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arrogance of certain members of the press. I remember you quite well, Mr Finn. I remember you in Albuquerque, and that you said you’d like to kill me. You should know that I will be in control of the end of my life. It will be a more beautiful, spectacular and memorable end than someone of your calibre could comprehend. And be glad! You will know when it happens! Because when I take my life I intend to take your peace of mind with me . I will, Mr Finn, in the final hour, run rings around you.”
    The Fortean Times was not pleased. “You’ll end up selling space on the hatch, match and dispatch column at the Crosby Herald ,” said Finn happily, while the magazine’s legal department was girding its loins for a fight. But the summons never came. We waited. We all held our breath. Nothing happened. Weeks went by. Months. After almost a year my curiosity got the better of me. I wrote to the PO box on the letter asking if Malachi was going to pursue the ‘conversation raised in your last letter’. No reply. I waited weeks and wrote again. “Looking forward to hearing from you.” Still no reply. On it went, letter after letter, and nothing but silence from Pig Island. Eventually, after six months, I got a curt little note from the treasurer: ‘Dear Mr Finn. Sorry to inform you, but Pastor Dove is no longer with us.“
    “No longer with us,” I asked Finn. “What does that mean?”
    “Dunno. Topped himself, probably. And if he’s dead I’m glad.”
    “He said his death was going to be memorable. Remember? Said we’d all know about it. Me especially. Said he was going to take my peace of mind with him.”
    “Well?” said Finn. “Has he?”
    I paused. “Don’t think so. Don’t feel any different. I mean, I’d like to know how he killed himself. I’d like to know if he went back on his manifesto, how he made it memorable, cos I always had this idea it was going to be somewhere public, you know? Somewhere everyone would see him. He’s a showman.”
    “You’ll have to find his body. That’s the only way to find out.”
    “Yeah. And I think it’s out on some shag-awful island in Scotland.”
    After that I went on for twenty years as a freelance journalist, but I never really took one eye off Pig Island. I did my paranormal work, and hackwork by the yard, but if anything came up on the Western Isles of Scotland, I’d be there. Which is how I came to do the Eigg revolution. And how I got invited, at last, on to Pig Island. Weird to think of Dove’s body out there somewhere on this silent island. Weird to think what the Ministries might have done with his body. Built a mausoleum, maybe. Or left it lying in state for people to come and see, like Lenin or Jeremy Bentham. In a glass box somewhere out in those trees.
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
     
    I crossed the clipped lawn in silence and set off along a small path that passed the backs of the cottages. Everything was neat and ordered—wheelie-bins lined up neatly against walls, a large recycling bin with flies circling its opening, and a shed where a ride-on mower sat with its bonnet folded open, piles of yellow gas tanks stacked beyond it. Nothing odd there. The path left the cottages, entered the trees. I could feel in the back of my legs that the land had begun to climb slightly.
    Over the years I’d done a lot of work in the States, trailing evangelists, watching mad-haired women in housecoats draw UFOs in trailerpark dust—and that morning on Pig Island I was suddenly reminded of a wood I’d visited on that long trip. It was in Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, and I was interested because the local residents had had the shits put up them by someone sneaking into the wood at night and decorating all the trees for a half a square mile with tiny, ruby-eyed voodoo dolls. I only found out later that a killer had been operating in those woods at the same time. A killer of children. No one ever worked out for sure if the dolls were connected with the