The Darkness Within
A Faro and Rose McQuinn Mystery
ALANNA KNIGHT
For Sheena and Allan
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BY ALANNA KNIGHT
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
Orkney 1906
Three mourning women, black statues against a heavy grey sky; seagulls screaming above their heads turned them into a monochrome, the prologue to a Greek tragedy.
Faro shuddered as the Stromness ferry touched the landing stage and as he leapt ashore the three statues became alive rushing down to welcome him, led by his two daughters Emily and Rose, followed a little slower by his mother, Mary Faro. The next moment he had gathered his girls into his arms, Emily the bereaved widow, murmuring his condolences suddenly changed into inadequate words.
‘My dear, you must forgive me for not getting here in time. We had just got back from France and I’m afraid any kind of news takes a while to reach Carasheen. Ireland is like that,’ he ended lamely.
Emily merely shook her head. The funeral was a week past and already seemed a long time ago, unreal, a kind of brutal nightmare from which there was no awakening. ‘No need for apologies, Pa. Erland would have understood – always travelling, he knew how difficult it was to get in touch with us.’
‘Imogen feels badly about it, too,’ Faro added awkwardly and Emily nodded in weary acknowledgement, leaving him more embarrassed than ever, never quite sure about how his family regarded Imogen Crowe, officially recognised as his travelling companion but everyone knew she was much more than that.
He kissed Emily’s cold cheek, guiltily aware that he had lost touch with his younger daughter after her marriage in Orkney. Now her husband’s untimely death had turned her into more of a stranger than ever. Even her looks had always been at variance with the Faros, with her long, straight black hair, round eyes in a face always pale, now stricken in grief. A throwback, she was, whispers ran, the image of Sibella, that scandalous selkie great-grandmother who had lived to be well past a hundred.
Rose was waiting for him, eagerly holding out her arms. Rose, his firstborn and dearest, so like his beloved long-lost Lizzie, the daughter always close to him who had followed in his footsteps.
‘Let me look at you.’ The passing years had been kind to Rose. Past forty she still looked young and petite with that cloud of yellow curls. ‘You look well.’
She smiled. ‘You too, Pa.’ He didn’t look seventy, this Orcadian-born policeman. The Viking warrior image was undimmed: thick fair hair, now white, the deep blue eyes, which she had once imagined would force the truth out of any criminal, because they seemed to look right through you, deep down into your very soul.
His mother, Mary Faro, watched the tableau, keeping a little distance apart, letting them give rein to their emotions, her main concern as always her only son, her beloved Jeremy, proud of him in his days as chief inspector in the Edinburgh Police Force, hoping and praying that retirement would bring him home again. But that had not happened; Jeremy had spread his wings to wider shores. Long a widower, she had brought up his two girls in Orkney always expecting – and even resenting, she had to admit – that he might remarry. Now he had this Irishwoman, the writer Imogen Crowe, famous they said she was, and him going all over the world with her.
He came to her, smiling sadly, and hugged her. ‘So sad, Ma, but you’re bearing up well – as always, you can be relied on.’
Her reply was lost in the noise of a shining motor car approaching down the road and braking alongside.
‘That’s ours, Pa,’ said Emily at her father’s look of surprise. She sighed. ‘Erland was so proud of it. Bought it only last year just when we were getting used to having the new motor bus between Kirkwall and Hopescarth, not that Gran would have anything to do with either.’
The driver was accompanied by a ten-year-old boy, tall for his age, fair, strong-looking. He leapt down and she put an arm around him.
‘Magnus, this is your grandfather.’ As they shook hands, Mary Faro came forward, beamed approval.
‘The very spit of you at his age, Jeremy,’ she said proudly. ‘The same island stock. He’ll make a fine man in a year or two.’
Magnus took his hand, a firm steady grip, a slight bow and a shrewd glance from eyes dark blue like his own. ‘Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard so much about you.’
As they walked towards the car, huffing and breathing a quantity of smoke as it waited, Rose came to his side and took his arm.
‘So good to see you, Pa,’ she sighed. ‘Two years is a long time.’
‘Too long, far too long.’ And guiltily Faro remembered that the last had been a very fleeting visit to Edinburgh, a pattern throughout the years of his retirement and his travels with Imogen, communication interspersed by the new craze for picture postcards, a blessed relief for those like himself who found writing letters burdensome.
‘Could have been a happier occasion, lass,’ he said. ‘Poor Emily.’
Rose nodded sadly. ‘Jack and I were shocked, a funeral when we should have all been meeting here to celebrate her fortieth birthday on Lammastide, the birthday she shared with Sibella, the very day it happened. I still can’t take it in, that Erland is dead.’ Looking up sad-eyed, she shook her head. ‘The most beautiful voice I ever heard, stilled for ever.’
‘I am sorry I couldn’t be here with you. Just couldn’t book a passage to Orkney in time.’ He sighed. ‘I never knew him, never got the chance,’ he added, too late now for the son-in-law he had only met when the cruise ship on which he and Imogen were travelling docked overnight in Kirkwall. A hasty meeting had been arranged, dinner at the local hotel, a return journey down to Stromness and Hopescarth impossible.
‘Magnus was just a baby, hadn’t even started school and just look at him now,’ Faro smiled, watching the others heading towards the motor car. ‘A fine young fellow. And how is your wee girl?’ Meg was Rose’s stepdaughter, the child of Jack Macmerry’s first brief marriage.
‘She’s fine, getting along very well with Magnus, her new-found cousin, as she calls him. I’m pleased – and relieved. I was rather anxious about this first meeting, and boys tend to despise girls at his age. But not Magnus, he’s very protective and kind. Seems to enjoy her company.’
‘Where’s Jack?’ Faro asked.
Rose giggled and pointed to the driver. Behind helmet and goggles, he recognised Rose’s husband, now Chief Inspector Jack Macmerry of the Edinburgh Police.
As they greeted each other with a warm handshake, Jack grinned. ‘You’re up here, Pa, beside the driver.’ Before assisting the women and Magnus into the four seats at the back, there would be a slight delay. Mary Faro, as housekeeper at Yesnaby House, took the opportunity of ‘gathering a few things from the shops’. Waiting for her return with Rose, Faro realised that a lot of things had changed in the last decade, progress had overtaken the island as Jack, patting the steering wheel, asked proudly:
&nbs
p; ‘Well, what do you think of her? Hammer Tourer, 24 horse power, 4-cylinder. And virtually brand new. Isn’t she just great?’
Faro nodded vaguely. With not the faintest notion about defining the merits of one motor car from another, he gratefully regarded this new species of transport, like the railway trains, an increasingly popular and painless method of travel.
‘They only provided horses, for the lucky – or the unlucky few, depending on how you cared for riding – in my day,’ he said.
Jack laughed. ‘They only provide motor cars for the lucky few now, provided that they are brave enough to learn to drive. I enjoy being behind the wheel and this was a rare opportunity, albeit a sad one, a chance to visit Orkney and bring Meg with us. She was quite determined, although it meant leaving Thane behind.’
Thane? Faro frowned. Oh yes, he remembered Thane was Rose’s deerhound. With her vivid imagination she tried to persuade everyone, himself included, that this mysterious animal had supernatural powers, that a kind of telepathy existed between them.
Nonsense, of course. He’d seen this Thane on an Edinburgh visit to Rose and Jack, and he seemed quite an ordinary likeable, well-behaved but exceedingly large dog, the size of a pony and more fitted to a stable stall than house room.
‘Just a short break to attend the funeral,’ Jack was saying, watching out for the two women coming back with their purchases. ‘You know what it’s like, sir.’
‘I do indeed.’
‘Of course, Rose has her own life in Edinburgh, too. She’s a very busy lady. Who would have thought that it ran in the family – must have got it from you.’ Jack’s laugh sounded slightly disapproving. More than ten years ago, Rose had returned from Arizona, widowed, believing that her husband, once his sergeant, Danny McQuinn, was dead. Against all the odds, she had set up very successfully as a lady investigator in Edinburgh.
Jack went on: ‘We have a housekeeper now, needed someone to look after Meg. Both of us are so actively involved, we haven’t much time left for domesticity.’ Jumping down, he saw the women with their baskets into the back seats. ‘Everyone settled now? Off we go.’
Mary Faro leant over and asked: ‘Where’s Imogen, Jeremy? Thought she’d be with you.’
Over the noise of the engine starting up, he shouted the delay in communication, apologised for missing the funeral and added, ‘She decided to go home to Carasheen.’
Mary frowned, a little disappointed, as he continued: ‘But she wouldn’t have come anyway. This is a family matter, you know,’ he added gently. Imogen Crowe did not regard herself as part of the family, although everyone guessed she was, in Scottish parlance, his wife ‘by habit and repute’. Only from choice, as Jeremy Faro would have added hastily in his own words: he would gladly put the wedding ring on her finger before the priest if she’d just name the day.
Once the motor car got somewhat noisily under way, conversation was impossible and he realised he had never travelled far beyond Kirkwall in his young days, when even a trip to Stromness was regarded in awe as a hazardous adventure, not to be undertaken lightly, and spoken of solemnly in the same hushed tones as voyaging across the Atlantic to America.
It was that same Atlantic he now regarded beating its great heart in wild waves breaking on the rocks far below. A new experience after that brief meeting with Erland and Emily from the cruise ship in Kirkwall. Now he saw that memory had painted a false picture of homecoming. He was unprepared for the emptiness, wild and bleak, the glimpses of a harsh seascape, for this was a land whose waiting was not measured in passing centuries but in that darker millennia beyond the ken of God-fearing, worshipping Christians.
This was an inhabited land long before the saints were born in Ireland. ‘The isles at the world’s end’ mariners called them, to be feared as the home of wreckers and the legendary seal people as well as mermaids and trolls. Seeing distant Skailholm had reminded him that here and there man had been bold, and turning a blind eye on the vagaries of an unreliable climate ready to spit in the face of humans’ work, they had planted stone houses perched uneasily as summer flies on hillsides and a boulder-strewn terrain, intercepted by death-dealing bogland and stretching away to limitless horizons.
And here he was now, a descendant of those distant settlers, heading towards Emily’s home at Yesnaby House in Erland’s motor car. In the front seat beside Jack, a noisy engine limited conversation with the three Faro women and young Magnus crowded into the back, giving him plenty of time to enjoy – or perhaps a more apt word was to endure – the passing scenery.
The sea road was rough and dangerously narrow, running in many places close to the cliff edge and requiring care and skilful attention from the driver. It was not for a nervous passenger. Faro was glad that he had no fear of heights, watching the translucent, wild-green Atlantic rollers crash on to the long stretches of pale gold sand. Beyond the violation of the peaceful strand their progress was interrupted by small irregular shapes of islands, like basking whales, impossible to imagine as being large enough for human habitation.
A signpost loomed into view pointing landwards. Lobster creels and fishing nets, narrow steps cut out of the cliff rock down to the shore, the glimpse of a single street of stone houses huddled together as if to get the most out of the warmth of a rare burst of sunshine.
Oddly it awoke memories of a boyhood visit to Stromness, swimming in the sea and lying afterwards in the sheltering warmth of dunes, eyeing through the swaying tall fronds of marram grass the bluest of summer skies and serenaded by the joyous chorus of unseen skylarks. That shaft of pure joy was his first true happiness. Memory, though distant, threw in a shadowy companion.
He was not alone; there was someone lying at his side. It was Inga, Inga St Ola, his first love, long before his marriage to Lizzie. Sadly brief, she had given him Rose and Emily and died with the birth of their stillborn son.
He sighed. It was all a long time ago; the years moved relentlessly and seventy belonged in a different world to seventeen, with all the joyous rapture of youth gone for ever. His nostalgia vanished with Jack’s shout:
‘Almost there, sir!’
They were now on the twisting sea road to Hopescarth, followed far below by dark round shapes bobbing up and down in the sea. Seals, and Faro remembered their curiosity, keeping pace with human travellers at a safe distance. He wondered how they saw these new arrivals, having observed through past ages two-legged creatures who walked on land that were now being replaced by huge black monsters who travelled on wheels. What on earth was the planet coming to?
Following Jack’s pointing finger he saw Hopescarth for the first time. Not that there was much more than could be taken in with one glance. A dozen grey stone houses, all identical and staring into each other’s windows across a long winding street. At one end a stern square block of a building with two entrance lintels carved ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ indicated the village school, although Faro wondered why they took the trouble to segregate such a small number. The remainder of Hopescarth was hidden behind high walls concealing a couple of better built houses, he guessed for doctor and minister as the steeple of the church rose alongside a railed-in kirkyard where crowded gravestones of vanished generations told of more currently dead than alive in the village.
Jack slowed down respectfully as they drove past, close by the Yesnaby vault where Erland had been laid to rest. A steep hill, the motor car snorting at this effort, and there facing west into the drama of the Atlantic was Yesnaby House.
Jack grinned at him and mouthed, ‘Home at last.’
Faro was disappointed. The Yesnabys were an ancient and, from all accounts, a wealthy family. The houses of their equivalent in Edinburgh were fashionably designed to resemble mini Balmoral castles, but this solid-looking square house squatting on a hillside lacked any architectural frills. In Orkney, weather dictated fashion, turning its face firmly against exterior ornamentation, a waste of time and money soon to succumb to fierce winds and winter storms. Here survival was the param
ount issue and in that nothing had changed in a thousand years, when it had been enemies such as the Vikings on marauding raids that threatened. Their other enemy, the fierce climate, remained, a constant siege to be faced with solid stone walls, deep-set windows and sturdy strong doors turned away from the sea.
They were crossing a stone bridge leading up to the house and Jack drove carefully, for, below, the ground dropped sharply across a stretch of bright-green grass. Bogland, to remind new generations that once upon a time the building on the skyline had been a fortress against invaders from the sea.
A brisk wind had arisen; the horizons darkened with a flurry of rain. What would it be like in a storm? Faro wondered. The house must have endured many, for even at this distance at first glance it had the air of the ancient pele tower, which had been its origin.
A tower with a sense of waiting, he thought, windows like brooding eyes. Just a mite sinister, a building that had lived through much, shaped and reshaped by the passing centuries, and holding itself in readiness, preparing for the next catastrophe.
Catastrophe? Why catastrophe, why that word?
Jack stopped as close to the front door as he could. Rose, Emily and Magnus went ahead with Faro and his mother at their heels.
A warm day to welcome him; it was summer, after all. But nevertheless, he shivered, wishing he could obliterate that first sight of those three women on the skyline he had first encountered, the seabirds screaming … the sense of something bad.
An omen.
CHAPTER TWO
Rose had found the drive frustrating, longing to sit beside her father, to be close to him in that front seat where only the back of his and Jack’s heads were visible. Sighing, she realised that she was still a little girl where he was concerned. Afraid that the passing years would take their toll and that an old man might have overtaken her adored strong father, she was delighted that the years were being kind to him. Proud to note that he remained a handsome man of seventy who still walked tall. The Viking image everyone associated with him, the once fair hair was still plentiful, those deep-blue eyes had lost nothing of the piercing quality of youth.
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