What can this work be? Can it be anything other than the ramblings of a mind terminally damaged by a cheerless upbringing, an unfulfilled marriage, unrequited love, religious confusion and the stress and injury of a near-fatal accident? Who would dare, in this day and age, to suggest that Gideon Mack was, as he maintained to the end, telling the truth?
It was in order to find answers to these questions that I, Patrick Walker, asked Harry Caithness to go to Monimaskit in January of this year, 2005. Ostensibly my decision whether or not to proceed to publication would depend on what he discovered. In fact, I was already committed to publish, and only the threat of serious legal action (which I considered remote) would have made me reconsider. But in the interim I wanted Harry to talk to those who had known Gideon Mack, and to find out their opinions of him. Having both read the manuscript, between us we made out a list of the people he should try to interview. We agreed that, although mention of the manuscript’s existence had been made in the press, and there had been some speculation as to what it might contain, it would be better not to disclose to the interviewees that we had a copy of it. However, it might be necessary for Harry to refer to things in the manuscript in the course of his investigations. If anybody asked him where he had acquired his facts, he would use the old defence of ‘protection of sources’ and, as a fallback, say that he’d had access to documents in the police files in Inverness.
Harry spent three days in and around Monimaskit, and the following, which speaks plainly enough for itself and which I therefore reproduce verbatim, is the report, in the form of a letter, that he sent me:
Dear Patrick,
I’m not sure if you’re going to think the information I’ve gathered is worth the cost (an invoice for fee and expenses, with receipts, is on its way) but here it is in any case.
You told me that you have never been to Monimaskit, and neither had I until this week. You should probably go before you publish, if you publish. You should get a sense of the place. Maybe the museum would want to host a launch! You’d be guaranteed a turn-out, though what kind of mood the assembled masses would be in I’m not sure.
Monimaskit is a typical small east coast Scottish town: a wee bit run down, a wee bit on the up, seen better days, seen worse days. It has the usual mix of High Street shops: Woolworths, Boots, Co-op, Oxfam, Cancer Research, newsagent, florist, baker, butcher, fishmonger, hairdressers, off-licence, chip shop, shoe shop, a building society, three estate agents, a couple of banks. There are some nice-looking red sandstone villas, a neat wee council scheme and some bland new-build on the outskirts. The river Keldo flows through the town and gives it a certain grace. I drove in past the Old Kirk, a simple but handsome establishment, and the manse, which looked as though it was unoccupied. I made a mental note to have a look round there later. Then I went and found my hotel, the Keldo Arms, which wasn’t difficult, as it’s the only one.
The hotel was almost empty, the ambience adequate but boring. The menu wouldn’t win any awards but suited my taste (everything with chips). The town itself was very quiet and seemed a bit sorry for itself, as if a majority of its inhabitants had drunk too much at New Year and were keeping their heads down till spring. It was probably a good time for me to be there. Back in October, when Mack’s body was found, the media attention was pretty intense, but the pack has long since moved on to other stories in other places. People, in my experience, often clam up when the circus is in town, but they’ll open up again to one old freelance like me wandering around, or most of them do. Anyway, I arrived on Thursday at dinner time, checked in, and then I got out the list of names we’d come up with and started knocking on doors and asking questions. Here is a summary of who I spoke to and what they said:
Amelia Wishaw: I was lucky to catch Dr Wishaw at the health centre. She was about to go to Newcastle for a conference and was only in to pick up some paperwork. I persuaded her to give me five minutes before she headed off, but I didn’t get much out of her. A hard-boiled professional, she gave the impression that most of the rest of us are a lowlier species than the likes of her, and that she is never wrong. She absolutely refused to divulge any information from Gideon Mack’s medical records, saying they were confidential even though he was dead. That was fair enough, I said, but as his doctor she must have an opinion about his mental and physical health before his death. Yes, she said, but she still wasn’t at liberty to share it with a third party, let alone a journalist.
I tried again, putting a hypothetical question to her. If somebody fell into the Black Jaws, spent three days trapped in the river and survived, what mental condition would she expect them to be in? Not good, she said. She would expect such a person to be suffering from severe shock and trauma, leaving aside the effects of any head injuries, oxygen deprivation and so on. I had to be careful about revealing what I knew, but asked whether a poor diet would have an adverse effect on the person’s mind. She said it wouldn’t help if they weren’t getting the right mix of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, etc. We talked about that in a general kind of way, and then I asked, ‘Would you say Gideon Mack experienced a nervous breakdown?’ She gave me a very sharp look. ‘I’ve already told you, I can’t answer such questions,’ she said. Her expression told me plainly that she thought he had. I mentioned all the stuff he’d come out with about the Devil in the cave. ‘Would you say he was mad?’ She said ‘mad’ was not a word she would use to describe any patient. It wasn’t a useful term. I asked if ‘mentally ill’ was a more useful term. She said it was. ‘Would you describe Gideon Mack as having been mentally ill?’ ‘No comment,’ she said, and then she stood up, saying she was already late and would have to leave at once. End of interview.
Andrew McAllister: This was the police sergeant who came to see Mack when he returned from hospital. I found him at the station. It turns out we have a couple of mutual acquaintances in the Highlands, so we found some common ground there. He seemed like a reasonable bloke who had grown bitter and frustrated, and who carries a chip on his shoulder because he hasn’t got further up the ranks. What did he think of Gideon Mack? ‘He was a decent man who never recovered from the death of his wife.’ I challenged him on this: that was eleven years before everything happened, I said. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I was there the night his wife was killed. In fact it was me that had to go and tell him.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘so you see I know what I’m talking about. He poured all his energies into his work after she died, but it wasn’t enough. You wouldn’t believe what he did for charity, running marathons and all that. If you want my opinion, he exhausted himself, lost the plot and took himself off into the hills to end it all.’ I asked if that’s what he really thought, that Mack committed suicide. ‘No doubt in my mind,’ Sergeant McAllister said.
I asked him about Mack’s accident. Did he really think he’d been in the water three days? ‘No, he couldn’t possibly have been. He’d have drowned, or died of hypothermia.’ Well, where did McAllister think he had been, washed up on the river bank? ‘No, he still couldn’t have survived.’ Well, then, did he sit by a big fire with the Devil in a cave, like he’d been telling people? The sergeant looked at me and nodded. ‘Not the Devil, though,’ he said. ‘Chae Middleton. Something went on between them, but Mr Mack either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to tell. That was why he came away with all that other nonsense. He needed an explanation as to where he’d been.’ An alibi? I asked. But meeting the Devil wasn’t much of an alibi. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. What did McAllister think they’d been up to? The sergeant said that Middleton was a right dodgy character, a known poacher and light-fingered in other ways too. He bought and sold contraband booze and fags but had never been caught. He probably dealt drugs as well. McAllister’s theory was that Mack somehow survived going through the Black Jaws, came out downstream the first night, after the searchers had had to give up because of the dark, and was picked up by Chae Middleton. Chae and some mates were up the river that night because with all the police and mountain rescue folk combing the area they were nervous about a stash of illicit goods they had hidden somewhere and were moving it out. That sounded a bit boys’ own adventure-ish to me – I mean, do people hide smuggled goods in caves and woods these days? – but I let him run with it. Chae was a bad bugger, McAllister said, but even he couldn’t let another human being drown, so when he saw Mack floating by he hauled him out. Mack came to and realised what was going on, and Chae’s pals began to get agitated. Chae took him somewhere and kept him there for two days till the contraband was out of the vicinity and well through the distribution chain. Meanwhile he came back and helped in the hunt for the missing minister. They came to an arrangement that, in exchange for Chae saving Mack’s life, Mack would say nothing about Chae’s activities. Then they went back up the river and staged the rescue, and Mack came out with his story about the Devil. But then later all this got to Mack’s conscience and on top of losing his wife it finally sent him over the edge.
Well, it wasn’t credible, and I said so. McAllister started telling me that truth was stranger than fiction, I wouldn’t believe half the things he’d seen over the years, etc. Fantasy stuff. I said, well, there’s an easy way to find out and that’s to get Chae Middleton in for questioning. McAllister said he’d already done that back in the autumn, but Chae had either been too drunk or too canny and didn’t let anything slip. He interviewed Mack (as we know) but got stonewalled there too. Basically, he said, there was nothing else he could do.
I said I’d go down to the Luggie and see Chae myself. ‘No you won’t,’ McAllister said. ‘It’s a free country,’ I said. ‘It may be,’ McAllister said, ‘and you can go down to the Luggie if you want but you won’t find Chae there.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because he’s dead.’ Apparently he fell in the harbour last March after a long night in the pub. Pretty ironic, when you think about it. ‘Fell, pushed or jumped?’ I asked. McAllister said the Procurator Fiscal concluded that he fell, but nobody saw it happen. McAllister obviously wasn’t convinced. He hinted darkly that Chae was losing it because of the bevvy, his business associates were worried about him and they might have given him a helping hand. He’s quite into conspiracies of one kind or another, McAllister. Anyway, that scratched my proposed interview with Chae Middleton, so I drove off up into the glens to visit the Reverend Lorna Sprott.
Lorna Sprott: I’d phoned Ms Sprott a few days before and asked if she’d be prepared to talk to me. She was very reluctant at first, especially when she knew I was a journalist. She thought she might have to clear it with 121 George Street. I told her I didn’t work for any particular paper, I was just interested in finding out more about Gideon. I said I’d met him once (stretching the truth a little), at the Elgin marathon when he’d got a big cheque out of NessTrek. He’d seemed like a really nice guy, I was sorry to hear he’d died in such tragic circumstances. That helped. She agreed to see me, and I went up to her manse at Meldrick that evening. Beautiful spot, but a bit isolated for my liking.
Ms Sprott manages to get through quite a quantity of white wine of an evening. She offered me a glass as soon as I arrived and she knocked back the rest of the bottle in the hour and a half I was there. A homely, lonely kind of soul. The dog, Jasper, came and lay on my feet and kept wanting me to rub his belly. I think Ms Sprott would have told me anything once she saw that the dog liked me, but she didn’t actually have much to say that added to the picture.
‘What was Gideon to you?’ I asked. ‘He was a dear friend who went insane,’ she said, ‘and not all the prayers and care I could offer could do anything to prevent it.’ ‘It looks like he lost his faith,’ I said, and added, ‘if he ever had it.’ ‘I can’t believe that of him,’ she said. ‘He was an honest, righteous man and I can’t believe he entered the ministry under false pretences.’ I said, okay, but it did seem that he’d lost his faith towards the end, judging from what he said at Catherine Craigie’s funeral. ‘I wasn’t there,’ she said, ‘so I don’t know. I like to think that he lost his way rather than his faith.’ She thought he’d gone off into the hills at the end to try to find it again. Why you’d go looking for your faith in Dalwhinnie escaped me, but Ms Sprott started singing, very badly, a psalm, the one that starts, ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid.’ I think she was hoping I’d join in. She stopped after one verse when I didn’t.
I said, so what about the Devil, had Gideon met him? No, of course he hadn’t. So where had he been those days he was missing? Unconscious. How had he survived? God protected him. Not the Devil? Absolutely not. Did she believe in the Devil? Yes, but not as a being the way Gideon described him. As what then? As a power for evil in the world, the antithesis of goodness, the opposite of God. And (I was chancing it here) did she believe in fairies? Of course not, she said. Yet she believed in God? She said that my line of questioning was mischievous, and insulting too. She was a minister, God was her entire life. I apologised but said it was surely part of a minister’s training to confront such questions and come up with some convincing answers. That was true, she said. Had the whole business with Gideon not shaken her own faith? Not a bit, her faith was what carried her through. ‘If I hadn’t had my faith I wouldn’t have been able to cope. And Jasper, of course.’ She looked pretty shaky to me. The dog was relaxed, though, coping a lot better than she was!
I had brought with me a photocopy of part of the first page of Gideon’s manuscript, the two texts he’d written out from the Bible and the one from Moby Dick. I showed her this and asked her if it was Gideon’s handwriting. She said it was and asked where I had got it. I said the police had required a sample of his writing when they were searching for him. She said it seemed a strange mixture of things to have written down on one sheet of paper. I didn’t have the heart to touch on what the rest of the manuscript said about Gideon’s relationship, or non-relationship, with Ms Sprott. There didn’t seem anything to be gained by it. She was a very sad woman. I left her to her wine and drove back to Monimaskit.
I had two or three pints in the public bar of the Keldo Arms and tried to engage the half dozen locals there in conversation about their ex-minister, but half of them didn’t know him at all and the others only knew what they’d read in the tabloids. A godless kind of establishment. Long before closing-time I called it a night.
John Gless: On Friday morning I called on John Gless, the Session Clerk. I located his home address from the phone book and went round unannounced, at ten o’clock. He is eighty years old and a tougher customer than many half his age. He wouldn’t even let me in. Having established that I was a journalist he told me he had nothing to say on the subject of Gideon Mack. I asked if that meant he disapproved of how he’d behaved. No, it meant that he had nothing to say. I showed him the sample of Gideon’s handwriting, and he confirmed that it was his. I asked him if he thought Gideon Mack had betrayed the Church of Scotland. He declined to comment on this and hoped that no other member of the Session would prolong the parish’s anguish by doing so. I said I had driven past the manse, and it seemed to be empty. Gless said that the parish had effectively been without a minister for fifteen months. What was the situation as far as a replacement for Mr Mack was concerned? Obviously, he said, things had been complicated by Mr Mack’s suspension and then his disappearance. Legally it had been very difficult to do anything until it was known what had happened to him. Since his body had been formally identified the vacancy procedure could begin, and this had already happened. It was hoped that the successful candidate would be in situ by the spring. I said that I understood that Mr Mack’s body had been buried at Inverness. He said that that was what he understood too. Was I mistaken in thinking that Presbytery was normally responsible for the funeral arrangements of a minister? He said that I was not mistaken, but Mr Mack’s will had unequivocally stated that in the event of his death he was to be interred without ceremony or service and without the intervention or involvement of the Church of Scotland. How did he know this, I asked. Because Mr Mack’s solicitor had informed him as soon as the body was identified. Who was Mr Mack’s solicitor? Mr Finlay Stewart of Montrose.
I asked John Gless if a memorial service or anything of that sort was to be held for Gideon at the Old Kirk. He knew of no such proposal. If I had no further questions then he wished me good morning. I had no further questions, and he closed the door in my face.
In spite of Mr Gless’s hopes that the rest of the Session would be as guarded as he in speaking to me, I thought I would try my luck with Peter Macmurray anyway. I went to the offices of the accountancy firm of which he is a partner, but he was in a meeting. When might he be available? That afternoon. I left my card and said I’d call back at two.
I went next to the museum, to see if I could interview the director, Alan Straiton. The woman on reception told me he was away in Edinburgh. Was it anything she could help me with? I said that among other things I was trying to track down an address or contact number for William Winnyford. It was a while since his exhibition, but I wanted to talk to him about his work. The woman was very helpful. She went into her files and found me his mobile number. She said she wasn’t allowed to give me his address for security reasons, but a mobile phone number couldn’t hurt, could it? I agreed that it couldn’t. Five minutes later I was talking to Bill Winnyford, or at least to someone at the number she’d given me who identified himself as such. I mention this only because the man I spoke to was slow and measured in his speech, not at all like the Bill Winnyford Gideon describes in his testament.
Bill Winnyford: His impressions of Gideon Mack fitted the pattern that was starting to emerge, viz. that he was a decent man who went out of his mind. I said that a transcript of an interview between them had been found by the police, which was more or less true. Did Mr Winnyford by any chance still have the tape of that interview? No, he didn’t even have a transcript. Gideon had promised to send him one but never had. As for the tape, Gideon had kept it. Why, Winnyford asked, did I want it? I said it would have been interesting to hear his voice, and he said I could hear that on the tape at the museum, the one of him reading the legend of the Black Jaws. I said I’d check that out later. (I never did, by the way. By the time I’d finished on the Saturday the museum was closed. You might want to follow that up yourself.)
‘What did you think after you did the second recording with him?’ I asked. ‘The one in which he described his three days underground?’
Bill Winnyford: ‘I didn’t know what to think. He was just out of hospital, he’d had a hugely traumatic experience. I don’t know what they were playing at, letting him out like that. He was very nervous, excited. When he asked me to go round to the manse I thought he just wanted some company. We’d got along pretty well before. But he said he had some big story that he wanted to get on record while it was clear in his head. So I went round with the equipment and then he started spouting this stuff about meeting the Devil.’
‘In that interview he asks you at one point if he strikes you as being a sane human being. And you say yes. Did you really mean that?’
‘If I said it, then yes, I meant it.’
‘But did you believe what he told you about the Devil?’
‘Of course I didn’t. I mean, my work explores myths and legends, but that’s what they are, myths and legends. Nobody actually meets the Devil in a cave, not unless they’re on a bad trip. But Gideon believed he had, he really did. I did wonder if he was doing drugs or on some kind of medication or something, but it wasn’t really like that. He was sane but he was saying insane things, does that make any kind of sense? He was deluded, but he was genuine. He wasn’t trying to wind me up. It was like he’d read a lot of stuff or seen a lot of stuff and on top of what he’d been through it all got mixed up in his head. The Devil healing his leg like that, for example, that’s straight out of E.T.’
I said I’d been informed by other people that it was certainly the case that he didn’t have a limp before the accident.
Bill Winnyford: ‘True, but he wasn’t nuts before the accident either. I know, I’m contradicting myself. He limped because he’d been through the Black Jaws, and to be honest coming out with a limp was the least thing that happened to him in there. Can you imagine what three days in that river must have done to his mind? It fucked it, basically.’
I asked if he really thought Mack could have spent three days in the river and survived. He said no, he probably got out of the water for a while but didn’t remember doing so. People were capable of astonishing feats of survival but often they were left permanently scarred. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I liked the guy. I really liked him. He was a decent man who wanted to help other people. He helped me and he didn’t have to. The fact that he went off his head is a tragedy, just a tragedy.’
I thought there was nothing more to be had from Winnyford and was about to end the conversation when he said something else.
‘You know, sometimes I think there was a jinx around that whole project. I mean, of the people who helped me, three were dead within six months of the exhibition opening. First Catherine Craigie, then Chae Middleton, then Gideon. It was as if they were being picked off for getting mixed up in it or something.’
‘Did you say Catherine Craigie helped you?’ I said. ‘I understood that she would have nothing to do with you.’
‘I don’t know where you got that from,’ Winnyford said. ‘She was incredibly helpful. We didn’t agree on everything, but she was very approachable and gave me a huge amount of information about the town. It’s true she didn’t want our collaboration broadcast – that was one of her conditions, that I didn’t acknowledge her assistance – but I couldn’t have done it without her. And she put me in touch with some key people, too. It was Miss Craigie who suggested that I involve both Chae and Gideon.’
‘But Gideon Mack didn’t know that?’
‘No, I was sworn to secrecy as far as he was concerned. It doesn’t matter now, of course, but at the time I think it was important to her.’
‘Why do you think that was?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said. ‘Local politics of some sort, I expect.’
As you and I know, Gideon was quite unaware that Catherine Craigie had assisted Winnyford in this manner. She went out of her way to rubbish him in fact. This revelation raises some interesting questions about the reliability of other things which, according to Gideon, she told him – questions, however, which are unlikely now ever to be answered.
‘What about Chae?’ I asked. ‘Did he know Miss Craigie had recommended him?’
‘I wouldn’t say “recommend”. He used to do odd jobs for her, gardening and suchlike, so she asked him herself. A bit of a lad, Chae. If Gideon was on anything, any drugs I mean, that’s who he could have been getting them from. But I don’t think they had anything to do with each other till Chae found him in the river.’
‘And then Chae drowned in the harbour,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Winnyford said. ‘I was quite shaken when I heard about it. He drank a lot, apparently. Mind you, so did Gideon.’
‘Really?’
‘He certainly poured enormous drams whenever I was at the manse,’ Winnyford said. ‘I’d hardly have started mine and he’d be knocking his back and topping us both up.’
‘Do you think he had a problem?’
‘I think he had all kinds of problems. An alcohol problem? I’m not going to say that about him now he’s dead, no. He was a decent man. I liked him.’
After this phone conversation I dropped in at the library to see if I could identify Elsie Moffat, but was told she wasn’t working. Would she be in at the weekend, I asked. No, she had Saturday off. Then I asked if Nancy Croy was still running her reading group. It seems that Nancy Croy successfully applied for a principal teacher of English post in Dumfries and Galloway. She left Monimaskit at Christmas.
At two o’clock I was back at Peter Macmurray’s office. Physically, and in terms of his personality, Macmurray is much as Gideon describes him in his manuscript. I explained who I was and that I was interested in the truth about Gideon Mack, and he invited me into his office. He could barely get back in his chair before the bile started to pour out.
Peter Macmurray: ‘I ought not to speak ill of the dead,’ he said, ‘but Gideon Mack was a deceiver and a hypocrite who brought shame on the Kirk and on this community. I always knew there was something not right about him, and events totally justified my suspicions.’ I asked what had aroused these suspicions, and he cited the fact that Mack had married one atheist and after her death had ‘taken up’ with another. I asked if he meant Catherine Craigie. Yes. Was he implying that there had been anything between them other than friendship? ‘Well, what do you think?’ he said. ‘She was an immoral woman and he visited her on a regular weekly basis. One doesn’t need to be Einstein to make two and two equal four.’ Did he have any particular reason for denigrating Miss Craigie, who was also, after all, dead? They must have been about the same age and had presumably grown up together in Monimaskit. Did he have any personal reason for disliking her? He went slightly pink and said he always tried to put personal issues aside. He simply stood up for the truth and for the Christian faith.
I showed him the handwriting sample, and he agreed that Mack had written the texts. He read them through and said of the third one that Herman Melville, whoever he was, might speak for himself and Gideon Mack but he, Peter Macmurray, was very far from being cracked about the head. Did he believe Mack’s story about meeting the Devil? ‘Not in so many words, no of course not.’ Then what could Mack have meant by it? ‘He was revealing the depths of his dabbling in the black arts.’ I asked him if he was serious. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘He made light of his involvement with that exhibition at the museum, but when I confronted him about it he refused to answer me. He was obviously burdened with guilt and eventually it dragged him down. Sin will out, Mr Caithness, and it did so spectacularly in his case.’ I asked him if he himself believed in the existence of the Devil. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. The Devil exists, and I’m sorry to say that Gideon Mack was one of his servants.’
There was a great deal more in this vein and eventually it was I who terminated the interview. I felt quite depressed after my half-hour with Mr Macmurray, and needed some fresh air. I walked round the manse, which was all shut up, and then I walked round the kirkyard, reading the stones. I found Catherine Craigie’s family gravestone with her name and dates freshly cut in it. I saw no children flying kites and nobody speaking to the dead.
I decided to go and get a haircut. A couple of inquiries led me to Henry Leask’s barber shop.
Henry Leask: Mr Leask had a customer and told me to take a seat. I looked at the paper for five minutes, then when the other man had gone I took my place in the chair. After the preliminaries about how I wanted my hair cut, the weather and the football, I brought the conversation round to Gideon Mack. I said I was passing through and had remembered reading about him in the papers. Had he known the minister? Yes, he used to cut his hair in the very chair in which I was sitting. I said it must have been a shock to everybody when they heard about his death. Henry Leask: ‘I think we all knew it would come to that, when he’d been missing that length of time. He never recovered from falling in the river. I knew he wasn’t long for this world.’ I asked him what he thought about the stories Mack had told. Did he believe them? Henry Leask: ‘I’d believe Gideon Mack a thousand times before I believe a word of some of the people that didn’t like him. He was a decent man.’ ‘Then you believe that he met the Devil?’ ‘Well, that’s a question it’s hard to say yes to, isn’t it? But then you wouldn’t credit some of the nonsense I nod along to when I’m cutting folk’s hair. And half of them believe what they’re telling me, and half of what they tell me turns out to be true! So I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think he lied. He might not have been well by that stage, but he wasn’t a liar.’ ‘But he lied about being a Christian, about believing in God.’ ‘That’s different. Everybody lies about that.’
By now it was late afternoon. There were just three more people I wanted to see, and two of them would have to wait until the next day, Saturday. I went to the Monimaskit Care Home and asked if I could see Mrs Agnes Mack. Who was I, the woman who opened the door wanted to know. I was a friend of her son Gideon, I was in the area and wanted to say hello. I knew that Mrs Mack wouldn’t know who I was, but for Gideon’s sake I thought I should call on her. ‘You’d better come in,’ the woman said. ‘Did you know Mrs Mack personally?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘she passed away at Christmas, at the age of eighty-six.’
I said I was sorry to hear that, and would she mind if I asked a couple of questions? Ask away, she said. Had Mrs Mack been aware of her son’s death? No, the woman said, she very much doubted it. They’d tried to tell her the first time he’d died, but then of course he hadn’t died, he’d come back again, and that was too confusing for her, so although they’d explained about him going missing again and then his body being found, as far as Agnes was concerned they could have been talking about Scott of the Antarctic. Gideon had come in a few times before he went missing the second time, but he hadn’t looked well and he hadn’t stayed long with his mother. She hadn’t recognised him for some years, which was always upsetting for relatives.
I asked the woman if her name was Betty. It was. I said, ‘Gideon mentioned you once or twice. He knew you looked after his mother well. That was important to him.’ She seemed very pleased about that. ‘Well, he must have appreciated it,’ she said. ‘You know he left everything to the home, don’t you?’ I said I didn’t know that. ‘Every penny he had,’ she said. ‘He may have gone strange at the end, but when you think of all the money he raised for charity over the years, and then this, you have to think well of him, don’t you?’ ‘Did he go strange?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he couldn’t help himself,’ she said. ‘He was religious. It’s something I’ve noticed with the residents since I’ve been working here. The more religious they are, the more daft they go. I probably shouldn’t say such a thing, but there, I’ve said it. So it wasn’t a surprise to me the way Mr Mack went after he’d been three days in the river.’
John and Elsie Moffat: On Saturday morning, after breakfast, I drove down the coast road to the Moffats’ house. It was a bright, sunny day, with snow on the hills inland, but I wasn’t looking forward to the encounter. Neither of them, I guessed, would be pleased to have yet another journalist on their doorstep asking questions about their former friend Gideon.
I found the house without difficulty, drove in through the open gate and parked, went to the back door and knocked. It was Elsie who answered. She looked tired and anxious, but I could see what Gideon had seen in her, she is a very attractive woman. I apologised for calling without notice, but their phone number was ex-directory (I’d checked this before: a lot of teachers keep their names out of the phone-book, with good reason). I’d been thinking for some time about how to persuade the Moffats to talk, and although you and I had agreed that we should keep the existence of Gideon’s manuscript confidential, I couldn’t see how I was going to engage them without telling them about it. They had undergone a lot of media attention back in the autumn, and one of the tabloids had run a particularly hurtful story portraying Elsie as a kind of Delilah of Monimaskit. I would have to approach them from a friendlier angle. So I said that I worked for a publisher, and that the publisher had come into possession of a document written by Gideon Mack shortly before he died. We were considering what to do with it and, since it mentioned them by name, thought it only right to come and talk to them about it.
Elsie’s face turned ashen. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. She leaned past me as if looking for a phalanx of cameras setting up in the drive. ‘You’d better come in.’
She told me to wait in the kitchen and went through a door leading to the rest of the house. I could hear the noise of a television, children playing, a man’s voice. A couple of minutes passed, and then Elsie came back with her husband.
John Moffat looked as tired as she did, but a lot angrier. At first I thought, like Gideon the last time he saw him, that he was going to punch me. He said, ‘If it had been me that came to the door you’d never have got through it. I have nothing but contempt for you people. But you’re in now, so say what you’ve got to say and then go.’
I said, ‘Mr Moffat, I’m sorry that you’re angry. Believe me, I don’t want to upset you. The fact is, though, as I was saying to your wife, that we have this document. There’s no question that it was written by Gideon Mack. Now, I’m a journalist but I don’t work for any particular newspaper and this isn’t going to be in a newspaper, but it’s quite probable that the document may be published in book form. That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.’
‘In book form?’ Moffat said. ‘How long is it, for fuck’s sake?’
‘It’s about three hundred pages of A4,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure exactly how many words that is.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘It’s about a hundred thousand words, give or take a few thousand. Jesus, Elsie, how fucking ironic is that? The bastard’s written a book. Not content with trying to ruin our lives, he’s gone and written a book, and somebody wants to publish it.’
‘Take it easy, John,’ Elsie said, which wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I remember you telling me once, Patrick, that hell hath no fury like a jealous author, especially an unpublished one.
‘Take it easy? How am I supposed to take it easy? Every time this thing dies away, and we’re trying to get ourselves back to normal, it flares up again. It’s like he’s haunting us.’
‘Gideon?’ I said.
‘Well, who else are we talking about?’ he said. ‘Aye, Gideon. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon.’
He couldn’t stay still. He kept swaying and stepping towards me and then pulling back. Elsie put a hand on his arm but he shook it off. I was standing in the middle of the floor, trying to look relaxed but not relaxed at all inside, waiting for him to fly at me.
Elsie said, ‘What’s your name again?’
‘Harry Caithness,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you sit at the table, Mr Caithness, and I’ll make some coffee.’
‘What?’ Moffat said. ‘Are you insane? I don’t want this man sitting in my kitchen drinking my coffee. I don’t even want him in the house. I want him to fuck off and leave us alone.’
‘John,’ she said, ‘he’s here now. We can send him away and, like you said, this will go away for a while, then it’ll come back again. If Gideon’s written something that’s going to be published, then we need to know what it is. We need to know what he’s said about us. Let’s at least hear what Mr Caithness has to say.’
Moffat stood there fuming for a bit longer. Elsie filled the kettle. I said, ‘She’s right, Mr Moffat. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later.’
‘Let’s see it, then,’ he said. ‘Gideon’s fucking masterpiece.’
I explained that I didn’t have a copy of it with me, but that I’d read it. I said that basically it was Gideon’s story of his life and his version of the events leading up to his disappearance. I said it accorded largely with what had been reported in the papers, but there was a lot more detail.
‘What kind of detail?’ John Moffat asked.
‘About everything,’ I said. ‘About how you all met as students, about his wife, about you two, about Monimaskit, about his falling into the Black Jaws…’
‘About meeting the Devil?’
‘Yes, a lot about that.’
‘So fundamentally it’s the diary of a madman. And you’re proposing to publish it?’
‘It tells his version of events,’ I repeated.
‘It tells a pack of lies in other words,’ he said. ‘What does it say about my wife? Does he tell the same lies he came out with before?’
‘He goes into more detail,’ I said.
His fist banged off the table. ‘Jesus Christ! We’ll sue you, you know, if you publish it. If you publish anything that’s not true, we’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got.’
‘Like you’ve sued the tabloids,’ I said, and before he could flare up again I went on, ‘I’m not being flippant, Mr Moffat, but if the book is published, it would be Gideon Mack’s story. It would be his word against yours.’
The kettle came to the boil and Elsie made the coffee.
‘Well, there you go, then,’ Moffat said. ‘His word’s worth nothing. He confessed he was a charlatan when it came to being a minister. He came out with all that crap about mysterious stones and speaking with the Devil. Obviously what he’s written is total fantasy.’
‘Then you have nothing to worry about,’ I said.
‘But a book’s a book,’ he said. ‘It’s different from a newspaper. The papers are here today, gone tomorrow. A book lasts for ever.’
Elsie said, ‘Why do you think he wrote it?’
Moffat gave her a look that was half wonder, half hatred. ‘Because he wanted to hurt us,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. Why did he write it, Mr Caithness?’
‘He says,’ I said, ‘he needed to tell the truth. He had to write it down because nobody would listen to him. He genuinely does seem to have believed that these things happened.’
‘What things?’ Moffat said fiercely.
‘All of them,’ I said.
‘But they were lies. Jesus, man, don’t you understand what he did to us? He was once my best friend. My best friend. But he went fucking nuts and then he made a pass at Elsie, and then, when she rejected him, he made up these lies about her. Don’t you see how horrible that is? To go to school and have these lies about your wife flying around? To walk down the street together and you know people are remembering what he said and thinking there might be something in it? Can you imagine what that’s like?’
He kept putting his head in his hands and letting out heavy sighs of exasperation. When he did this I glanced at Elsie. She was looking back at me. She shook her head quickly. There was an obvious question that she didn’t want me to ask.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘Nothing’s settled yet. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll speak to the publisher and tell him how hard this is for you. Maybe we can send you the manuscript and you can tell us what you think. I’m not promising anything. I’m not saying we’ll cut anything, nothing like that. But at least you could see what it is we’re talking about before anybody else does. At least you could decide what, if anything, you want to do about it.’
‘Great,’ Moffat said. ‘You’re offering to hold a gun to my head and say, “What does that feel like?” What can we do about it? There’s fuck all we can do about it, is there?’
‘Wait till you’ve seen it,’ I said. Elsie went through to check on her children. While she was away Moffat looked at me with what was almost a pleading look.
‘We used to take the piss out of miracles and God and all that,’ he said. ‘Gideon and me. He was great back then. A son of the manse and he rejected the whole fucking business. We used to rely on facts. That was all: nothing that wasn’t a fact counted, nothing you couldn’t experience. If it wasn’t real it was crap. And he was interested in real issues too, politics and stuff. We were grown-ups. But then I kept growing and he started regressing. It was bad enough when he went into the Church but he promised me he wouldn’t change, he didn’t believe any of it. But he did change, and he did start believing it. And then all this shite. It was like he was taken over by some fucking, I don’t know, some cult or something, but it was just him, he did it all by himself. It was like he wasn’t Gideon any more.’
‘So what happened that made him change?’ I asked.
‘How do I know? Is that why you’re here? Do you think we can give you some answers about what the fuck was going on in Gideon’s head? There are no answers, don’t you see? There are no answers. Gideon once understood that.’
Elsie came back in. ‘Are they okay?’ Moffat asked. ‘They’re fine,’ she said.
‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you,’ I said. ‘The place where he says he saw this standing stone, that’s somewhere near here, isn’t it?’
‘It’s up in the woods,’ Moffat said. ‘Fuck. That was two years ago, can you believe that, Elsie? That was the start of it. Two years ago he came here and told us about that stone. And now look where we are.’
‘Where in the woods?’ I said.
Moffat laughed. ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Nowhere. Because there never was a stone. He imagined the whole thing. Nobody else ever saw it because it was never there.’
‘Where in the woods did he say it was?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Moffat said. ‘He was always going to show us, but he never did. For obvious reasons.’
‘I know where it is,’ Elsie said. ‘I mean, where he said it was.’
He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You? How do you know?’
‘Well, there isn’t a precise spot, but I know the path he was talking about. There’s a clearing. I know where he meant.’
‘Can we go there?’ I asked.
They looked at each other.
‘What’s the point?’ Moffat said.
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said.
Elsie said, ‘I can show you.’
‘No,’ Moffat said.
‘We could all go,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ Moffat said, ‘but I’m not wandering about in the woods looking for a non-existent stone.’
‘Let me go,’ Elsie said. ‘What are you afraid of?’
‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ he said. ‘Or anyone. I just don’t see the point.’
‘We need to make this be over, John,’ she said. ‘Let me close this bit of it. I’ll show Mr Caithness where Gideon thought he saw his stone, and that’ll be it. Over.’
‘Until his fucking book comes out.’
‘We’ll deal with that later,’ she said.
I realised that she was the strong one in the relationship. He was floundering, sinking. She was the one that would get them through it, if they got through it. But also, she wanted to tell me something.
‘Okay,’ Moffat said. ‘I’ll stay here with the kids. You show him. And then it’s over, right?’
‘Right,’ she said.
He looked at me. ‘I don’t want to see that manuscript, typescript, whatever the hell it is,’ he said. Elsie interrupted, ‘John…’ but he carried on. ‘I can’t be arsed with this any more. Send it to Elsie if she wants to look at it. I don’t. It can’t say anything that isn’t already out there. It’s all fucking lies anyway.’
‘That’s up to you,’ I said.
‘See when you go for your walk in the woods just now,’ he said. ‘Take your car, and don’t come back. You’ve already ruined my weekend. Just don’t come back, all right?’
I drank up my coffee. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said. I thought I should give them a chance to talk on their own, but Elsie Moffat followed almost immediately.
The entrance to Keldo Woods is only a few hundred yards from their house. We could have walked, but I took Moffat’s advice and drove Elsie along to the parking area. It was dry underfoot. She’d put on trainers, I just had my ordinary shoes. We headed off along the main track. The sun, as they say, was splitting the trees.
We didn’t say anything much at first. We just walked. She was a lot fitter than me and gave me a disapproving look when I lit up a cigarette and smoked as we went. I admit, I was peching a bit until I got into my stride. I’d meant to pay attention, get my bearings for future reference, but it wasn’t easy, there are that many wee paths criss-crossing through the trees. For a while we seemed to be going in a big circle, then I thought we were doubling back on ourselves. We turned on to another path that went up a slight slope. We climbed for a bit, then things levelled out. I threw away the cigarette-end and stamped it out.
I said, ‘It was all lies, was it? What Gideon said about him and you?’
‘Of course it was,’ she said, in a flash. She’d been waiting for the question all that time. I knew then that Gideon had been telling the truth, at least about her, at least in part.
The path divided in two. We went left, then a little further on we went left again. The trees crowd in very thick at this point. It was pretty oppressive even on a sunny day: I didn’t fancy it much on a wet, dark night. And then quite suddenly we hit an open area of thick, coarse grass and mossy tummocks, just the way Gideon describes it. He wasn’t making that bit up either.
‘This is it,’ she said.
I looked around. ‘Where?’
She pointed across the clearing. ‘Over there.’
‘But there’s nothing there,’ I said.
She said, ‘Did you expect there would be?’
We left the path and made our way across the open ground. It was a bit squelchy in places, once I put a foot wrong and the mud oozed up over my shoe. I swore but she didn’t seem to hear. After thirty or forty yards she stopped.
‘Here,’ she said.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how do you know?’ I said. ‘According to what he wrote down, he was the only one who ever saw it. How do you know it was here?’
‘Because I saw it,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? She looked at me. ‘I don’t know what’s in this for you,’ she said. ‘I really don’t, but I guess at one level it’s the story. That’s what you journalists are really interested in, isn’t it, the story? Meanwhile John and I are trying to get our marriage back together, but you want the story that will make that impossible. Well, you can publish Gideon’s book and maybe that will finish us off and maybe it won’t, I don’t know. But I need to tell you this, and you can put it in the damned book or you can leave it out, it doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s the truth.
‘I followed Gideon up here one night, just over a year ago. It was after the trouble at the funeral, after he’d been suspended and everything. Gideon was going downhill fast. We hadn’t seen anything of him. I couldn’t bear it, it was too painful because I really did love him, as a friend I mean, and John just didn’t want to have anything to do with him. And then he turned up at the house one afternoon early in the New Year. He wanted to speak to us. He wanted to apologise. He wanted to try to get back to where we’d been. We’d been such close friends, all of us, him, me, John, Jenny. He came to say sorry, and John threw him out. No, he wouldn’t even let him in. It was pouring with rain. When John told me who it was at the door and that he’d told him to fuck off we had a huge row, and I stormed out of the house. I just had to get away from him and I walked up the road to the car park and then I saw Gideon’s car.’
I said, ‘You wanted to let Gideon in after all he’d said and done?’
‘We had to start somewhere if we were going to save him. Save ourselves. But John was so angry. And one of the reasons he was so angry was because he knew it was true, what Gideon had said at the funeral, that we’d had an affair. That doesn’t surprise you, does it, Mr Caithness? I can see that it doesn’t. It wasn’t Gideon that was lying, it was me.’
I said, ‘It was hardly an affair. He says you only had sex once, when you were helping him to sort out his wife’s clothes.’
She shook her head. ‘Is that what he’s written? I don’t understand that.’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘But it didn’t just happen once. That was the first time, but we made love all that summer. And for years afterwards I used to go to the manse at different times of the day and we’d make love. So it was an affair all right, it was passionate and intense and secret, it was like stealing fruit from a beautiful garden, but I think right from the start I knew it was doomed, that it would never be anything other than stealing.’
‘Why did you think that?’ I asked.
‘Because Gideon was weak, Mr Caithness. He was a weak man. His upbringing, his character, the whole religion thing – not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it – it was all weakness. When he first said he was going to be a minister I thought it showed he had strength and courage but I was wrong. He was never going to really love me, whatever he said. I don’t think he ever loved Jenny either. He wasn’t capable of loving her or me or anybody, including himself. He’d had that terrible upbringing that strangled love at every turn. So our affair dwindled to nothing. Our secret meetings happened less and less and finally, when I was pregnant with Katie, they stopped altogether.’
‘Mrs Moffat,’ I said. ‘Elsie. Is Katie Gideon’s daughter?’
She didn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Yes, actually, I think so. But both of the girls look like me so I’ll never be certain. But yes, I think Katie is Gideon’s.’
‘Does your husband know that?’
‘He suspects,’ she said. ‘Why do you think things are so difficult? Long before Gideon said it in public he suspected there’d been something between us. The children came along, and it ended, but something like that never quite ends, does it? It’s blighted our marriage. And then, when maybe it had faded away enough for us almost to ignore it, I began to suspect John. I thought he was having an affair with somebody else. But of course I couldn’t say anything.’
‘Nancy Croy,’ I said.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘How do you know that?’
‘You told Gideon,’ I said. ‘He wrote it down.’
She started hitting her forehead with the palm of her hand. I thought she was crying but she was laughing. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘What fucking idiots we all are.’
She was silent for a minute. We stood in the clearing, on the site where the stone had supposedly been, and birds were singing somewhere at a distance and it all felt very unreal.
‘I don’t know if there was anything between John and Nancy,’ she said. ‘In the scheme of things, what does it matter? It doesn’t matter at all, not any more. Anyway. I saw Gideon’s car and I followed him into the woods. At first I was trying to catch him up, just to apologise for what John had done, and he can’t have been that far ahead of me because I could hear him, his pace was much slower with the limp. But then I thought, no, wait a minute, he’s come here for a reason, so I hung back, just kept him in sight, and followed him. And he came up here. I was getting nervous, it was so wet and there wasn’t much light left, but I stayed back and I watched him. He came over here and I saw him at the stone.’
‘You saw the stone?’ I said.
‘He was leaning on it. Shouting and weeping and cursing. I was frightened. But yes, I could see it in the half-light. A bloody great stone, right here where we are.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m telling you.’ Then she shook her head. ‘No, not now. I was sure then, I was positive. I could definitely see it. But now, look – nothing. So how could I have?’
I remembered something. ‘Did you see anybody else?’
‘I might have. It was getting very dark. He’d been shouting as if he was really shouting at someone – “Wait, speak to me,” that kind of thing. Over there in the trees. So I was looking, and I think maybe I did see someone, but I can’t swear to it.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Why?’
‘Gideon says there was someone. He thinks the Devil was here that night.’
She shook her head. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there was anyone. I was scared. I was imagining things.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Gideon started howling and screaming, and I wanted to go and help him but I was too afraid, I really thought he might be dangerous, and I ran back down the track and got to the road and ran all the way home. And when I got in John was giving the girls their tea, and we looked at each other and he knew where I’d been and… Well, that’s where we are now, really, a year later. It’s like John said, it keeps coming back. It won’t leave us alone.’
I looked at the ground around our feet. Grass. Moss. Bog. That was it.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said. ‘No stone, nothing.’
‘No Gideon either,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think more and more. There’s nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There’s just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.’
‘And yet you say you saw the stone,’ I said.
‘I think I saw it,’ she said. ‘That’s all I have from that night – a maybe. I might have seen it. That’s not enough. It’s not real.’
‘So what’s real?’ I said.
‘My children,’ she said without hesitation. ‘John and me. We’ll either sort ourselves out or we won’t but we both want the best for our children. That’s the only reality that counts.’
We went back to the path and began to retrace our steps through the woods. I realised that she’d said everything she wanted to say, but I couldn’t help asking one last question.
‘Do you think any of what Gideon said was true? About the Devil, I mean?’
She said, ‘Well, he didn’t lie about us, did he? But then from what you’re telling me it turns out that he did. But why would he make up a story like that about the Devil? Why would he lie about that? He had nothing to gain by it.’
I waited for her to answer my question, and she knew I was waiting. She shook her head and carried on walking. After that the only words she said to me were when we got back to the car and I offered her a lift home. ‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’ll walk. Goodbye, Mr Caithness.’
So ends Harry’s report. And so ends this strange narrative. As you can see, I did decide to publish, and I repeat what I said at the beginning, that this is the complete and – almost – unedited testament of Gideon Mack. The only thing that may frustrate the sleuths among you is that, following the advice of my lawyer, I have been obliged to alter some of the names of the people and places involved in these affairs. I regret this, but it was deemed to be not merely prudent but essential. I had received a communication from the Montrose solicitor, Finlay Stewart, acting not only on behalf of the trustees of the Monimaskit Care Home but also as the late Gideon Mack’s executor, suggesting that we come to some suitable financial arrangement with regard to the publication of his memoir and that some discretion regarding its contents would also be appropriate. Mr Stewart was the one remaining participant in all this business that I wished Harry had interviewed, but that interview never took place. I myself have spoken by telephone to Mr Stewart on several occasions, but he has always refused to enter into any discussion of Gideon Mack and his affairs that does not pertain directly and exclusively to the contents of his will or the publication of his testament. I regret, therefore, that no further light is to be shed on this story from that quarter, but you may rest assured that every copy sold of The Testament of Gideon Mack will in a small but not insignificant way benefit the residents of the Monimaskit Care Home.
I spoke to Harry Caithness on the telephone the day after receiving his report. We talked it over, and then he told me what he had done after parting from Elsie Moffat. He deemed it to be strictly outwith the bounds of his remit, but he wanted to tell me about it anyway. He got in his car and drove the few miles inland to the Black Jaws.
‘I thought you’d have wanted me to do it, Patrick,’ he said, ‘and if you ever go to Monimaskit yourself you’ll have to go and look at the place. It’s incredible. You wander along this muddy path, and it all seems very unexciting, and then you start to hear this roaring noise. And the closer you get, the louder the roaring gets, until finally there’s this wooden walkway and a bridge over the ravine, and you can stand on it and look down.’
‘And what can you see?’ I asked.
He didn’t say anything. I thought for a moment we’d been cut off.
‘Harry?’ I said. ‘What did you see?’
It was almost not Harry’s voice at the other end of the phone. It was as if he were talking in his sleep, or as if it were an actor playing the part of Harry. He said, ‘There’s this permanent mist of water droplets in the air, like an almost invisible veil or a film between you and the bottom of the chasm. And “film” is the right word because the light plays on it, there are these fragments of rainbow everywhere, and through them you see shapes and images shifting among the projecting trees and in the shadows of the cliffs. If you look for a while you become mesmerised, you start to see a whole world of things. God, I saw such a lot of stuff down there. But of all the things I saw the only ones I can remember are these. I saw a dog scrabbling, trying to get to safety, and not knowing what it was escaping from except noise and water and cliff. And then I saw a man falling into that horrible place, and it was like it was me falling out of myself. I’d gone there for a purpose, or he’d gone there for a purpose, but there was no purpose left, and then he’d slipped and fallen. And I watched him fall, and it was as if I’d fallen, I felt like I’d lost a part of myself. I tell you, it was the strangest feeling. It was as if I’d watched myself go to my own death.’