Free The Chessmen by Peter May

voice immediately. There was a kind of hush in it. Intelligent anticipation.
    ‘What happened?’
    For a moment he couldn’t trust himself to speak. Why was it so difficult for him to tell this girl that he didn’t even know? ‘He was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Edinburgh.’ And if he closed his eyes he could see the police photographs of the street, kept still in a folder he couldn’t bring himself to throw away.
    There was a long silence, then, in the old blackhouse, before finally he raised his head and met her eye. There wasa mix of emotions in her face. Sympathy, confusion, fear. But not of him. She took evasive action. ‘So you were at school with my dad?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Was he as big an arsehole back then as he is now?’
    And Fin couldn’t stop his lips from parting in a smile, or the laugh that came in a breath. ‘Yes, he was.’
    And she laughed, too, and was transformed in a moment from an ugly teenage Goth into a pretty young girl with lights in her eyes. The change was almost shocking. But while the image might have changed, the mouth was just as foul. ‘So how the fuck did you become his friend?’
    ‘You’ve heard of the
Iolaire
?’
    She shook her head, and Fin wondered at how quickly history got lost. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. He had known nothing about it himself until that day out at Holm Point.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I first met Whistler Macaskill when I left Crobost school in Ness to go into third year at the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. We had a certain swagger, us Ness boys. Thought we were a bit special. Until we arrived at the Nicolson and found that everyone else had a swagger, too. The Uig crowd, the boys from Lochs, the wild westers from Carloway. But the big city soon knocked it out of us.
    I can laugh now, but that’s what Stornoway felt like then. It was the only town on the island, with all its shops and cafes and restaurants, and its inner and outer harbour. It was home to the Hebridean fishing fleet and a population of eleven thousand. Sadly, there was no cinema in those days, since the Church had forced the Playhouse to close down following a showing of
Jesus Christ, Superstar
. At least, that was what they said, but it was before my time, so I don’t know if it’s true. The old cinema became the Royal British Legion Club, and still is.
    The Church dominated life then, and in many ways still does. In all its various incarnations. But it was the presbyterian Church of Scotland and the breakaway Free Church that prevailed. They wouldn’t allow flights or ferries on theSabbath when I was a boy, and there was not a single shop, cafe, newsagent or chippie open. You read your Sunday newspapers on Monday, and if you forgot to buy your cigarettes on a Saturday you would have an even more miserable Sunday than usual.
    But that particular year, there
was
something special about the kids from Uig. They arrived with their own band. Six kids who’d been playing music together since primary school. Sòlas, they called themselves, the Gaelic equivalent of
solace
or
comfort
, and they had already developed their own unique mix of traditional Celtic music and rock. An eclectic fusion that in a few years would make them the most commercially successful Celtic rock band of their generation.
    I wasn’t really aware of them at first. I was too busy adapting to life away from home in the student lodgings at the Gibson Hostel in Ripley Place. We came down from Ness in a bus on the Monday morning, and back again on the Friday night. Not that I missed my life at Crobost. My folks had been dead for years by then, and existence with my aunt was spartan. My friend Artair had gone to the Lews Castle College because his grades hadn’t been good enough to get him into the Nicolson. They wouldn’t do that to kids these days in case it gave them low self-esteem. But it wasn’t a consideration back then. Relations with my primary school sweetheart, Marsaili Macdonald, were in