The Testament of Gideon Mack Read online

  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, h
owever, 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?”’