Pig Island Read Free

up with her job—a receptionist at a London clinic—besotted by the media-whore neurosurgeon who ran the place (you guessed I don’t like him, right?). The last thing I expected was for her to want to leave London. But one minute I say, “I’m coming to Scotland,” next thing she’s on the web looking for holiday cottages.
    She found a crappy one-bed bungalow on Craignish Peninsula that my budget stretched to. It was hot and unventilated and Lexie slept restlessly. The night I got back from the beach she was already in bed, turning over in her sleep, whimpering and pushing at the pillow. I got in silently and lay next to her, staring up at the ceiling. Tomorrow I’d be on Pig Island. I needed to think about what I was chasing. I was going to have to play it dead carefully. Going to have to concentrate, be ready for anything.
    The Psychogenic Healing Ministries wanted me at their Positive Living Centre on Pig Island because of Eigg, the little Hebridean island fifty miles to the north. They hadn’t said it, but I knew it anyway. On Eigg the tenants had raised the money to buy the island from the owner. They got donations from everywhere, all over the country—even the National Lottery. Booted old Schellenberg and Maruma out. And how did they manage that? Good publicity. Simple as that. Someone was there to spread their story to the world. And that someone was me. I’d been there—helped break the story in the press. How I saw it now was the Psychogenic Healing Ministries probably had some legal hassle they wanted to raise money for. Thought I could help. If they’d known I had history with their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, if they’d known that eighteen years ago I’d written an article on him under the name Joe Finn, that he’d been so arsed off about it he’d tried to sue me for libel, I’d never have got even a little bit close to Pig Island. But, like I said, canny bastard, me.
    I lay awake half the night ticking off kit in my head: MP3 player, camera, batteries, spare camera card, phone … Didn’t get to kip until three in the morning and the next day I was on edge. After breakfast, when I’d packed and was ready to set off for Pig Island, I got the laptop out one last time.
    I never had found out what came first—the rumours that the Psychogenic Healing Ministries were practising Satanism, or the video. But when the public saw it they made up their mind it was an image of the devil, brought down on to Pig Island by the Satanic ritual of the PHMs. A great steaming pile of bollocks, naturally, but even I had to admit there was something dead creepy about the video.
    First of all, it wasn’t trick photography. It had been through every AV specialist unit in the country, passed every test, been torn apart frame by frame, but even with all that gadgetry thrown at it, it kept coming up clean over and over again. Whoever had cooked up this little bit of chicanery hadn’t used trick photography: something had definitely been on the island beach that hot 18 July two years ago.
    That morning I played it again on my laptop. I sat forward on the edge of my seat, concentrating hard. I’d seen it a thousand times and knew every frame. It started off kind of ordinary, with the camera lingering on the horizon out to sea, tilting gently as the single-engined boat bobbed on the waves in the Firth of Lorn. I dragged the RealPlayer toggle to the bit where a shout went up on the boat. This was the exact moment when one of the other tourists saw something moving on the island. A few indistinct shouts came from the TV—a lot of camera movement as the surprised tourist whipped the videocam sideways, taking in one or two shocked faces on the boat, then focused across the bay on an indeterminate line of green-brown—the seaward shoreline of Pig Island. Someone close to the camera spoke. The words were totally unintelligible because of the wind on the soundtrack, but the BBC unit had added sub-titled dialogue to my