The Darkness Within

by Alanna Knight

  They had reached the house and Faro wished that the walls now bracing themselves against the coming storm were able to reveal the truth in some of the stories that Emily had told him.

  He was getting to know his two daughters more in a few hours staying at Hopescarth, he decided, than he had ever had the chance to know them as children. Of course, that was his own fault, he thought guiltily, packing them off to Orkney after Lizzie died, a little sorrowful but more relieved that he was not faced with the prospect of bringing up two little girls on his own, consoling himself that there would be school holidays. He would have them in Edinburgh, make them at home in Sheridan Place, but never for him in Orkney, always too busy with the police and that seemed far more important than family commitments, catching criminals rather than taking little lasses on picnics or to the zoo.

  He could remember to this day, their eager, smiling little faces, staring up at him as they hugged and kissed him. And then the excuse, the inevitable disappointment, but Mrs Brook was always at hand, his solid reliable housekeeper, devoted to him and the girls, ready to stand in and perform the duties of a parent. But he often recalled, opening the thank-you letter dictated back in Kirkwall by their grandmother Mary, that look of reproach on their small sad faces as he kissed them goodbye at the ship in Leith before hurrying back to the next case awaiting him, the next murderer to bring to justice.

  Like Emily’s stories his guilt was past history, the selkie legend of Sibella beyond his powers of logic but the story Archie Tofts had told about shooting a seal, well, there was a mystery here, and one which he gave him that familiar itch. He must make the acquaintance of that young man.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jack had returned to the family circle. With warnings of a full blooded storm approaching, there would be no ferries from the island that night.

  He wasn’t exactly sorry to have to spend another night with them and another day with Meg, who was delighted when he grinned and said: ‘It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good.’

  As for Emily, Faro and Rose saw that she was determined that they should enjoy the rarity of being together, and her father remarked that he could not recall the last time he had sat around a table with his entire family. If he had one regret it was that Imogen wasn’t by his side to share this moment. Skilled at fitting into any social gathering, how she would react to the Scarths was a different matter.

  Enjoying the meal and the company of both his daughters, he was relieved to find that those first ominous feelings about Hopescarth had vanished as soon as he stepped across the threshold. He dismissed them as a moment of panic, just imagination, perhaps one of the penalties of increasing age, compensation being the two grandchildren; he fondly remembered when the front door had opened, how a small girl hurtled out to greet them. First her father, Jack, straight into his arms as if he had been gone for years rather than hours, then turning she saw Faro, one glance took him in from head to foot. A happy sigh as if she was not disappointed, she ran to his side, curtseyed prettily and took his hand shyly.

  ‘Grandpa. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘All of it good, I hope.’

  Eyeing him shrewdly in a grown-up way, she nodded. ‘Yes, of course, and you do look like a Viking, like Magnus,’ she added with a fond glance in the direction of the boy she now regarded as her cousin and friend.

  Faro smiled. She was so much Jack’s daughter. His very image, sandy hair, freckles, a typical Scots’ peasant face through the ages, but there was a trace of something else, a quality he couldn’t define behind the nondescript features of the seven-year-old. Something indefinable whispered that one day she would be a beauty, just a hint of breeding and authority, of dignity.

  He was to get the answer to this mystery his senses had recognised from Rose when, ignoring Emily’s warning that they would get soaked, they decided to have a stroll before the storm broke.

  There was a strange stillness, a prelude as the series of black clouds gathered, waiting for the crescendo, a full orchestra of torrential rain as they walked along the cliff path where a great rock formation sprouted out of the sea below.

  Rose pointed down to it. ‘That’s the Castle of Yesnaby, Pa, it’s where Erland’s ancestors, the original settlers who came from who knows where, took their name.’

  Faro was surprised, having expected at least the word ‘castle’ to produce ancient ruins and seeing instead an ideal place, with all those secret caves dotted along the coast, for smugglers through the ages.

  Voices from far below echoed up to them. Meg and Magnus, two tiny figures racing along the empty strand of glittering sand. ‘Shouldn’t those two be abed?’ he said sternly.

  Rose smiled. ‘Come along, Pa. It doesn’t feel late. Have you forgotten? There is no real darkness in an Orkney summer. Remember the locals playing midnight tennis? Meg is very interested in the seal king legend and is hoping to see him leap out of the water, just like those images of King Neptune with crown and trident, and take a human bride back to his kingdom under the sea.’

  When Faro laughed at this absurdity she added solemnly, ‘Emily says there are still girls who believe it.’ And looking to where the two children were still now, standing close together staring across the sea, ‘Meg wants to believe it and she hasn’t any Orcadian blood.’

  ‘But a lot of north-east Scotland. What was her mother like?’

  ‘Jack never spoke about her.’ And although she had never told anyone, least of all Jack, she felt for the first time the need to share the knowledge of Meg’s nativity with the one person closest to her.

  There was a seat on the path nearby and they sat down together high above the sea in a world turned silent, waiting for the storm, the great stretch of sand empty now of the two children. The seabirds, too, had disappeared, their shrill cries stilled for the night.

  It was a moment as if the cliffs themselves took refuge in the menacing silence, rested uneasily and slept away from the torment of the twice-daily onslaught of the Atlantic’s mighty roar. And so Faro heard the story of Meg’s Romany heritage from the mother she had never known and how the Faws had tried to reclaim her last year when they had holidayed with Vince at Balmoral.

  ‘She knows nothing of this,’ Rose ended.

  ‘Will you tell her?’

  ‘One day, when she is no longer a child, I will tell her what the old woman, her grandmother, the matriarch of the tribe, foretold.’ Rose paused. ‘The odd thing is that I don’t suppose she will be completely surprised as she has always been drawn to gypsies, even the ones who camp out in the Queen’s Park below Arthur’s Seat in summer and are despised by everyone. I thought it was just the idea of living in a horse-driven caravan – superb in summer, and very romantic.’

  ‘No one else but Jack could have been her father. She’s his image.’

  Rose sighed. ‘And I can’t tell you how relieved we all were about that.’ And she told him the story of Jack’s first marriage. ‘No one to blame but myself, my own fault entirely. It was a marriage on the rebound.’

  Pausing, she shook her head. ‘I knew how much Jack loved me and wanted us to marry, but one day we had a bitter argument, he accused me of putting him off by making excuses. His last words as he stormed out were that he wasn’t waiting any more. I thought he would be back the next day but he had gone to Glasgow on a case and still feeling angry went out and got very drunk, took the barmaid back to his hotel.’

  Again she stopped and sighed. ‘Meg was the result. Or so the girl said, and being an honourable man Jack married her. It wasn’t a happy marriage, although it was mercifully brief,’ she continued ruefully. ‘When he heard that she had died and her sister who was childless would take care of the wee girl, he was relieved; he didn’t want to see her, wasn’t even sure if she was his child. We had been reconciled, he had told me the whole sad story and that after all, there had only been that one night together. Seeing that she had been so eager, he suspected that he was not the first and she had go
t him to marry her by the oldest trick in the business.’

  ‘But after we married, I was the one to worry, especially when I miscarried and it seemed that I wouldn’t ever give Jack a live bairn.’

  She sighed sadly. ‘The curse of the Faro women, isn’t it, Pa? One bairn and one only.’

  Faro merely shook his head, he wasn’t expected to reply and the logical reasoning on which he had built his life did not credit the existence of curses as she went on: ‘Anyway, four years ago I was on an assignment near where the aunt lived, so I decided to look for Meg. She was three years old and after the aunt died she’d had a pretty rough time with an uncle who was a drunk and a ne’er-do-well, plus his new wife, with bairns of her own, who didn’t want her.’

  Rose laughed. ‘I knew in that first glance that this was Jack’s bairn, there was no mistaking that, and his parents are quite ecstatic about her. When I got her to Edinburgh I still had to persuade Jack to meet her. You have never seen any man more reluctant but I wish you could have seen his face at that first meeting. It was like seeing his own childhood face in a mirror and never have I seen such relief.’

  She paused for breath and Faro said: ‘Happy ending, all round. She loves you too. Mercifully, I expect she was too young to remember those early years and accepts that you are her real mother.’

  ‘Someday I’ll tell her and what I learnt when she went missing last year on our Deeside holiday, that she is part-Romany. Her mother married a gorgio and was disinherited by the Faws. I often think of that old matriarch and how she could see into the future and knew that someday Meg would be great and might claim her rightful inheritance as a leader.’

  Returning to the house, a family friend had looked in. Introduced as Dr John Randall, he had served as an army doctor abroad and, glad to be home again, when he took over the Hopescarth practice, he and Erland became firm friends.

  ‘They were more than that,’ Emily added. ‘Cousins several times removed. It happens to most families – all related. Since this is a small island and before travel was as easy as it is today, some folks never moved more than a mile or two in their whole lives.’

  Faro had heard this story before and how the inevitable interbreeding had produced lads like Archie Tofts.

  A good-looking man, Faro judged Randall to be in his late fifties and Erland’s nearest kin. ‘No brothers or sisters,’ Emily said, ‘the last of the Yesnabys until Magnus came along – apart from some woman in Aberdeen. They sent each other Christmas cards. She was very proud of the connection, always planning to visit Orkney.’ She sighed. ‘Erland was expecting her this summer. John was interested in meeting her too, they were talking about it the week just before – just before—’ She stopped and put a hand to her mouth. ‘Dear God, how terrible, if she just walked in, coming all that way.’

  With an apologetic glance at the assembled family, Randall smiled at Emily, said he had been worried about her not sleeping, and in case she needed something he reached into his pocket and produced a small packet, which he put in her hand with another gentle smile.

  For someone prepared to come up to Yesnaby House on foot from Hopescarth – as he explained, just a hurried dash at nearly midnight – in a threatening storm, which had stopped the ferries and had brought Jack back, one thing was obvious to both Faro and Rose, both used to taking in situations at a first glance: Dr John was more than a family doctor, he was a would-be suitor for Emily.

  There was an old saying of the Irish that Imogen was fond of quoting that Faro remembered looking at Randall: ‘the candles were lit behind his eyes for her’. Of this, he was sure Emily was quite unaware and in casual conversation with her later he learnt that they knew little of his life before he arrived in Hopescarth, and that from Sibella who he had watched over in her last days. He had married young, long a widower, his wife had died of consumption.

  Randall was delighted to meet Faro and Jack. He already knew Rose, since he had been called in to examine Meg with reassurances that the head cold she had in Edinburgh was recovering nicely. He made a great fuss of Magnus, and eager to please, had bought him a colouring book. A little too young for this particular ten-year-old, Rose thought, despite his enthusiastic thank you.

  Apart from Emily, the person Randall most wanted to impress was Jeremy Faro. He shook his hand warmly and said, ‘You are a legend in your own time, sir. Why, everyone has heard of the great Inspector Faro, who was also personal detective to our late Queen, God bless her.’

  Faro acknowledged the compliment graciously while feeling certain that ‘everyone’ was something of an overstatement and that he was being unnecessarily flattered. However, the good doctor doubtless meant well. At one point in their conversation he paused and, looking towards Emily and Magnus, shook his head sadly.

  ‘Erland was a great man, sir, we will not see his like again. A great man,’ he repeated with a solemn head shake, ‘and a great friend. I was with him at the end, you know,’ he added in a confidential whisper although they were unlikely to be overheard. ‘I will never forget. We had been playing chess as usual on Thursday, my afternoon off from the surgery, enjoying a pipe together and a dram, laughing about something inconsequential when – suddenly – suddenly he wasn’t with me. He had gone, sitting there in the chair in front of me, but quite dead. I know what death looks like, I have seen it too often to be mistaken. But maybe it was something I could deal with this time, I did all I could but it was too late.’ He sighed deeply. ‘A serious heart condition, but there had never been any indication of such a thing, not in all the time I knew him, I always thought he was in perfect health, the sort of man who bragged that he had never needed a doctor, and I valued our friendship too much to insist.’ His voice broke, ‘Oh God, I wish I had insisted, perhaps he would still be with us.’

  ‘How are you two getting along?’ It was Emily. She had walked over to where they were sitting in a corner of the room, unable to restrain her curiosity.

  ‘Is my father telling you all about Edinburgh police and the most gruesome cases he has solved?’

  Randall’s quick smile held a warning glance for Faro as Emily continued.

  ‘John has always wanted to be a detective, has he told you that?’ She smiled at him. ‘Your secret ambition all these years here in Hopescarth.’

  Randall seized on the topic with relief. ‘Not many crimes to solve in our little community, I am thankful to say. Not only healthy God-fearing folk but also law-abiding too.’

  ‘I imagine he’s read too many stories about the great detective Sherlock Holmes. Fiction is very different from real life, isn’t it, Pa?’ Smiling she said: ‘You must have felt very like him, when you had Vince on call to help solve your greatest crimes.’ Then to Randall, she added rather proudly: ‘Our stepbrother, Dr Vincent Laurie, is now physician to the royal household.’

  ‘Mostly to the servants, he says,’ Rose put in, ‘but he’s on good terms with the King. Even when he was Prince of Wales and came to Edinburgh, he would bring Vince along, the soul of discretion if HRH wanted to sow a few more wild oats, I suspect. We are all so proud of him, but he’s another of the family,’ she added with a reproachful look at her father, ‘we hardly ever see these days. It’s a shame, but despite all our progress in travel, trains and motor cars, Edinburgh is still a long way from London.’

  ‘I’ve only been to London once, with Erland years ago,’ Emily said. ‘It was the first time I’d been so far south, and I was quite scared. Such a great bustling city. You were offered London once, weren’t you, John?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. The share of a practice in Harley Street. I was flattered but that kind of life is not for me. I am an islander born and bred and, quite frankly, I begrudged those years I spent abroad on Her Majesty’s service. Now that I’m home, and that’s here, I mean to spend the rest of my days …’ He looked up at Emily and Faro saw fleetingly in his eyes the yearning that added the unspoken words: ‘with you’.

  And that wouldn’t be a bad idea eith
er, Faro thought, his mind racing ahead. It would solve Emily’s problem and Magnus’s too. If she remarried the local doctor then there was no reason for leaving Yesnaby House.

  Later he was to discover that Rose also guessed that Randall was in love with her sister, who treated him with playful affection and seemed the only one unaware of what was staring everyone else in the face.

  ‘Randall would be a good thing, Pa, quite the best that could happen to her and Magnus.’

  And so it seemed, a conventional happy ending to suit everyone, but there were darker shadows gathering that no one had expected.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  All was silent when they awoke the next morning, the storm had not broken over Yesnaby after all, but after a show of torrential rain had moved on, leaving in its wake a heavy mist brooding over the landscape with only the ghostly boom of an unseen sea.

  ‘Worse than ever,’ said Jack cheerfully. ‘I doubt whether the ferries will negotiate this.’ He was rather pleased at the prospect of yet another day with Rose, and Meg was delighted.

  Faro didn’t share their enthusiasm; thick fog made him claustrophobic, wanting to keep his voice down and walk on tiptoe, a primeval instinct of being trapped like some animal.