Suddenly the calm young man had vanished, his eyes were wild, his hands thumped the arms of the chair. He groaned, covering his eyes, sobbing, the tears flowing. ‘Now, I might never see her again,’ he wailed.
Rose leant over, touched his shoulder, said: ‘It may not be as bad as you think,’ knowing they were empty words. There was no comfort or even truth in them, but they had the right effect.
He looked up. ‘You think so?’
Rose smiled, reached out for his hand. ‘But we have to find this man who you think attacked you.’
She asked: ‘Had you ever seen him before?’ Ignoring the fact that he had resembled her father.
Archie shook his head, thought for a moment. ‘He wasn’t close enough for me to see his face, but I would know him again.’ He paused. ‘You’ve all asked what he looked like. Well, all I can tell you is that he was smartly dressed, not casual like our folk. Not from the island. He was a gentleman.’ He sighed again. ‘You are a lady, missus. You will know where to look for him.’ And looking over to where his mother still stood watching them, he shouted, ‘I’m hungry. Get me some food now, please.’
Rose stood up, ready to take her leave. The interview was over; there was no more information to be gained. Refusing Millie’s offer of refreshment, of bannocks and cheese, and heading back to Yesnaby, she was alerted to the approach of a horse and trap. The driver waved to her.
Dr Randall. Coming to a halt with a friendly greeting, Rose realised this was exactly the opportunity she wanted. ‘I have just visited one of your patients, Doctor. Archie Tofts.’
The doctor sighed. ‘Ah, yes, young Archie. Look, can I offer you a lift to Yesnaby?’
The house was almost visible, but Rose guessed that the doctor had thought fast and this was another chance to see Emily again. Thanking him, she stepped up and he moved alongside for her. ‘Young Archie,’ he repeated. ‘Did he tell you his story, of the attack?’ When she said so, he shook his head. ‘I am afraid we are all victims of his imagination.’
‘You mean none of it was true?’
‘Alas, no. I’ve looked after the lad since I first came here. He was just into his teens and the first thing I spotted was that he suffered from what is all too frequent on the island, commonly known in Orkney as the “doonfa” sickness.’
Rose frowned. She had heard of it, of course, in her young days with Gran in Kirkwall. Randall continued, ‘In other words he has epilepsy, although his mother refuses to accept it. He takes fits and has done so since childhood. She ignores that, especially as they are less frequent these days. She has the forlorn hope that he has recovered from what was just a childhood disorder.’ He shook his head. ‘That is unlikely, and I am afraid what happened last night might be an all too frequent recurrence, not helped by the Lammastide mythology and his obsession with selkies.’
He paused. ‘My diagnosis, which of course his mother rejected, is that he had an epileptic seizure, fell and hit his head on a rock, was knocked unconscious and believed that some man, an innocent walker he had observed nearby out for an evening stroll, had hit him on the head. His mother not unnaturally wishes to believe his story, since she completely rejects the “doonfa” sickness diagnosis.’
They had reached the house where Emily immediately invited John in for a cup of tea. Both seemed pleased by this unexpected meeting, which cheered Rose, who could not help but feel that her sister’s infatuation for Sven would end in heartbreak.
She had no intention of revealing Emily’s confidences to their father – such matters were sacred between sisters – however, as he had seen her arrive with John Randall and observed his warm reception, Faro said that the doctor was a fine fellow and it would be excellent, as well as solving the problem of staying on at Yesnaby, if Emily could come to regard him less through the eyes of a long and trusted friend and more as a life partner.
Rose was pleased but shook an admonishing finger at him. ‘Well, Pa, this is a surprise. Since the time has come that you no longer have crimes to solve and criminals to put behind bars in the interests of public safety, you might well go into the business of matchmaking.’
He chuckled and shook his head. ‘My dear, it is merely my lifelong observation and deduction at work, the desire to restore order out of chaos. Anyone with half an eye can see that the good doctor is devoted to our Emily.’
Ignoring what she regarded as her father’s regrettable tendency towards clichés, and remembering her talk with Archie, she asked, ‘What did he look like, this Mr Smith? Describe him.’
Faro did so and she laughed. ‘Now there’s a coincidence. When you said Archie was terrified of you and thought you were his attacker, I think we have the answer. This tall gentleman from the yacht seen at a distance also fitted your description. Don’t you see, Pa? From what we now know, there is every reason to consider that despite Dr Randall’s diagnosis, perhaps Archie was telling the truth and from what you have told me, Mr Smith might well have been his attacker.’
Faro smiled. ‘As always, my dear, our thoughts run along the same track. It would seem that our royal yacht is implicated, but as yet I can’t see any obvious link with a lad who had to be hit on the head, except that he was in the vicinity, innocently waiting for a selkie to appear.’
Selkies meant Sibella Scarth to Rose. ‘I loved Sibella. When we met, I realised that Emily might, if she lived to be very, very old, be her image. Remember the portrait I did of her?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, and quite extraordinary, Meg’s mistake thinking it was Emily. At least I know now that I’ve solved one mystery, why my two daughters looked so unlike sisters. Emily didn’t look like any of us. But you, my dear, were the image of your mother, my beloved Lizzie.’ Was this, he wondered, why Rose had always been his closest bairn?
Rose was saying, ‘I couldn’t understand it either, I only knew that I wanted to be like Em, envying her looks, and then when I met Sibella, I guessed the seal woman story was right.’ She looked at him intently. ‘Especially those mittened hands, and even the rather … slithering way she walked. It was very odd, a bit scary, but she was such a wonderful person and she was very proud of you.’
There was a slight pause and as Faro made no comment, Rose said: ‘You don’t really believe that story about Sibella and Hakon Scarth rescuing her from the sea, do you, Pa?’
He sighed. ‘I prefer the more rational and logical explanation that regardless of the denials of the sailors from the wrecked ship – and they may have had good reason for that – I think she was undoubtedly a survivor, a tiny child too young to remember her parents, who went down with the Norwegian merchantman.’
‘What about Archie’s story, then, about shooting a seal, which turned out to be an old woman, our Sibella. Don’t you believe that?’
The story made Faro uncomfortable. He did not like to face the fact that there was no grave for his grandmother, that she had drowned and her body was never recovered or, as Rose would prefer to believe, the seal woman had gone back to the sea. Faro was a man who liked tidy ends to stories and this one upset him.
‘We have to remember that by all accounts she was more than just an elderly woman. She was incredibly old, well over a hundred. Although I gather from you and Em that she was still independent and went walking each day by the shore, she must have been very fragile, frail enough to fall into the sea and drown.’
Rose said: ‘Always looking out for Hakon, I remember her telling me. That someday he would come for her, and as he had always loved the sea she would go back there to be with him.’ She smiled at her father. ‘She once pointed out the particular rock where he would be waiting.’
‘A nice romantic tale, Rose,’ Faro replied, determined to have the last word. ‘Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that since her eyesight was no longer good, and quite incapable of seeing through the island’s frequent mists, she imagined one day that he was there waiting for her, so she tried to reach him and, well, that was the end. She disappeared into the sea, but not ou
t of some magical impulse.’ He shrugged. ‘As for Archie’s tale, he is obsessed with selkies, and he was out shooting illegally, I understand, and everyone knows that seals’ heads can look like humans. Like old men, mostly.’
They looked at each other, each the same thought.
Or the head of the passenger who had gone overboard and drowned off the royal yacht.
There was an interesting epilogue to their earlier speculation regarding Mr Smith and the royal yacht that neither could know at that time. In Kirkwall, Jack had returned to the hotel awaiting Mr Smith in the dining room. The hour appointed passed, and still he did not appear. Jack ate alone, and although annoyed that some message might have been sent in the interests of politeness, he dismissed the incident and after an excellent meal finished off by equally excellent Orkney whisky, he retired to bed to be wakened as requested by the alarm.
He declined breakfast and paying his bill to the all-night reception clerk, his curiosity was suddenly aroused by the register lying open, and scanning the signatures, he asked: ‘I had a supper engagement with Mr Smith, but he failed to appear. I wonder did he leave a message for me?’
‘A moment, sir,’ the clerk consulted the rack. ‘Nothing here.’ He frowned. ‘Mr Smith did not occupy his room last night. He did not pick up his key, said he was going for a walk before dining. So he obviously intended to return. But he seems to have left, and I regret to say, without paying his bill for yesterday’s luncheon and his drinks’ bill.’
Heading towards the ferry, Jack was still sleepy and wished he had not applied himself quite so enthusiastically to the whisky; it always had this effect on him. As for Mr Smith, he would have liked to have had a word with his father-in-law about the outcome of that interview, but that would have to wait. Curiosity was not one of his failings, he was a practical man and used to interpreting what was in front of him rather than making speculations often based on intuition, which he regarded as women’s business and fitted often quite successfully in with Rose’s role as a lady investigator. He smiled. Her intuitions were commendable and doubtless when she returned home he would hear all about her father and the man who had so wanted to meet him.
Although the mysterious Mr Smith had looked like a gentleman, good manners as well as honesty regarding a hotel bill were in dispute, but what most occupied Jack’s thoughts was returning to the Central Office and hoping that someone could throw some light on the reason why there had been a message from what the police headed under ‘higher authorities’, a vague term disguising HM’s government, that he had been told to remain in Orkney on a fabricated reason of a fraud case and warned off any matters relating to the presence of the royal yacht.
However, he did not associate Mr Smith or his subsequent disappearance with those orders from Edinburgh. Those revelations were to remain hidden for the present.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While Rose and Faro had accepted Dr Randall’s verdict that Archie’s so-called attack had been an accident caused by his epilepsy, PC Flett was called to a similar incident in Skailholm. A local lad of Archie’s age was leaving the inn when he was brutally attacked and, even worse than Archie, left for dead. Dr Randall, who served both communities, was called and the young man rushed to the local hospital where PC Flett sat patiently by his bedside, notebook at the ready, awaiting his return to consciousness, to reveal details of the attack.
On hearing of this new crime, Faro sighed. It was becoming evident that here were some doubtful areas in the local police administration.
Emily said defensively, ‘This is new to us, Pa. We hardly need a policeman at all. We are very law-abiding citizens. The only things Flett ever has to sort out are occasional drunken brawls, mostly at Hogmanay, or poachers.’
‘What about smuggling?’
She laughed. ‘Only whisky, perhaps. And for obvious reasons, that is completely ignored.’
‘By “obvious reasons”, I presume you mean bribes.’
She shrugged. ‘If you want to put it that way, but it is hardly corruption on a large scale, all fairly innocent, no one gets hurt except the revenue of the mainland excise.’ And with a smile, ‘You are too law-abiding for us, Pa.’
Later, as they watched the Victoria and Albert III disappear over the horizon on the afternoon tide, the reason for its continued presence to remain a mystery, Rose was eager to hear more about her father’s meeting with the man in Kirkwall, and although she was intrigued by his connection with the royal yacht, she was disappointed that her father had learnt so little.
‘I wish you could have been present, my dear. You are so much better at probing questions.’
‘I doubt that, Pa. I will never have anything like the number of criminals you have successfully caught in your career.’
But bearing in mind her success with Archie, Faro recalled his interview with Mr Smith and the explanations he was doubtless inventing for the drowning accident man as well as the captain’s unhappy duty of informing the man’s relatives. Perhaps, Rose would have been more successful in making sense of it all.
There were problems at home now as Mary had seized upon the similarity of that poor young man now in the hospital to the attack on Archie. In her opinion, Hopescarth was in the grip of what she called a wave of terror, a term that summoned up thoughts more appropriate to the French Revolution and heads dropping into baskets at the guillotine than a one-man street attack in a small Orkney hamlet.
Faro sighed, it was obvious to him from whom Rose had inherited that remarkable imagination, although hers was under firm control most of the time. His mother’s so-called ‘new wave of terror’ was set to engulf Yesnaby in a relentless grip as she extended her anxieties to encompass their two innocent children, and with a murderer at large she was insisting that Sven should accompany them everywhere.
A suggestion that Emily and Rose dismissed as nonsense. Rose knew of her sister’s secret regarding Sven, whose virtues she sang at every opportunity, but she was also aware of a disquieting factor that had escaped Emily. It had become obvious to Rose, always sensitive to the emotions of those around her, that although Sven seemed fond of Magnus, treating him in a playful, good-humoured manner, the boy winced from his teasing and certainly did not share his mother’s fondness and admiration for this member of their household. She wondered if Faro had noticed it too, especially after his own early problems with an eleven-year-old Vince.
Thankfully she had no such problems with Meg, to whom she had never seemed other than her real mother. They reacted to the same things and so she was not greatly surprised when Meg said: ‘I don’t think Magnus likes Sven.’
‘Indeed. Has he said why?’
Meg shrugged. ‘Not really. But I just know somehow. He doesn’t like being teased such a lot. Sven should leave him alone, you know, Mam. Magnus is really quite grown-up.’
Rose laughed at that. Ten years old and already grown up, but there was something very mature about the boy, she could see that, and if Emily was a throwback to Sibella then Magnus had inherited much of his grandfather. He had the same eyes, that piercing-blue direct look and a maturity that struck her as what Faro must have been like at the same age, and she felt entirely happy leaving Meg in his care, aware from that first meeting that he would take good care of their wee girl.
Mary’s constant warnings about the surge of a local crime wave were placated by Emily. She agreed that until the Skailholm attacker was apprehended, if the children were to venture far from the house, then Sven should go with them, a suggestion to which Sven was in instant agreement. Indeed, he said, the same idea had occurred to him.
Meanwhile, beyond the long drive up to Yesnaby House, gossip that spread quicker than wildfire or the telegraph system had put residents as far as Stromness and Kirkwall in full possession of every detail of the murderous attacks on Archie Tofts in Hopescarth followed by that on Jimmy Wells outside the Skailholm inn, the latter incident rare enough to make front-page news in bold lettering in the weekly newspaper, The Orca
dian.
Sensational and reader-grabbing as those headlines were, sweeping aside avid interest in farming matters and fat stock prices, as well as births, weddings and deaths (known locally as hatches, matches and despatches), the reporter would have benefited greatly from a seat at the table where three of the local ladies, a better dressed and more civilised edition of Macbeth’s three weird sisters, including Millie Tofts when available, met regularly each Wednesday afternoon in the parlour of the hotel. There, the owner’s wife, Bessie, away from her husband’s eagle eye, provided bere bannocks and cheese and a less inflammatory brew than those famous witches, in small ales guaranteed to loosen tongues and give more import and shrill exclamations to what had been happening since their last weekly meeting.
The royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert III, was high on the opening agenda, but summarily dismissed as of little interest since neither the King nor any of the royal family were aboard. Local pregnancies came next, babies imminent with discussion about whether the prospective parents could afford them and whether they were happy or no, which led inevitably to illicit love affairs, lodgers (known as ‘bidey-ins’) – a keen topic – and about whose lad was seeing whose lass and late-night assignations down by the shore.
This led not unnaturally to Archie Tofts, Millie’s poor laddie who saw things and had the ‘doonfa’ sickness. Heads were shaken over all that business about selkies, which none of them believed, but in years gone by as lasses themselves they had taken care not to walk alone by the shore at Lammastide, when the seal king arose rampant from the waves and took a young lassie back to his kingdom under the sea for a year and a day.
Heads were shaken again and the glasses solemnly refreshed for there had been incidents. Aye, one lass, innocent no longer, came back after twa’ years and was seen walking along the shore as if she had just been out for an evening stroll. A sensation that was and, although the centre of attraction, she couldn’t remember a thing about such a remarkable experience. Later information leaked out and it transpired that they had all been cheated. The lass had never been awa’ in that kingdom under the sea but had in fact skipped off to the mainland wi’ a fancy man her parents didna’ like. They had been right about him and she had come home again, wiser, stouter and with a wee bairn in tow.
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