James Robertson

 

THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Robertson is the author of two previous novels, The Fanatic (2000) and Joseph Knight (2003). The latter was awarded the two major Scottish literary awards in 2003/4 – the Saltire Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. He has also published stories, poetry, anthologies and essays. In 2006 he was selected for a prestigious Creative Scotland award and was also nominated for a Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland award. The Testament of Gideon Mack was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year award.

By the same author

Close & Other Stories

The Ragged Man’s Complaint

Sound Shadow (poetry)

Scottish Ghost Stories

Voyage of Intent: Sonnets and Essays from

the Scottish Parliament

The Fanatic

Joseph Knight

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK

‘In the hands of great writers the unlikeliest stories are generally the most rewarding. What Robertson produces here is a parable of organized religion, the supernatural and mental illness … he pulls it off with aplomb’ Guardian

‘James Robertson is one of Scotland’s finest novelists … artful and lyrical, nothing is ever what it seems in this beguiling and subversivetale. Gideon Mack gets right under your skin. That’s what happens when you are under the influence of a master storyteller’ Sunday Herald

‘Great gothic stuff in the tradition of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson’ Big Issue

‘Robertson’s Devil is a sublimely ambiguous, haunting character … It is a fabulous fable, encapsulating the last fifty years of Scottish history while simultaneously being a parable about redemption, judgement and fidelity’ Scotland on Sunday

‘A hugely gripping tale and a fascinating examination of the difference between faith and belief’ Financial Times

‘A Devil for our day and age … Part Dostoevsky, part Flann O’Brien, Robertson’s creation becomes a comment on the diabolical in fiction, and a fascinating addition to its colourful gallery’ Globe & Mail

‘Gripping, vividly evocative … Robertson has surpassed all expectations’ The List

‘James Robertson is a brilliant novelist. His novels arrive to a reader as fully-formed, preoccupying and astonishing as the Stone arrives in this book. Very few writers are as brave in dealing head-on in their fictions with the truth, and it’s a long time since I read a novel in which the contemporary notions of faith and belief were so frankly tested’ Ali Smith

BLACK ROCK OF KILTEARN

They named it Aultgraat – Ugly Burn,

This water through the crevice hurled

Scouring the entrails of the world –

Not ugly in the rising smoke

That clothes it with a rainbow cloak.

But slip a foot on frost-spiked stone

Above this rock-lipped Phlegethon

And you shall have

The Black Rock of Kiltearn

For tombstone, grave

And trumpet of your resurrection.

Andrew Young

Thanks to Natasha Fairweather and Judy Moir for their support and advice

‘And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.’

Matthew 13:57

‘The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’

Jonah 2:5

‘I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy notions on these subjects… Heaven have Mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.’

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Prologue

In presenting to the world the following strange narrative, I find it necessary to offer a word of explanation as to its provenance. Being a firm believer in the principle of the division of labour, I do not usually divert myself from the business of publishing books in order to write prologues to them. However, Mr Harry Caithness having declined to provide an introduction – on the grounds, he says, that he has more than cancelled any debt he owed me by (a) sending me a copy of the original manuscript in the first place and (b) submitting the report which forms the bulk of the epilogue – I am left with no option but to write this myself.

Sir Walter Scott, with whose work, as you will read, the Reverend Gideon Mack was intimately familiar, once described publishing as ‘the most ticklish and unsafe and hazardous of all professions scarcely with the exception of horse-jockeyship’. I have this salutary warning typed up on a three-by-five-inch card taped to the wall beside my desk. Whenever I fall to wondering why I persist in trying to make a living in this profession, and whether some other form of gambling might not offer a greater return for less effort, I read those words of Sir Walter – penned long before he himself fell so heavily at the high fence of publishing – to remind myself that it was ever thus. Then I take a deep breath and carry on.

So it is with this book. One voice in my head tells me that it is a mere passing curiosity in which few will have any interest; a waste of my time, the printer’s ink and the forests of Finland. Another whispers that it is outlandish enough to attract a cult readership, if only that readership can be identified. A third – the voice, perhaps, of my conscience – deplores the exploitation, for commercial gain, of the outpourings of a ruined man. A fourth loudly protests at this: the man is dead and therefore cannot be exploited, and the book, though some may dismiss it as a tissue of lies or the fantasy of a damaged mind, is a genuine document with its own relevance for our times. All these and other arguments have jostled in my brain when I have pondered Gideon Mack’s story. In the end, what has persuaded me to publish it is its very peculiarity: in twenty years, I have come across nothing like it. It is not a fiction, for Gideon Mack undoubtedly existed; yet nor, surely, can it be treated as fact. What, then, is it? It is because I am unable to answer this question that I consider it worthy of the public’s attention, so that others can make up their own minds. But first I must recount how it came into my hands.

One Monday morning at the start of October 2004, I received a phone call out of the blue from my old friend Harry Caithness. I was sitting at my desk sipping my third coffee of the day, turning the pages of the latest edition of our Scotch whisky guide, A Dram in Your Pocket, newly back from the printers. It looked very handsome, all the more so for being a reliable mover, and I anticipated some healthy sales in the run-up to Christmas.

I had not heard from Harry for a while, but I recognised his gravelly voice at once. He is a freelance journalist, based in Inverness but roaming from there east along the Moray Firth, and to Fort William and all points north and west. He picks up stories of every kind and sells them to the highest bidder. He is what one might call – and I hope he will take this as a compliment – one of the old school. He smokes, drinks too much, eats unhealthy food at unhealthy hours and doesn’t respond well to sunlight. But he is a first-class reporter, hard-headed enough not to let go of a good story yet sensitive enough to deal with people in such a way as to secure it. He has also written a book, Crimes and Mysteries of the Scottish Highlands, which I published. It has done very well over the years. I paid Harry a decent advance for it, and twice a year he still receives a royalty cheque, which, as he says, would pay for a week’s holiday if he ever took one. To me it is business, but Harry used to say, when we spoke on the phone, that he owed me something. He doesn’t say this any longer.

I asked him how he was, and he said he was fine. We might at this juncture have exchanged further pleasantries along these lines, but Harry doesn’t do pleasantries. Instead, he came straight to the point. He had something for me, he said. It was somewhat sensitive, but he thought it would be of interest. Had I ever come across a character called Gideon Mack?

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it, and I said so.

‘He was a minister,’ Harry said. ‘Church, not state. He went missing earlier this year.’

He reminded me of what had happened. There had been quite a bit in the papers at the time, and as Harry talked I recalled some of it. The Reverend Gideon Mack had vanished from his Church of Scotland manse one day in January, and nothing had been heard or seen of him since. Before his disappearance Mack had gone spectacularly off the rails, causing something of a stir in Church circles and in Monimaskit, the small town on the east coast which was his charge. I suspected that Harry was going to tell me that he had turned up and wanted to sell me his life-story – a prospect, I confess, that did not fill me with eager anticipation – but I was wrong. Mack was still missing, but something of his had turned up, and Harry said he thought it had my name on it. When I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘Well, it’s something he’s written. A kind of memoir, or a confession, I suppose you’d call it. I think you should take a look. I read it over the weekend. I’m going to stick it in the post to you.’

I asked him how he had got hold of it, and what exactly Mack had confessed to. ‘Quite a lot, for a minister,’ Harry said. ‘Adultery, for example, and meeting the Devil.’ This second item also rang a bell. I asked Harry again how he had come by the thing.

‘One of my contacts in the Northern Constabulary photocopied it for me,’ he said.

‘That was decent of them,’ I said drily. ‘Why did they do that?’

‘Never you mind,’ Harry said. ‘I’m a journalist. I have to protect my sources.’

I remonstrated at this, and he relented and told me that he happened to have been at police headquarters in Inverness, chatting to some of his acquaintances there, and the Mack missing person case had come up in the conversation. ‘Your man’s memoir, autobiography, confession, whatever you want to call it, was sitting on a desk,’ Harry said. ‘There was a photo of him too. Now I’d actually seen him once before, in the flesh, years ago. He ran a marathon up here, in Elgin, back in about 1990, and raised a lot of money for charity. I saw him crossing the finishing-line. So we were talking about all that and they let me have a look at the manuscript, and I hinted I’d like to read it at my leisure. They’d made several photocopies, so it was almost in the public domain anyway. I took it home to read, and it was so strange I thought of you straight away.’

‘Thanks, Harry,’ I said.

‘No problem,’ he replied. And then he told me the rest of the story.

A few days earlier, a Mrs Nora MacLean, who took in guests for bed and breakfast at her cottage in the village of Dalwhinnie, some fifty miles south of Inverness, had appeared at the local police station in a state of agitation, and had handed in a hold-all containing a man’s clothing and a heavy padded envelope. No identifying marks were on the clothes, which consisted of a pair of carpet slippers, some socks and underwear, a tee-shirt and a handkerchief. The envelope contained a bulky manuscript. The bag had been left by a gentleman who had stayed with Mrs MacLean back in January. She described him as quite tall, very thin and slightly stooped, aged about fifty, with long, unruly hair in need of a good trim, and a pronounced limp in his right leg. He had stayed for two nights, the 15th and 16th to be precise. He had given his name as Mr Robert Kirk.

Mrs MacLean was a simple soul, it seems. She feared some official or officious connection between the Northern Constabulary and the Inland Revenue and was therefore embarrassed to admit that, although she had written Mr Kirk’s name on the calendar when he had phoned about the room, she had not asked him to fill in her visitors’ book and thus had no record of his address. He had not booked in advance, but, on the afternoon of the 15th, had phoned from the shop in the village where she kept a card in the window. He said he had come by train from Perth. He was wearing stout boots in good condition and outdoor clothing suitable for walking in the hills. His weatherproof jacket was light blue in colour. Mrs MacLean frequently had walkers and climbers to stay, so none of this was remarkable, although that week the weather was wet and misty, far from ideal for those activities. She did wonder how able a walker Mr Kirk could be, considering the limp, but felt it was not her business to inquire on this subject.

The conversation they had on his arrival, as far as she could recall, and which she related to the police officer who took her statement, went like this:

MRS MACLEAN: ‘You’ll be here for the hills, I suppose.’

MR KIRK: ‘Yes, I hope to do some walking in the hills.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘It’s not really the weather for it, but it can change so quickly.’

MR KIRK: ‘Yes. I’ll just hope for the best.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘There’s an electric fire in your bedroom and a chair and table. You’re welcome to stay in the house if the weather doesn’t improve. There are some books in the sitting room if you want something to read. There isn’t a television in your room but there’s one in the sitting room, and you can use that if you want; the reception isn’t always that good, though.’

MR KIRK: ‘Thank you, but I won’t bother. I have some work to do if I can’t go out.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘Oh, well, make yourself at home, and just ask if you want anything. What time would you like your breakfast?’

MR KIRK: ‘About eight o’clock or half-past?’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘Half-past eight is fine. Do you like porridge and a cooked breakfast?’

MR KIRK: ‘Porridge would be fine, but no cooked breakfast, thank you.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘Oh, but if you’re going hill-walking you’ll want a good breakfast to keep you going.’

MR KIRK: ‘No, thank you, just some porridge.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘I can make you up some sandwiches if you go out. And a flask of hot soup.’

MR KIRK: ‘That won’t be necessary. I may not go out at all.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘Well, I see you don’t have a rucksack. You would need a rucksack if you were taking sandwiches with you.’

MR KIRK: ‘I don’t think I’ll need a rucksack.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘I don’t do an evening meal, but you can get something to eat at the hotel or the café along the road.’

MR KIRK: ‘Yes, thank you.’

MRS MACLEAN: ‘If there’s anything else you want, just you ask.’

MR KIRK: ‘I will. I really don’t want anything except a bed for two nights. I have some work to complete. If you don’t mind, I’ll just go to my room now and have a rest. I’m a wee bit tired.’

According to Harry, the policeman must have thought this was all potentially useful information, because he had written it down verbatim – it was in the report that Harry had also managed to get a copy of, which he was reading to me down the phone (and which he later sent to me).

I couldn’t see the point of all this, and I said so, but Harry told me to be patient, so I was.

That exchange was the longest that took place between Mrs MacLean and her guest during the two days of his stay. She served him black coffee and porridge for breakfast on both mornings, and tried to engage him in further conversation, but while perfectly polite he made it clear that he preferred to communicate only as far as was required for the transaction of business between them. This, Mrs MacLean said, ‘put her neither up nor down’. She was quite used to some people being less friendly than others, and he was probably shy.

Mrs MacLean had no other guests staying at this time and, being a widow, as she told the police, lived alone. Although Mr Kirk was rather withdrawn, there did not appear to her anything especially strange or unusual about him, apart perhaps from the limp and his unkempt hair. She was not in any way afraid or distrustful of him. Indeed, on the second night of his stay she went out to visit a friend, leaving him alone in the house. Apart from going out for a newspaper on the morning of the 16th, and for a short walk that afternoon, he never left his room except for breakfast and to use the bathroom. Once, when she took him a cup of tea – which he accepted, she thought, more to make her go away than because he really wanted it – she found him reading from a large pile of handwritten sheets of paper, apparently making additions and corrections to them. She thought at the time that he might be a writer working on a book, a deduction which, as it turned out, was not so very wide of the mark.

On the day of his departure Kirk paid for his accommodation in cash. The bill was thirty-six pounds. He produced two twenty-pound notes and refused the change. When Mrs MacLean tried to insist, he suggested she give the four pounds’ difference to her favourite charity. He then returned to his room in order, she assumed, to pack his belongings.

Mrs MacLean was busy in the kitchen, and it was some time, perhaps half an hour, before it occurred to her that he must still be in his room. She wanted to change the sheets on his bed, so went and knocked on the door. There being no reply, she knocked louder and called out, ‘Are you all right, Mr Kirk?’ After a further silence, she opened the door. The room was empty. She went to the front door of the cottage and opened it. It was brighter that morning, with patches of blue sky among the clouds, and she could see the whole length of the road, but there was no sign of her guest. It seems that he must have slipped out while she was in the kitchen. She never set eyes on him again.

Once again I interrupted Harry to ask why he was telling me all this, and once again he told me to have patience. ‘I’m just giving you the background,’ he said. ‘You need it, believe me.’

At the time Mrs MacLean assumed that Robert Kirk had taken his hold-all and its contents with him. Mrs MacLean ‘kept herself to herself’, as she put it, and, while she was well acquainted with events in the village, did not take a great interest in the wider affairs of the world. The disappearance of a minister of the Church of Scotland, around the time that Mr Kirk stayed at her cottage, was widely reported in the press and on radio and television, but Mrs MacLean paid little attention to this news, and did not make any connection between her guest and the missing minister. It was only in September, when she was preparing to redecorate the room he had used, that she discovered the hold-all placed on an upper shelf in the built-in cupboard. Subsequent guests, presumably thinking it belonged there, had not interfered with it. She took it down, opened it, and found the padded envelope containing a quantity of loose A4 sheets of close-written handwriting. This recalled to Mrs MacLean her guest of the previous January. She began to read the document. A neighbour arrived at the door just then, and Mrs MacLean showed it to her. Coming across the phrase ‘To the world at large I was just Gideon Mack’ on the first page, the neighbour remembered the story that had been in the news nine months before, and advised Mrs MacLean to go straight to the police.

‘That’s the reason,’ Harry said, ‘why the local bobby made his report in so much detail. As soon as he saw the name he knew he was on to something. There’d been a notice sent round all the local stations back in the winter, when they were looking for Mack. HQ here in Inverness took it up and they’ve reinstated the search. I reckon it’s only a matter of time now before they find him.’

‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘Mr Kirk was Mr Mack.’

‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘They showed her a photo, and she said it was him. It’s pretty likely that when he checked out of Mrs MacLean’s he set off into the hills. He was dressed for it anyway.’

Armed with this new information, and having read through the manuscript for clues, the police were carrying out a detailed search of the hills around Dalwhinnie, and in particular – for reasons that will become clear to the reader in due course – the massive and remote Ben Alder. There was a strong indication, Harry told me, that that was where Mack had been heading.

I made the obvious observation that he wouldn’t still be there after all these months, not unless he were dead, and Harry said that it wouldn’t be the first time a corpse had been found on Ben Alder. He reminded me of a chapter we’d inserted into the most recent edition of Crimes and Mysteries of the Scottish Highlands. Back in the mid-1990s a body had been found there with a bullet wound to the chest, and an old-fashioned gun lying near by. The body had lain for months, buried under the snow. On that occasion the police had taken more than a year to establish that the dead man was a young Frenchman who had disappeared from his home near Paris and chosen that remote spot to end his life.

Harry thought it highly likely that Gideon Mack would also be found there. When I read what Mack had written, he said, I would see why he was so sure. He would post the document to me first-class, so that I’d get it in the morning.

‘You think I might want to publish it?’ I asked.

‘It has possibilities,’ he replied, and rang off.

The photocopied manuscript duly arrived the next day, Tuesday 5th October, 2004. It consisted – consists, in fact, for I have it before me as I compose this – of 310 pages of A4 paper, numbered, very neatly written for the most part, in black ink, with deletions and additions clearly marked, extra passages inserted at the margins and on the reverse of many sheets, and the whole thing divided into sections headed by Roman numerals. Only towards the end of the document does the handwriting deteriorate, although it is never illegible. (Of late, looking at it again, I have mused if some of the corrections and deletions might not be the work of another hand, but the style is so closely matched that I am inclined to ascribe these variations to tiredness or stress on the part of the author.)^* I started to read. After twenty minutes I went out into the main office and told my assistant to hold all my calls. I sat and read that manuscript for the rest of the day.

The next morning, with impeccable timing, the newspapers reported that human remains had been found on Ben Alder. By that time I had done some research on the internet. There was quite a lot about Gideon Mack. I have since acquired a good deal more information, so that the following gives a pretty fair summary of the background to his disappearance.

The Reverend Gideon Mack, minister of Monimaskit, a small town on the east coast of Scotland between Dundee and Aberdeen, seems to have left his manse on the weekend of 10th–11th January 2004. He had not been performing his official duties for some months, otherwise his absence would have been noticed immediately at the Sunday service. As it was, it was not until Wednesday 14th January that the alarm was raised. Police in Perth, checking up on a red Renault that had been collecting parking tickets for several days in a street close to the railway station, found that it was registered in Mr Mack’s name. Inquiries were made, and when a colleague, the Reverend Lorna Sprott, expressed concerns for his safety and wellbeing, a nationwide search was instigated. No trace of him was found. The fact that he had abandoned his car in Perth, perhaps in favour of public transport, suggested that he did not want to be located. After a while he became just another missing persons statistic.

Before that happened, however, the Scottish media got hold of the story, but the diverting embellishments of the tabloid press need not concern us here. The facts concerning Gideon Mack were these: in September of 2003, he had been involved in an accident a few miles from Monimaskit, at a river gorge known as the Black Jaws. Attempting to save a dog (belonging to the Reverend Lorna Sprott, as it happened) which had got into difficulty, he had slipped and plunged more than a hundred feet into the water below. A rescue was attempted, but it proved impossible to lower anybody to the bottom of the gorge, and the river, the Keldo Water, was too dangerous to be entered from downstream. It was assumed that the minister must have perished, either killed by the fall or drowned. Given that the gorge is nearly half a mile long, and so narrow and impenetrable that the river is believed at one point to go completely underground before re-emerging and continuing on its way to the coast, there was little prospect of his body ever being recovered.

However, three days after this incident, while the community was still coming to terms with its loss, the body of Mr Mack was found washed up on the bank of the Keldo a short distance downstream of the Black Jaws. Not only had the water apparently carried him through its unknown course, but, even more amazingly, he was alive, and without a broken bone in his body. True, he was badly battered, he had a large bruise on the side of his head, and his right leg had sustained some kind of internal damage which left him with a severe limp, but he had somehow survived three nights outdoors and a subterranean journey that no creature, except a fish, could have been expected to survive. He was taken to hospital in Dundee, where he remained unconscious but stable for a day and a half. When he came round he astonished medical staff by making such a speedy recovery that less than a week after the accident he was discharged and sent home.

Back in Monimaskit, Mr Mack convalesced at his manse and seemed in no great hurry to resume his pastoral duties. It was at this time that he began to talk to some people of his experience. He claimed that he had been rescued from the river by a stranger, a man inhabiting the caverns through which he said it passed, and that he had been looked after by this individual. This seemed improbable enough, but Mr Mack went on to assert that this person was none other than the Devil, and that they had had several long conversations in the course of the three days. These remarks were taken by the minister’s friends as indication of a severe shock to his system, and possibly of damage to the brain sustained during his ordeal. Others, however, were less concerned with his health than with the injury his words might do to the good name of the Church of Scotland.

A few days later, Mr Mack, despite his seeming physical and mental frailty, insisted on taking the funeral service of an old friend, an inhabitant of Monimaskit, conducting the event in a way which some considered not just unorthodox and irreverent, but incompatible with the role of a Church of Scotland minister. After the interment he publicly repeated his story that he had met and conversed with the Devil. Finally, at the gathering in the church hall which followed, he made declarations of such a scandalous nature that the Monimaskit Kirk Session had no option but to refer the matter to the local Presbytery.

The procedures of the Presbyterian court system are complex, but need not long detain us. Presbytery, having heard the evidence, invited Mr Mack to defend himself. He admitted the truth of the allegations made against him, but denied that he had committed any offence. Presbytery decided to suspend him forthwith pending further investigation and consultation with the Church’s legal advisers, until such time as Mr Mack could be brought before a committee of Presbytery for trial. A libel was drawn up and served on him, but no date had been set for the case to be heard when Mr Mack’s disappearance brought all proceedings to a halt.

This is the text of the relevant part of the libel served on Gideon Mack:

Gideon Mack, minister of the Old Kirk of Monimaskit, in the parish of Monimaskit, you are indicted at the instance of John Gless, Session Clerk at the same Old Kirk of Monimaskit, Peter Macmurray, Elder of the same, and of [various other names] that on divers dates in September 2003 you uttered wild, incredible and false statements concerning an alleged meeting and conversation between yourself and another person, supposedly the Devil or Satan; and that in reporting this alleged conversation you made remarks contrary to the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith and the Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, which as an ordained minister of this Church you have sworn to uphold; and that on 22nd September 2003, while conducting a funeral service at the Old Kirk of Monimaskit before a large congregation, which included young children, you introduced unchristian rituals into the proceedings; and that you condoned the use of an illegal drug and were in possession of a quantity of the same; and that you later used profane, blasphemous and scandalous language in the Old Kirk hall, making reference among other things to having had carnal relations with a married woman of the parish; and that you allowed alcohol to be supplied on Church property on this occasion in contravention of the General Assembly’s ruling on this matter; and that your whole conduct was an abrogation of your responsibility as a minister of the Church to perform such duties with dignity and sobriety; all this as detailed in the appendix to this libel, and as attested by the witnesses named and listed hereinafter …

In due course, through dental records and other evidence, the remains found on Ben Alder were identified as those of the Reverend Gideon Mack. A forensic investigation was carried out and a report made to the Procurator Fiscal. It seemed likely that the body had lain undiscovered for several months, and this suggested that death had occurred not long after Mr Mack’s stay at Dalwhinnie. Due to the body’s advanced state of decay, it was not possible to establish the precise cause of death, but there were no signs of the involvement of a third party. The Procurator Fiscal ruled that there were no suspicious circumstances, and the remains were buried without any kind of ceremony in a cemetery in Inverness. Apart from his elderly mother, who suffered from senile dementia and was quite unaware of these events, Gideon Mack had no relatives, but it was notable that neither any of his friends nor any representatives of the Church attended the interment.

Harry and I talked on the phone a few more times during October 2004. There was another flurry of interest in the press, and much speculation as to why Gideon Mack had taken himself off to Ben Alder. Some said that he must have made a deliberate choice to end his life, others that he had been mentally unstable and hadn’t known what he was doing. People in Monimaskit were interviewed, and a few offered their opinions, none of which was particularly illuminating. Meanwhile, I was reading and rereading the manuscript Harry had sent me. I felt I had access to information that nobody else had. The police had their copies, of course, and the original, but, having established the identity of the corpse, their professional interest in the case was over. Mine, on the other hand, was only just beginning.

Harry had, however, picked up another couple of stories from the police, which he passed on to me. I include these here less in expectation of their being taken seriously by any rational reader than because they are typical of the kind of stories that spring up around almost any unusual death. When it was announced at the end of September that a fresh search for the missing man was to be undertaken, and that this search would concentrate on the Ben Alder area, three new witnesses contacted the police. The first two of these were a Mr Sean Dobie and a Miss Rachel Annand. They had been walking, in mid-August 2004, from the train station at Corrour, via Loch Ossian and Loch Pattack, to Dalwhinnie, a long west–east journey through some of Scotland’s wildest terrain. They had stayed a night at the youth hostel at Loch Ossian and set off early to make the journey of some twenty miles to their destination. It was a fine day, and they could see their route stretching out through the mountains far in front of them. Around midday, as they skirted the north-western flank of Ben Alder, they saw a man walking on the track about a mile ahead. He appeared to be moving quite slowly, and they began to close the distance. They could see that he was a tall, thin man with long, straggly hair, that he was wearing a light blue jacket and that he was limping. They wondered if he was in difficulty. There came a slight rise in the path, followed by a dip and another rise. As Mr Dobie and Miss Annand came over the first rise they saw, very distinctly, the man labouring up the second one. They assumed that they would overtake him in the next two or three minutes. They descended into the dip, climbed up the second rise and – nothing! He had vanished. There was an expanse of moor to their left, and to their right were the slopes of Ben Alder, but in all that vast landscape not a solitary being was to be seen. Mr Dobie and Miss Annand continued on their way, but though they met several other walkers that afternoon, none of them was the man they had seen; nor, when they asked, had anybody else seen him. They puzzled over this incident until they read about the search for Mr Mack, whereupon they reported it to the police.

The other new witness was a Dr Roland Tanner, who was hiking alone from Dalwhinnie to Loch Rannoch via the northern shore of Loch Ericht, a route which again goes through the heart of the country around Ben Alder. This Dr Tanner keeps a journal of his trips. The relevant part of the entry for Sunday 1st August, as transcribed by the police when he contacted them, reads as follows:

Camped beside Benalder cottage. Bothy empty but full of midges so pitched tent. Up at seven having slept well, despite midge bites. Quick breakfast while warding off hundreds of the little bastards. Threatening rain so struck tent and set off. Within quarter mile came upon man sitting on rock. Assumed must have camped near by but no sign of tent, rucksack or other equipment. Passed time of day. No reply, but smiled and raised hand. Something odd about him. Not sure what. Walked on. Had misgivings, wondered if he was all right. Had only gone fifty yards so turned back. He was gone. Retraced steps almost to cottage. No sign, not a trace. Begin to wonder if I should do these walks alone any more. Very peculiar.

Dr Tanner confirmed that the man was wearing a light blue jacket. He could not say whether he limped, as he had not seen him walking. When shown a photograph of Mr Mack, Mr Dobie and Miss Annand had been unable to say with any certainty whether he was the man they had seen: his back had been to them and they had never got right up close to him. Dr Tanner, on the other hand, stated that the man he saw sitting on a rock was an exact likeness of Mr Mack. On both occasions, the police asked, was Mack alone? Yes, said Mr Dobie and Miss Annand, the man they saw was quite alone. Dr Tanner said that had there been anyone else with him he would not have been concerned.

These separate experiences were reported to the police before the discovery of Mr Mack’s remains on 6th October, but had taken place seven months after the likely time, according to the forensic report, of his demise. This had stirred up Harry Caithness’s curiosity. ‘I phoned this guy Tanner,’ he told me. ‘My police friends gave me his details. He’s a medieval historian. He didn’t want to talk to me at first, but I buttered him up, mentioned a few of my favourite climbs. These hill-walking types just can’t resist when you start name-dropping mountains. I said I’d done the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glencoe and he was impressed – he’d done it a couple of years ago. It kind of melted the ice.’

I’d always assumed that the only form of exercise Harry took was lifting pint-glasses from table to mouth. ‘I didn’t know you climbed mountains,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘At least not in reality. But people have devoted entire websites to their Munro-bagging^* experiences. I’ve virtually climbed most of the hard ones. When I was in my prime, you understand. It’s amazing what doors a bit of hill talk can open up. Somebody tells you how they were nearly blown off Ben MacDui, and you tell them about the time you got lost in a blizzard there, and it creates a bond, a buddy thing, you know, and they start spilling all kinds of information. Anyway, after a while I brought up the subject of Gideon Mack and asked Tanner what he thought about the fact that he’d seen a ghost. He wanted to know what I was talking about. I said, “When you saw the man sitting on the stone near the bothy, the man you identified as Gideon Mack, Mack must have been dead for more than six months. So either you made a mistake or you’ve seen a ghost. What do you think of that?”’

‘And what did he say?’ I asked.

‘“I didn’t make a mistake. It was definitely him.” So I said, “Then you saw a ghost.”’

‘And he said?’

‘He didn’t say anything for a while. I said, “Dr Tanner, are you still there?” “Yes,” he says, “I am. I’m thinking.” “What are you thinking?” I asked. “I’m thinking I’m going to go and pour myself a large whisky,” he says. And then he hung up. So much for breaking the ice. He wouldn’t pick the phone up again. I just got his answer-machine after that.’

‘You spooked him,’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘Aye, maybe. Something did anyway. He had no reason to lie. I think he saw somebody. He sounded pretty shaken. I don’t blame him for heading for the whisky.’

Dr Tanner might have been a brilliant historian, but he didn’t sound to me like a very reliable witness. In fact, I said, the whole thing seemed a bit far-fetched. That, Harry said, was why he had contacted me. ‘You’re into ghosts and mysteries and all that stuff.’

I felt obliged to correct him. ‘I publish books on “all that stuff”,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean I believe in it.’

‘Neither did Gideon Mack,’ Harry said, ‘until the stone appeared in the woods.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘The stone in the woods is where it all starts, and from there we move on to the Devil in the cave. Far-fetched, you see. Maybe Mack was just mad and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said, ‘but that’s no argument against publishing his memoir. There are lots of crazy people out there who’ll love it.’

I asked Harry why he had sent the document to me. He said he owed me a favour, and I said he didn’t, and he said all right, but now that I had it, what was I going to do with it? I said I would think about it.

I heard his smoker’s laugh down the line, and he proceeded to give me several reasons why I should publish Gideon Mack’s work. None of them, I should say, reflected well on his understanding of the higher motives of a reputable publisher such as myself. He jocularly suggested that I was imagining a full-page review in Life and Work, the magazine of the Church of Scotland. When I denied this he said that he thought it might become a ‘cult best-seller’, and when I again expressed doubts he said that at least it would be guaranteed lots of sales in and around Monimaskit. ‘It’s probably the biggest thing that’s happened there for a hundred years,’ he said. ‘Their minister wandering off to die in the frozen wastes after chatting with Auld Nick? Plus all the other stuff he was up to? It’ll go like snow off a dyke. Everybody loves a scandal.’

He had a point: everybody, including any publisher worth his salt, does love a scandal. But that same thought prompted another concern.

‘What if someone sues me?’ I said. ‘There’s some fairly hot stuff in there if it’s not true.’

‘True?’ Harry said. ‘Are you kidding me? Do you think the Devil’s going to set his lawyers on to you? The Devil’s advocates,’ he laughed.

‘Very good, Harry,’ I said. ‘I mean what he says about real people. Real people still living in Monimaskit.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Harry said, ‘you live with the threat of being sued every day. You put information out there, knowing that some of it might come back and bite you. Can they sue you for printing the words of a dead man?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to ask my lawyer.’

‘You’ve got the manuscript, or a copy of it: there’s no doubt that Mack wrote it. My understanding is that you can’t libel the dead.’

‘It’s not the dead that bother me,’ I said. ‘Sure, you can’t libel the dead, and you might not be able to sue them for libel, but I bet you can sue their publisher.’

Harry said, ‘Who are you thinking about?’

‘The Moffats,’ I said. ‘Elsie Moffat, specifically.’

‘There’s been plenty about her in the papers already. I haven’t seen her sue anybody. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

But I did worry. Those words of old Sir Walter were up on the wall just a few feet from me. And then there was Gideon Mack’s estate. Although I didn’t then know if his mother was still alive, there would surely be an estate, with all the possible complications that entailed.

‘Harry,’ I said, ‘if I go ahead with this, will you do something for me? I’ll pay you, of course. Cover all your costs.’

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Will you go to Monimaskit and talk to people? Talk to John and Elsie Moffat. Ask them if they thought he was insane. He was their friend, after all. Talk to other people. Talk to Lorna Sprott. Find out what’s true and what isn’t.’

Now it was Harry who hesitated. ‘It’s a bit out of my territory,’ he said. ‘My geographical territory, I mean.’

‘It needs to be done if I’m to publish,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you do it?’ he asked.

‘You’re the journalist,’ I said. ‘That’s your job. You’ll ask the right questions.’

‘The Moffats won’t like it,’ he said. ‘I might get something out of some of the others, but they’re the ones who really won’t like it.’

‘That’s why it needs to be done,’ I said. ‘They’re the crucial ones.’

We knocked this back and forth a bit, and eventually Harry agreed to go to Monimaskit. His findings are recorded in the epilogue at the end of this book, which is the right place for them. All that is left for me to do here is to present this strange and original document, which I have taken the liberty of entitling The Testament of Gideon Mack. This is – almost – my only interference with the actual text. Except for one or two explanatory footnotes I offer no remarks on its contents, and in nearly every other way it remains exactly as it was written by its author. I make no additions, alterations or deletions other than those insisted upon by my legal advisers, and leave every reader to judge it for him or herself.

Patrick Walker

Edinburgh, June 2005

I

When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: yet I was already, in so many ways, the man I would become. I think back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire, but cold I certainly was. There was ice built around my heart, years of it. How could it have been otherwise? The manse at Ochtermill saw to that.

I have walked and run through this world pretending emotions rather than feeling them. Oh, I could feel pain, physical pain, but I had to imagine joy, sorrow, anger. As for love, I didn’t know what it meant. But I learned early to keep myself well disguised. To the world at large I was just Gideon Mack, a dutiful wee boy growing in the shadow of his father and of the Kirk.

As that wee boy I was taught that, solitary though I might be, I was never alone. Always there was one who walked beside me. I could not see him, but he was there, constant at my side. I wanted to know him, to love and be loved by him, but he did not reveal himself. He frightened me. I had neither the courage to reject him nor the capacity to embrace him.

This is the hard lesson of my life: love is not in us from the beginning, like an instinct; love is no more original to human beings than sin. Like sin, it has to be learned.

Then I put away childish things, and for years I thought I saw with the clarity of reason. I did not believe in anything I could not see. I mocked at shadows and sprites. That constant companion was not there at all: I did not believe in him, and he did not reveal himself to me. Yet, through circumstances and through choice, I was to become his servant, a minister of religion. How ironic this is, and yet how natural, as if the path were laid out for me from birth, and though I wandered a little from it, distracted or deluded here and there, yet I was always bound to return to it again.

And all the while this fire was burning deep inside me. I kept it battened down, the door of the furnace tightly shut, because that seemed necessary in order to get through life. I never savoured life for what it was: I only wanted to get to the next stage of it. I wish now I’d taken a little more time, but it is too late for such regrets. I was like the child in the cinema whose chief anticipation lies not in the film but in wondering what he will do after it is over; I was the reader who hurries through a 500-page novel not to see what will happen but simply to get to the end. And now, despite everything, I am there, and for this I must thank that other companion, in whom also I did not believe, but who has shown me a way through the shadows and beyond the shadows.

I have not preached for weeks, yet I am full of texts. If I am a prophet then I have yet to be heard. If I am Jonah, then the fish has vomited me out but nobody believes where I have been: nobody except the one who saved me from the belly of hell. Who am I? I am Gideon Mack, time-server, charlatan, hypocrite, God’s grovelling apologist; the man who saw the Stone, the man that was drowned and that the waters gave back, the mad minister who met with the Devil and lived to tell the tale. And hence my third, non-Scriptural text, for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion? And yet there is peace and sanctuary in religion too – it is the asylum to which all poor crazed sinners may come at last, the door which will always open to us if we can only find the courage to knock.

Few suspected it, but all my life was a lie from the age of nine (when, through deceit, I almost succeeded in killing my father); all my words were spoken with the tongue of a serpent, and what love I gave or felt came from a dissembling heart. Then I saw the Stone, and nothing was the same again. This is my testimony. Read it and believe it, or believe it not. You may judge me a liar, a cheat, a madman, I do not care. I am beyond questions of probity or sanity now. I am at the gates of the realm of knowledge, and one day soon I will pass through them.