Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
For just a moment time stopped for Fin. Light poured in through arched windows. Colourful statues of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and winged angels bowed in prayer, cast long shadows across narrow wooden pews. Stars shone in a blue firmament painted in the dome above the altar, and the white-draped table itself was supported on the bows of a small boat.
Every hair on his arms, and the back of his neck, stood on end. For here was the church with the boat in it that Tormod had spoken of. He turned back towards the entrance.
“Excuse me.”
The old lady straightened up from her bucket. “Yes?”
“What’s the story of the boat beneath the altar? Do you know?”
She placed both hands behind her hips and arched herself backwards. “Aye,” she said. “It’s a wonderful tale. The church was built by the people themselves, you see. Quarried and dressed the stone, and carried the sand and all the materials up here on their backs. Devout souls they were. Every last one of them with a place in Heaven. No doubt of that.” She thrust her mop back into the bucket and leaned on its handle. “But it was the fishermen who paid for it. Offered to give the proceeds of one night’s catch towards the building of the church. Everyone prayed that night, and they came back with a record catch. £200, it was. A lot of money away back then. So the boat’s a kind of homage to those brave souls who risked the wrath of the sea for the Lord.”
Outside, Fin followed the gravel path around to the west side of the church and saw how the land fell away to the shore. Past the houses on the rise, and the headstones on the machair below, to a strip of beach glowing silver against the shallow turquoise waters of the bay. Just as Tormod had said.
Fin remembered a paragraph from the post-mortem report, which he had read only the night before in the flickering fluorescent light of his tent.
There is an oval, dark brown-black, apparent abraded contusion, measuring 5 x 2.5 centimetres, over the inferior aspect of the right patellar area. The surface skin is vaguely roughened and there are fine grains of silver sand in the superficial skin.
The pathologist had found fine silver sand in all the abrasions and contusions of the lower body. Not golden sand, as found on the beaches of Harris. But silver sand, as found here, down there, on what Tormod had called Charlie’s beach.
Fin focused on the crescent of silver that led the eye around the bay to a new breakwater at the south end, and wondered why he had called it Charlie’s beach.
Twenty-five
Twenty-five
“Who’s this?”
“It’s your grandson, Mr. Macdonald. Fionnlagh.”