He looked down on the steel-cold waters of Loch a Tuath, the downdraught from the rotors sending concentric circles of broken light across the bay, and then they tipped and veered east, swinging sharply to drop down to the apron behind the terminal building. A clutch of police vehicles and an ambulance were gathered there, blue lights flashing in the sunlight that fell in handfuls through flitting gaps in the cloud, sprinkling like fairy dust across the moor before vanishing again in an instant.
Fin glanced once more at the boy, wrapped in blankets by the door. He had remained impassive for the duration of the flight. Whatever turmoil there might have been in his head was not reflected outside it. Fin himself felt hollowed out. A husk. Emptied of everything that might once have defined him. He looked away again in despair and saw Marsaili waiting for them by the ambulance, George Gunn standing awkwardly at her side. She was wrapped in a long black coat over jeans and boots, and her hair blew back in a stream from a face as pale as an August moon. She looked tiny beside Gunn. And Fin saw in her again the little girl with the pigtails who had sat beside him that first day at school, full of stubborn determination, but vulnerable now in a way she had never been as a child. Artair’s death had been radioed ahead. She averted her face from the blast of air and dust thrown out by the blades as the coastguard helicopter touched down on the tarmac.
Fin turned and saw Gigs and Pluto sitting in grim silence at the back of the cabin, their presence demanded by Smith, who wanted to take formal statements back in Stornoway. The others had stayed behind to pack up and make the return trip on the Purple Isle. Without a single bird culled. For the first time in centuries there would be no guga eaten on the Isle of Lewis that year.
As the engines wound down, and the door slid open, Marsaili searched anxiously among the faces of the men disembarking. Fin saw her catch her breath as her eyes fell on Fionnlagh, and she ran across the taxiway to throw her arms around him and hold him as if she meant never to let him go. Fin climbed down from the hatch and stood there, helpless, impotent, watching them uncertainly. Gunn approached and slipped Fin a piece of paper torn from a notebook and put a hand gently on Marsaili’s shoulder. ‘We need to get the boy checked out at the hospital, Mrs Macinnes.’ Reluctantly she released her son, before taking his face in both her hands and looking into his eyes, searching perhaps for some sign that he didn’t hate her too much. ‘Talk to me, Fionnlagh. Say something.’ But it was towards Fin that he turned his head.
‘Was it true? What you told my father out there on the rock?’
Marsaili looked at Fin with wide, frightened eyes. ‘What did you tell him?’
Fin clutched the piece of paper Gunn had given him, afraid to look at it. ‘That Fionnlagh was his son.’
‘And am I?’ Fionnlagh looked from one to the other, anger rising visibly in his chest, as if he believed he was being excluded from some secret that only they shared.
Marsaili said, ‘You were only weeks old, Fionnlagh. You were crying every night. I had post-natal depression, and every other kind of depression you can think of.’ Her blue eyes briefly found Fin’s, then slipped away into some distant place from which she had a view back in time. ‘We had a terrible argument, Artair and I. I can’t even remember what it was about now. But I wanted to hurt him.’ She looked at her son, guilt etching the frown gathering in furrows across her forehead. ‘And so I used you. I told him you were Fin’s son, not his. It just came out. How could I ever have imagined what it would lead to, that it would end like this?’ She raised her eyes to a sky rushing past overhead. ‘I wished right there and then that I could have bitten my tongue off. I told him a thousand times that I’d only said it to hurt him, but he would never believe me.’ She lowered her head and ran the tips of her fingers lovingly down the side of her son’s face. ‘And you’ve had to live with the consequences ever since.’
‘So he was my father.’ All the bitterness and disappointment collected in the tears that hovered in Fionnlagh’s eyes.
Marsaili hesitated. ‘The truth, Fionnlagh?’ She shook her head. ‘The truth is that I don’t know. I really don’t. After Fin and I split up in Glasgow I came back to Lewis, miserable and unhappy. And straight into the arms of Artair. He was only too pleased to give me the comfort I was looking for.’ She sighed. ‘And I never knew whether it was Artair or Fin who had made me pregnant.’
Fionnlagh went limp, his gaze falling listlessly on the flashing lights of the police cars. He blinked away his tears, determined to harden himself to a world of uncertainty. ‘We’ll never know, then.’
Marsaili said, ‘We can find out.’
‘No!’ Fionnlagh nearly shouted it. ‘I don’t want to know! If I don’t, then he doesn’t ever have to have been my father.’
Fin smoothed open the piece of paper in his hand and dipped his eyes to look at it. He felt his throat constricting. ‘It’s too late for that now, Fionnlagh.’ The boy looked at him, a sudden dread in his eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
The sound of voices crackled across police wavebands in the nearby cars.
‘Last night, I asked DS Gunn to call the lab handling the DNA samples taken on Wednesday. They cross-checked yours and Artair’s.’ Both Fionnlagh and Marsaili fixed him with looks that carried the hopes and fears of two lifetimes. Fin folded the slip of paper into his pocket. ‘Do you like football, Fionnlagh?’ The boy frowned. ‘Because if you do, I can get us tickets to the next Scotland game in Glasgow. That’s what fathers and sons do, isn’t it? Go to the football together?’