Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  By the time Magnus picked her up back at the hotel, she had managed to learn a little about the place. Stone Age settlers had neatly divided it up with the kind of stone walls, called dykes, that still marked fields. There were traces of these early farms underneath the layers of peat that covered the islands. By the Iron Age the Shetlanders were building brochs, dry-stone fortifications, which were still standing around here and there. Later, small, dark, Christian Picts were overrun by big, fair barbarian Vikings. Norway managed to hold on to the place for the next five hundred years or so, with the Scots squabbling over it once in a while. After the Danes swallowed up Norway, they took possession. The bankrupt King Christian pawned the islands to Scotland for 8,000 florins in 1469 to pay for a dowry and told the inhabitants to be obedient to the kings of Scotland and pay their taxes until he redeemed his pledge—which he never got around to doing. The place had been left in the hock shop for centuries.

  She closed the book and checked her watch. Catching up on local history had been a charming escape. It all seemed so far away from Marcia St. Francis, dead in the bathtub in the Meade Hotel.

  Which was where Jane had overheard Magnus Anderson complaining to that Chilean about King Christian’s careless behavior, centuries after the fact. Time seemed to stretch out in this place.

  Magnus arrived at twilight to pick her up, and they drove out of Lerwick, past modern houses and gas stations into a treeless landscape composed of very few elements—hills, peat, heather, grass, sky, sea and stone—but managed to combine and recombine in what seemed like an infinite number of ways. Hills changed from green to gold to a dark peaty brown. Coming around a curve in the road would afford a sudden view of a serene gleaming blue inlet or a cluster of islands in the distance; the light illuminated the land, then cast it in shadow again as the clouds moved across the vast sky; the landscape changed from a forbidding hill to a gentle slope leading to the sea, or it sheared off from a grassy field to a rocky precipice.

  “You don’t find it bleak?” he asked her.

  “Not at all,” she said, wanting him to know how much she liked the place. “It’s very sculptural.”

  The stone walls ran everywhere, and at intervals in the barren landscape there were stone houses—new, with flouncy white curtains at the windows, or abandoned, roofs rotted away, peaks pointing upward, sometimes just walls or piles of rubble.

  They passed a pretty little pond in a grassy field. Magnus said, “A Viking princess drooned in that pond,” with a stunning casualness. Jane wasn’t sure whether this was an affectation or not. Magnus seemed to come up with some amazingly picturesque stuff. In any case, she was beginning to feel the spell of the place.

  She certainly wasn’t prepared for Magnus’s house. First of all, it was accessible only by rowboat. He parked the car and rowed them across a small, glassy body of water he called a “voe.” On the other side of the water, Jane faced what looked like a small castle.

  One part was clearly older, a square, two-story stone house. There was also a Victorian addition, with turrets and stained-glass windows. It stood there, looking proud and stately on its own little island, surrounded by sheep and some rickety out-buildings.

  “My God,” said Jane. “It looks like something out of one of those nostalgic British TV shows. Does it have a name?”

  “Bellevue,” he said, handing her out of the boat. “A French name in a place like this! It’s a Norman conceit of one of my ancestors.”

  “Your ancestors?” Somehow she would have imagined Magnus’s ancestors as Picts huddling in brochs or as yeoman Viking farmers.

  “On my mother’s side,” he said. “He was only a cousin, but when he died the other heirs lived in Canada and New Zealand and didn’t want to bother themselves with it, so it came down to me. It’s shameful, really. I never thought I’d be the laird. A lot of Scottish sheep thieves is what they were.”

  “You’re the laird?” said Jane.

  “Yes,” he said, clearly embarrassed. “But I will say my old cousin wasn’t so bad. The tenants even bought him a tombstone.”

  “That’s sweet,” said Jane. “Perhaps they’ll do the same for you if you don’t have them whipped for poaching or violate their daughters.”

  “The rents are all fixed,” Magnus said with a shrug. “And if I could sell the place to someone, I’d be glad to do it.” He led her up a stone path grown over with grass. “It’s a bit ironic, really, when I’ve always been the champion of an independent Shetland, to find myself cast as one of the oppressors.”

  A few sheep stared at them as they made their way up toward the house.

  “Does the title go with the property?” asked Jane.

  “That’s right,” he said. “If you know any rich Americans, they can have it for a hundred thousand pound.”

  An island, a manor house or whatever it was and the chance to call yourself a laird for less than the price of a luxury condominium seemed like a pretty good deal to Jane. Magnus sighed and told her the place needed work and went into a litany of repairs—drains, wiring, plumbing, the roof and more. Having sunk a lot of the money from her first paying case into Uncle Harold’s old house back in Seattle, Jane knew just how overwhelming all that renovation could be.

  They entered a side door. Magnus explained that he lived mostly in the kitchen, which was a big room with thick green paint on the walls, orangy-looking wooden doors and wainscoting, appliances from the fifties, narrow tiled counters and a worn linoleum floor.

  The kitchen seemed warm enough—there were some old-fashioned radiators around—so presumably Magnus didn’t have to heat with peat. On a solid old table at one side of the room was a fax machine. Magnus scooped up a handful of faxes and read them while Jane looked out a small window to the serene voe and the soft curves of the hills beyond. The stillness of the place was more than an absence of sound or other stimuli. It had a quality of its own—something deep and cool, slightly mysterious but benevolent.

  “Oh,” said Magnus, “here’s a nice order from Santa Monica.”

  Jane was taken aback. In her present mood she found it impossible to fathom that this place and Southern California could exist on the same planet, let alone be in instant communication.

  It reminded her why she was here herself.

  “I read a book about Shetland today,” she said. “It had a wonderful quote in it from some old Scottish minister in the eighteenth century. He said he’d never met people more interested in gossip than Shetlanders.”

  Magnus laughed. “That’s still absolutely true.”

  “Well, you were awfully reticent when I asked you about Trygve,” she said. “All you told me was he had his hand in his pocket, then you stopped.”

  Magnus looked slightly crafty. She’d never seen him that way before. “Dinna tell no one,” he said, “but Trygve wasn’t quick enough in that lift. Before he put his hand in his pocket, I marked he had a handcuff hanging from his wrist.”

  “Sounds a bit kinky,” said Jane.

  Magnus blushed again. “That’s what I thought. And then his telling me American lasses were daft . . .”

  A handcuff hanging from Knutsen’s wrist as he came back from a date with Marcia. Of course, it brought up visions of some kind of sex orgy. Maybe if the Meade Hotel had offered Sven and Inga Go All the Way on a pay-per-view basis, Knutsen could have spent a quiet night with a room service meal.

  Magnus put on a Patsy Cline CD, and Jane helped him prepare a big meal of pasta. About a dozen guests arrived at intervals, and they all made themselves at home in the kitchen, opening bottles of wine and nibbling on things. There was a whole slew of accents—one English couple in their mid-thirties seemed to her to be the British equivalent of people who might have grown up in a Connecticut suburb and escaped to a blueberry farm in Maine with trust fund money. Jane talked to a schoolteacher named Margaret who’d grown up in Glasgow, a cozy-looking woman with a long challis skirt and a hand-knit cardigan, and a young native named Peter who told her that
most Shetlanders who’d left the island to go to the University of Edinburgh never came back, but that he’d been lucky enough to find a job with the Shetland Council.

  There was an aristocratic-looking salmon farmer and his glamorous French wife, Marie-Claire, who told Jane in whispered French that she often went mad in the winters here but regained her sanity every summer, and a fiftyish lady who was a cousin of Magnus and worked in the library, who said she’d been abroad only once in her life—to Scotland. Jane also talked to a man who’d been born in Zimbabwe when it was still Rhodesia and ended up in Shetland as quality control officer in a fish plant. Jane turned the conversation away from fish as fast as she could.

  While all this mingling was going on, volunteers were ferrying guests back and forth in the rowboat. The last guest to arrive, still wearing his business suit and looking over-dressed, was Gunther Kessler.

  Everybody ate in the kitchen, by now warmer and full of the smell of smoke and food. The other guests were animated and lively and had a nice way of making Jane feel welcome.

  After dinner they went into the living room, a big Victorian stage set of a room with stained-glass windows, a walk-in fireplace, lots of oppressive, heavily varnished wooden sideboards and cupboards, some worn old plush furniture and ancestral portraits that looked as though they’d been done in the early nineteenth century. Magnus said he hadn’t the faintest idea who these people were and wasn’t sure if he was related to them or not. They had simply always hung here and would still be there when and if he managed to unload the property.

  “This Victorian bit is a horror,” he said cheerfully. “Would you like to see the original part of the house?”

  Jane followed him up a narrow staircase to what was mostly a long hall with a series of small bedrooms off it. The rooms were furnished with old dressers and sagging beds. The walls were whitewashed and the wooden floors agreeably uneven. There was a slight dampness in the air. She imagined a lot of pale, lonely young girls with chilblains growing up in these rooms, combing out their hair by candlelight and wondering if they would ever meet anyone of their own station to marry. Just a trip into Lerwick in those days must have been a major undertaking.

  From below they suddenly heard a violin tuning up and some accordion chords. On the way back down, Magnus explained that Shetland fiddle music was unique in the world. “It’s a distinctive style, less rigid than Scottish fiddle music, with what we call ringing strings, playing two strings at once, and lots of grace notes and turns.”

  It did indeed sound very busy and lively. Jane hoped Magnus would forget he’d asked her to sing. Her Meade Hotel lounge act seemed pretty tacky compared with all this folklore. But unfortunately he remembered, and after consultation with the accordion player and a heartfelt introduction from Magnus, she found herself standing by the fireplace singing “La Vie en Rose” to the roomful of people.

  They all looked odd in this stuffy Victorian room, sitting around in lots of sweaters and jeans like children partying in the living room under the gaze of the ancestral portraits while Mom and Dad were out of town. Over by the fireplace stood Gunther Kessler, holding his wineglass stiffly. Jane had been aware of him at the edges of the group all evening. As she looked over at him in her friendly, visual sweep of the room—part of her standard moves, although with “Vie en Rose” one could also lean against something in a world-weary way and close one’s eyes—she saw his glass stop midway to his lips. She realized it was a gesture of recognition. He hadn’t known where he had seen her before, but now that she was singing, he recognized her.

  Something about the eye contact they made—her singing, him standing across the room with a drink—gave her a feeling of déjà vu herself. Was she imagining it? Or had he been in Seattle at the Meade Hotel during that seafood convention?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There was some hearty applause and a few requests, but it was always a good idea to quit while people were still appreciative.

  Magnus came up to Jane and told her what a fine job she’d done, and handed her another glass of wine. Kessler approached.

  “A lovely party,” he said to Magnus, “but I have a report to write, and I must go.” He turned to Jane. “Would you like a lift back to the hotel?”

  “She can stay here,” said Magnus. “A lot of people are. You can always have as much drink as you like at my house because you never have to drive home.”

  Jane had noticed the damp in the wing full of bedrooms and didn’t like the idea of a large hangover breakfast gathering the following morning when she could have room service. “Actually,” she said, “I should probably take Mr. Kessler up on his kind offer. I have an early flight tomorrow.”

  “She’s off to Bergen to sing for the Norwegians,” said Magnus. He turned to her, and she noticed his pale skin was pinkened with wine. “Bergen was once our capital,” he went on. “The cultural center of this part of the world, before the soothmoothers came.”

  “Soothmoothers?” said Jane.

  “Foreigners,” he said with a scowl. Jane had the sudden idea his patriotic Shetland sentiments emerged more strongly after a few belts. “Literally, it means people who talk with accents from the south.”

  “Oh,” said Jane. “South mouthers.”

  He nodded a little impatiently, as if to say “That’s what I just said.”

  Jane thanked him for everything, throwing in a few gushy sentiments about Shetland for his benefit. “I must come back in the summer,” she said.

  Magnus nodded. “When the bird life is at its most interesting,” he said.

  Kessler was silent as one of the other guests rowed them across the narrow stretch of water to his rented car. They had driven about a mile when he said, “So, you are interested in birds?”

  “Well, a little,” she said. Terrific, another ornithologist. “I don’t know much about them, but Magnus told me this place is famous for its birds.”

  “And you are also interested in fish?” he said. He was artfully working the high and low beams as they traveled along the winding roads in the dark.

  She shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see the gesture in the darkness. “I learned a little about the business when I was in Seattle. There was a seafood convention at the hotel where I sang.”

  “Yes. I remember you there, but on the plane I noticed you were reading about fish. Salmon.”

  Jane felt her heart sink. “As a matter of fact, I’m visiting someone in Norway. Someone I met at the fish convention. I was brushing up a little on his business before I visited.” There. That should stifle his curiosity.

  “So, you are going to be singing in Bergen also?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. That’s what Magnus had told him, so she’d have to stick with it. Why was he interrogating her, anyway?

  “Where?” he said. “I know Bergen a little.”

  She decided not to answer. “Yes, I imagine you do,” she said, “being in the fish business yourself. Refrigeration, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  He didn’t ask her again where she was singing, thank God. Or anything else. They drove the rest of the way in silence. Nevertheless, he had managed to unnerve her. To her slight shame, she usually enjoyed lying, but Kessler had somehow managed to make her feel guilty. And the story she had come up with about meeting some Norwegian at a convention and then brushing up on the salmon business to impress him made her feel slightly shabby.

  She didn’t know if it was simply Gunther Kessler’s stiffness—refrigeration seemed a very apt business for him—but she got the impression he didn’t quite approve of her. He saw her, no doubt, as a louche lady making her living singing in saloons and looking for a meal ticket. Which, come to think of it, was pretty much true, except that her meal ticket wasn’t a prosperous conventioneer, but a chance at getting some of her uncle Harold’s money under the terms of his eccentric will by finding and solving a pro bono case. Why should she care what Gunther Kessler thought, anyway? As soon
as they got back to the Shetland Hotel, she’d never see him again, she thought.

  But she did see him again. The next morning. On the plane to Bergen. She was unaccountably resentful. When she’d told him she was headed there, he hadn’t said a word about his own plans. She wondered if he’d ask again where she was singing so he could go hear her. Gunther Kessler was beginning to give her the creeps.

  “What a surprise,” she said rather coolly as she walked past him down the aisle to her own seat.

  “Hello,” he said, lowering his newspaper. This time he gave her a little smile, and she realized it was the first time she’d seen him smile.

  She spent part of the flight worrying about the ubiquitous Swiss. But why was she worrying? In Shetland she had found out part of what she wanted to know about Trygve Knutsen. Now she was going to come face-to-face with him and try to find out the rest. None of this had anything to do with Gunther Kessler, and if the story she told him didn’t quite make sense, what difference did it make?

  It would be more useful to plan just what she would say to Knutsen. She still didn’t know if he would recognize her as the lounge singer at the Meade Hotel. She counted on the fact that he had been very drunk and that meeting someone in a different context was always confusing. Gunther Kessler seemed to have much more on the ball, but only when she sang had he been able to place her.

  She kicked a few scenarios around in her head, from the disingenuous (“Wasn’t it terrible about that girl who was killed? And it happened right in the room next to yours, didn’t it?”) to the confrontational—Perry Mason style (“And isn’t it a fact, Mr. Knutsen, that after a lust-crazed night of bondage games, something went seriously wrong and now a girl is dead?”). In the latter version, as in the old TV show, Knutsen broke down sobbing and confessed (“Ja, ja, it is true!”).

  Finally Jane dismissed all these ideas as ridiculous. There wasn’t any way she could have a fixed plan, because Knutsen would presumably be sober, and she had no idea what he was like in that state. She would have to take the situation as she found it and play it by ear. This pleased her. She always liked to improvise.