Shortly after breakfast on the morning of July 2nd 2018, my partner and I set out from our home on the Isle of Bute, driving along the coast road in the direction of the ferry crossing at Rhubodach, the ‘wee ferry’ that links the north end of the island with the mountains and extensive forests of the Cowal Peninsula. We were off to spend a short holiday on the Isle of Arran, and with the whole day at our disposal we had decided to take the longer and more scenic route via Portavadie and Tarbet, making landfall at the sheltered port of Lochranza with its imposing ruined castle. Scotland and especially the west coast is infamous for its unpredictable weather – returning to Arran in May 2021 we were not as surprised as we might have been to see her highest mountain, Goat Fell, adorned with an impressive crown of snow – but this July morning was luminously bright and clear.
We were excited to be making this trip. Since relocating to western Scotland the year before, this was to be our first visit to our neighbouring island. I was in particularly good spirits; after more than a couple of false starts, I had just finished the first complete draft of the novel that would eventually become The Good Neighbours, a mystery surrounding a familicide on a Scottish island. We were in plenty of time for the ferry and were looking forward to a leisurely morning’s drive. What we were not expecting was to have our way blocked by police cars. As we approached the junction between Shore Road and Ardbeg Road, a woman officer flagged us to a halt and asked us where we were headed, before directing us on to the lower coast road and away from the junction. We glimpsed two more police cars, a number of officers gathered together in a huddled group. We noticed in particular the police tape, sealing the entrance and driveway of a nearby house.
It barely seems credible now, given what had taken place, but we actually made jokes about this at the time, laughing about how the cops must have had to send away to the mainland for the scene-of-crime kit. The Isle of Bute is a remarkably safe place to live. People here really do still leave their houses and cars unlocked when they go to the shops. A recent incident in which a pensioner had his wallet snatched saw locals apprehending the culprit and delivering him to the police station. The idea that a major violent crime might have taken place here did not cross our minds. The sight of police cars and police tape were disturbing and discomfiting, but if I suspected anything it was a private tragedy: a suicide, or possibly an elderly resident found dead from natural causes, alone at home. Such saddening but low-key events do not always make the local papers, and I doubted we would ever discover anything more. We continued along our way, the matter receding from our minds with every mile. By the time we boarded our third ferry at Claonaig we had stopped talking about it.
This was soon to change. Shortly after we arrived at our guest house in Brodick, I received a text from a friend in Manchester, asking if I had heard any more details of what had happened on the Isle of Bute; our obscure and northerly island had made the national news. I checked the media feeds on my phone, searching for more information, and quickly learned that a six-year-old girl, Alesha MacPhail, had been reported missing from her home – the same house we had seen cordoned off by police tape as we drove towards the ferry crossing four hours earlier. The news reports gave away little, stating only that ‘an extensive police search’ was already underway. It was not until a couple of hours later that the police released their statement: Alesha’s body had been found by a member of the public, in woodland less than a mile from where she had been taken.
As the initial horror began to sink in, I noted how the police did not appear to be making any attempt to stop or question people leaving the island, a fact that seemed to suggest they already had a suspect in view – not a tourist, not a random killing, but someone who lived on the island with nowhere to run to. And so it proved; just days later, as we were returning home, an arrest was made. Alongside the initial relief that the killer had been found came an increased sense of horror and disbelief: the arrested suspect was just sixteen years of age.
On the streets of Bute, that sense of horror and disbelief was palpable, and ever-present. I will never forget the strange atmosphere of those first days and weeks following Alesha’s death, the odd hush over everything, the knowledge that every person you met in the street or at the butcher’s or in the Co-op was preoccupied with the same thoughts, the same subject. I have experienced this form of group consciousness, this shared awareness of history a few times in my life – Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11 – and the sensation it produces has always been similarly destabilising, on the edge of the uncanny, as if, through those electrically charged moments, a deeper layer of reality has been revealed.
In the case of Alesha MacPhail, the overwhelming sensation was one of grief, and of impotent anger. The murder happened at the height of the tourist season, and alongside the stunned locals, visitors to the island – many of them children visiting grandparents, just like Alesha – played in the sun and by the water. It was good – a relief – to see people behaving normally, yet at the same time the sense of unease was difficult to dislodge, the sense that those children might not be safe anywhere, or never entirely.
We had to wait a further eight months until the trial before we learned the full extent of the horror that had befallen Alesha MacPhail and her grieving family: how a young psychopath had previously fantasised about committing such a murder, how he then, in open court, tried to blame another, completely innocent person for his own appalling actions before finally confessing his crimes to a police psychologist and declaring himself ‘quite satisfied with the murder’. But even before then I felt so affected by what had happened that I briefly considered abandoning work on The Good Neighbours. With a real murder so close to home, the idea of inflicting a similar trauma even on invented characters seemed questionable. I was especially concerned by the possibility that anyone reading the book and most especially anyone who knows the island might assume the novel’s events had been directly inspired by the tragedy that took place on Bute in the summer of 2018. With the crime still so recent and still so raw in the memory, the idea of utilising it as a basis for fiction seemed inappropriate to me.
On further reflection, I decided it would be wrong of me not to finish what I had started. The Good Neighbours is a book I had been trying to write for some years, and I am proud of how it turned out. I proceeded with my work in the full and certain knowledge that not only had I completed the first draft before the murder took place, but that the actual inspiration for my novel lay in an entirely unrelated crime that took place half a century ago, five hundred miles to the south of where I now live.
And yet the book was changed, nonetheless. In ways I could never have predicted, certain scenes – the scenes of mourning in particular – became inflected, suffused with the peculiar atmosphere of those first days following the murder of Alesha MacPhail. The quietness in the streets, that strange hush. And then there was the heat, above all the heat. The shadowy pallor of northern nights, charged with off-kilter magic and a dangerous restlessness, when there is light in the sky even at midnight, and with the heat of the day cooling to an amethyst shimmer, the sense of a world apart, a time removed.
I completed the manuscript with a deeper love for the island that is now my home, as well as a renewed awareness of the importance of taking responsibility for the stories we choose to tell. I passionately believe in the power of crime fiction – for examining social division and personal trauma, for asking questions about the society in which we live and how it might be improved. But in posing such questions and examining such situations we must take care not to neglect the trauma experienced by victims, the devastating impact of violence in the real world. Crime stories are not just stories. Details matter.
The Good Neighbour by Nina Allan (Quercus Publishing) Out Now.
Cath is a photographer hoping to go freelance, working in a record shop to pay the rent and eking out her time with her manager Steve. He thinks her photography is detective work, drawing attention to things that would otherwise pass unseen and maybe he's right . . . Starting work on her new project - photographing murder houses - she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just eighteen. The Isle of Bute is embedded in her identity, the draughty house that overlooked the bay, the feeling of being nowhere, the memory of her childhood friend Shirley Craigie and the devastating familicide of her family by the father, John Craigie. Arriving at the Craigie house, Cath finds that it's occupied by Financial Analyst Alice Rahman. Her bid to escape the city lifestyle, the anxiety she felt in that world, led her to leave London and settle on the island. The strangeness of the situation brings them closer, leading them to reinvestigate the Craigie murder. Now, within the walls of the Craigie house, Cath can uncover the nefarious truths and curious nature of John Craigie: his hidden obsession with the work of Richard Dadd and the local myths of the fairy folk.
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