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
“And that a homer called Donald John Gillies lived there.”
“Yes. With old Donald Seamus and his sister, Mary-Anne.”
Fin nodded thoughtfully. “Just the three of them?”
“No, Donald John had a brother.” Morag sheltered a fresh cigarette from the wind as she lit it. “Just trying to remember his name . . .” She got her cigarette going and blew out a long stream of smoke that vanished at the same moment it left her lips. “Peter,” she said at last. “Donald Peter. That was his name.” She laughed. “Everyone here’s called Donald. It’s your middle name that counts.” Then she shook her head sadly. “Poor Peter. A lovely boy he was. But not all there, if you know what I mean.”
And Fin knew then that he had found the place that Marsaili’s father had come from, and whose body it was they had dug out of the bog at Siader.
Twenty-nine
Twenty-nine
A strange calm had settled across the northern half of the Isle of Lewis. In contrast to the confusion of chaotic thoughts which had filled Fin’s mind on the long drive north.
He had not stopped once, except for the half-hour spent in Stornoway briefing George Gunn on what he had discovered. Gunn had listened in silence in the incident room. He had stood staring out over the roofs of the houses opposite, towards Lews Castle and the trees on the hill, the final sunshine of the day slanting down among the branches and lying in long pink strips across the slope. And he had said, “So the dead boy is Marsaili’s father’s brother.”
“Donald Peter Gillies.”
“Except that neither of them is really called Gillies. That’s just their homer names.”
Fin nodded acknowledgement.
“And we have no idea where they came from, or what their real names might be.”
After leaving Stornoway, Fin had thought about that on the drive across the Barvas moor, and through all the villages of the west coast. Siader, Galson, Dell, Cross. A blur of churches, each one a different denomination. Of DAF 2s and 3s, whitehouses, blackhouses, modern harled bungalows, braced all along the coast for the next assault.
He had no idea what kind of record, if any, the Church might have kept of those poor children it had torn from homes on the mainland to transport to the islands. There was no guarantee that the local authorities would be any more forthcoming. It was all so long ago. And who had cared back then about the human detritus of failed families, or orphaned children without relatives to champion their rights? Fin’s overwhelming emotion was one of shame that such things should have been so recently perpetrated by his fellow countrymen.