’t mean anything. It’ll take an autopsy to establish exactly how she died.’ She stood up now, stretching stiffened muscles. ‘I’ll take a vaginal swab for DNA. If there’s semen there it’ll give us a clue to the identity of the rapist, who is probably also her killer.’ She sighed. ‘It’ll be a few days, though, before we get results back from the lab.’

All Gunn could hear were the cries of gulls flying around the cliffs where they nested, the sound of the sea as the retreating tide sucked it out once more into the Black Loch. Sunlight fell, sparkling like jewels, on the surface of the

water, and beyond the headland he saw a gannet diving for fish somewhere out on East Loch Roag. Life continuing as it had since the beginning of time on this convergence of the Atlantic Ocean and the north-­western fringe of the European landmass. But not for this poor dead girl at his feet.

 

And he knew that all this would still be here when he, too, was gone. He had been resisting retirement, despite the pleading of his wife, with the sense that it would only accelerate him towards an end he had resolutely refused to acknowledge all his life. An end that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. He let his eyes fall again to the lifeless form of Caitlin Black at his feet and felt reproached for surviving this long when someone so young had not. Someone with everything to live for.

Sam dropped again to her hunkers, and her voice dragged him away from his reverie. ‘You should look at this, George.’

He blinked and refocused, crouching beside her as she began carefully to part the girl’s salt-­crusted hair. The ends of a fine gold chain, irretrievably tangled among the individual hairs, caught the sunlight. The doctor turned the dead girl’s head to one side and revealed a small shiny gold object nestled behind her left ear. It was still attached to the broken chain. Gunn frowned and peered at it more closely.

‘What is it?’

‘A pendant of some kind.’ It was round, the same gold as the chain, and cut in the shape of an eye, with a virulent blue stone set at its centre like an iris. ‘A sapphire, I think.’

Gunn looked at her, surprised. ‘Real?’

 

She shrugged. ‘Beyond my field of expertise. You’ll need to ask a jeweller.’

‘Hers, do you think?’

‘Could be.’

Gunn reached around to the back pocket of his trousers for his Samsung phone. It was what they issued them now, a replacement for the traditional police officer’s black notebook. Officially known, prosaically, as a Mobile Handheld Device. Unlike the old notebooks, you could take photographs with it, record statements, type in reports and send them wirelessly. Gunn hated it. He fumbled to activate its camera function. Louise leaned over and tapped the screen. ‘Just swipe up now, George.’

He snatched it away from her in annoyance. ‘I know how to use it!’

An image of the girl lying in the sand flickered on to his screen. He took several photographs before asking the doctor to part the hair again so that he could get a

 close-­up of the pendant. He stood up, heard a crack in his knee and felt a twinge of pain in his lower back. ‘Anyone know where she lives? How she got here?’

The uniform was eager to help. A young constable, not long out of probation. ‘When I first arrived,’ he said, ‘there was a woman at that house over there.’ He waved a hand vaguely towards the far side of the beach. ‘She said there was a light on all night at the house on the cliffs.’ And he turned to point almost directly overhead. Black rock rose twenty-­five feet into the blue of the sky, and the gable ends and pointed dormers of a white-­painted cottage with slate roof broke the skyline.

 

III.

Gunn was out of breath and trailing several paces behind his younger colleague by the time he and Louise had climbed the single-­track road to the top of the cliffs. And he was glad of the stiffening breeze that blew in off the loch up here, cooling the heat in pink cheeks and providing much needed oxygen for toiling lungs.

The cottage was bigger than it appeared from below. An outbuilding attached itself at right angles to the far gable, creating a sheltered semi-­courtyard behind the house. A vehicle gate stood open, but the pedestrian gate was jammed shut, and Gunn and Louise had to pick their way across a cattle grid.

The chippings that had once covered the courtyard were mostly lost in mud baked hard by the recent unaccustomed dry spell. The house itself had seen better days, whitewash peeling from roughcast walls, weeds growing in profusion around the step at the back door. A battered old lime green Ford Fiesta stood parked by the outbuilding.

Gunn stopped to take a photograph of it before approaching the vehicle. He pulled on latex gloves to open the driver’s door. The interior of the car was faded and tashed, and Gunn was struck by the smell of damp fighting for ascendancy over the scent of stale perfume and the musty odour of wet dog. He stooped to pick a lipstick holder from a mud-­caked rubber mat on the floor. Fuchsia pink. He placed it carefully on the worn seat cover and glanced in the back. Half a dozen dog-­eared fashion magazines were strewn across the back seat and liberally covered by muddy paw prints

 He closed the door and rounded the car to the passenger side, where he sat in to open the glove box. Sweet wrappers and empty packs of chewing gum fell out, along with the other detritus of a teenage girl’s life. A broken mascara brush. A dried-­up bottle of pale blue nail varnish. Right at the back was an owner’s manual, water-­stained and tattered. Gunn leaned over to riffle through the stuff that had fallen out, and a short plastic wand about six inches long, pink at one end, white at the other, caught his attention. He picked it up. A small rectangular window at the white end displayed two short parallel red lines.

 

A shadow fell through the open door and he turned to see Louise leaning in for a closer look.

He said, ‘Is this what I think it is?’

She bent down to retrieve an empty cardboard box from the floor and held it up. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s not a Covid test.’

‘Jesus!’ The oath slipped from his lips in a pained whisper. Somehow, this only made it worse. He pulled himself together and photographed both items before slipping them into a clear plastic evidence bag and sealing it shut. He slid out into the warmth of the sun again. ‘Check out the perimeter of the house, Louise. And follow that path out to the far end of the headland. If there’s anything kicking about out there, we want to retrieve it before the wind gets up.’ He turned to cast his eye over the back of the house, windows almost opaque with dirt and masking the gloom beyond. ‘I’ll take a look inside.’

 

The house was cool, thick stone walls defying the best efforts of the sun to penetrate its inner chill. There was a lingering hint of dampness in the air, and yet a sense of recent human presence. Something hard to define. Olfactory, perhaps. Bodies. Sweat. And something else. Alcohol, he realized, as he stepped from the gloom of a narrow hallway into the kitchen and saw a half-­empty bottle of white wine catching the light of the sun that angled through a front window. Two glasses stood beside the bottle on a stained worktop. One still with an inch of wine in the bottom of it, a smudge of fuchsia pink on its rim.

There were crumbs on the worktop, and Gunn flipped open a pedal bin to look down on the remains of a half-­eaten sandwich and its plastic wrapping among crumpled paper bags and napkins, and two empty wine bottles.

He crossed to the window and shaded his eyes from the sunlight to peer out. From here, the body and the little group of people attending to it down below were invisible. But he could see across to the far side of the bay where sunlight glinted off the bonnet of his car, and a woman was hanging up washing on a line outside a house on the hill above. He glanced at the ceiling and saw that the kitchen light was still on, although it would have been hard now to separate it from the wash of sunlight flooding the room

But it would surely have been visible at night from the house across the way, and he assumed that the woman hanging out the washing was probably the one who had reported it to the constable.

 

From the kitchen-­diner, he wandered back into the hall. A door opened off it into a small living room with vintage nineteen-­seventies wallpaper, faded and browned by years of peat smoke. The distinctive toasty odour of the peat lingered still, though who knew how long it was since a fire had burned in the grate?

Upstairs were two bedrooms, one either side of a small landing, separated by a tiny bathroom. In the room to his left, a lumpy old bed with wooden head-­ and footboards was covered with a frayed candlewick bedspread, dark blue, almost black, like a widow’s modesty. In stark contrast, the bed in the other room lay shamelessly naked, exposed by sheets flung aside to reveal the chaos of what looked to have been frenzied activity, depressions left by heads pressed into soft pillows. The room smelled of sex. There were stains on the sheets, and the evidence of long chestnut hair shed on white pillowcases.

Something caught Gunn’s eye on the floor, half­ hidden beneath the bed. He crouched down to see that it was a discarded credit card receipt. Standing up again, he crossed to the dormer. He tilted his head at an angle to see Louise coming back along the path from the headland, and took his Airwave from his belt to call her.

It was a couple of minutes before he heard her coming into the house and he shouted her up the stairs. She stepped into the bedroom and her eyes fell straight away on the bed. She turned to look at Gunn. He said, ‘We’re going to have to dust for prints, swab for DNA. And photograph everything here. Starting with this . . .’ And he crouched once more, this time to photograph the credit card receipt before lifting it between latex fingers to examine it more closely.

 

‘What is it?’ Louise said.

Gunn dropped it into an evidence bag. ‘Credit card receipt from the Co-­op in Stornoway. Probably for that half-­drunk bottle of wine sitting downstairs in the kitchen.’

 

Gunn left Louise on the beach watching as Caitlin Black was zipped carefully into a body bag, the impression she had left in the sand erased now by the incoming tide. Soon, any evidence that she had been there at all would be lost for ever, like her life itself.

The detective sergeant was perspiring freely by the time he had navigated the stony track

that led from the road up to the bungalow on the far side of the bay, stopping and fumbling to find a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. The woman was still at the washing line. Had she been there the whole time? He saw that she was taking things in now. Sheets, shirts, socks. All dropped into a brown plastic basket. He could believe that she had hung them up and taken them down half a dozen times in the last hour. Giving her a fine excuse to be out in the garden with an uninterrupted view of activities on the beach.

She looked guilty as he approached.

Gunn said, ‘Good morning, Mrs er . . .? ’

 

‘Caimbeul,’ she said, and wiped both hands down the front of her apron. She was a woman in her fifties. Her shiny smooth-­skinned face severely exposed by the silver-­grey hair pulled back from it and held in a neat bun behind her head.

Gunn nodded towards the beach. ‘Nice view.’

She glowered at him. ‘It is.’

‘That’s a lot of washing you’re doing today, Mrs Caimbeul.’

‘Profiting from the good Lord’s sunshine. Heaven knows, we don’t see that much of it.’

Gunn managed a grim smile. ‘Aye.’ And took out his warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant George Gunn,’ he said, holding it out towards her. ‘You’ll have seen the comings and goings down there, then.’

‘I have. They came up here to phone the police.’

‘Who did?’

‘The folk that found her. Tourists. English, of course. Their schools are still on holiday.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no mobile signal down there.’ And sighed. ‘The children were in a terrible state. A young policewoman drove them back to Stornoway. To take statements.’

Gunn nodded. ‘It was you that reported seeing a light on in the house over there all night?’

‘It was.’

‘Who owns it? The

 house.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that now. It used to be an elderly English gentleman. He came at Easter, and for a few weeks in the summer. But he died last year, so . . .’

 

Gunn waited for her to go on, and prompted her when she didn’t. ‘So . . .? ’

‘Anna Macpherson over at Breacleit used to clean for him. Before he came and after he left. So she’s probably still got a key.’ She folded her arms knowingly beneath ample bosoms. ‘I’ve no doubt that’s where they got it from.’

‘Who?’

‘Caitlin Black and her young man. They’ve been meeting there off and on all summer. No doubt they imagined that no one knew.’ She blew derision through mean lips and shook her head. ‘You can’t do anything around here, Mr Gunn, without someone knowing.’

‘Primarily you.’

If she thought to take offence, Gunn pre-­empted the mounting of her high horse by producing his Samsung. ‘Is this Caitlin?’ he said, and swiped an image he had taken of the dead girl across its screen.

She glanced at it, and her eyes opened wide. A hand flew to cover her mouth. ‘That’s her down there?’

Gunn nodded.

‘Oh, my God! The poor wee lassie.’

‘Caitlin Black?’ He didn’t want there to be any dubiety.

Mrs Caimbeul nodded mutely. She appeared to have trouble catching her breath. ‘Is she . . . is she dead?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

To Gunn’s discomfort, tears sprang unexpectedly to her eyes. ‘Her poor mother’ll be devastated.’

 

‘You know the family, then?’

‘There’s not a lot of us left here on Great Bernera, Sergeant. Everyone knows everyone.’

He returned the Samsung to his back pocket. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know who her young man was?’

Indignation forced its way past her tears. ‘Of course I do. I’ve seen him often enough at parent–teacher nights at the Nicolson.’

Gunn couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘He’s a teacher?’

‘Aye. And far too old for that lassie.’ She returned teary eyes to the beach. ‘That poor, poor girl.’

IV.

And still the good weather continued, as persistent as the summer rain that usually blew in off the Atlantic at the approach of autumn. All the way during the long drive up the west coast to Ness, Gunn sat silent in the passenger seat. Impervious to the sunshine. Wrapped in his own deep despond of gloom. He had been happy to let Louise drive, knowing that he would not be able to

concentrate on the road.

For most of the forty-­minute trek across the moor, he had gazed sightlessly through the windscreen, north and east, across its vast featureless expanse. The heather was already in bloom, an ocean of undulating purple that shimmered off into the uninhabited interior of the island, where at other times of the year blue flowering water forget-­me-­not would fill sodden hollows, and the yellow of marsh marigolds grew along roadside ditches.

 

Villages strung out like beads on a necklace lined the road north, fully exposed to the anger of the winter storms that blew across three thousand miles of ocean to vent their fury on a resolute coastline that reflected the character of those who lived there. Nothing grew, beyond a few stunted bushes, to offer any kind of protection. Trees here had an even more tenuous hold on the landscape than people. ...