A Handful of Ash

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘So he could,’ Gavin agreed. ‘And have you any ideas about who that uscrupulous person might be?’

  I turned my head to look him straight in the eye. ‘Nate seemed the obvious person.’ My gaze moved to his hand. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me.’ His hand moved back, with a ceremonious swirl. ‘Thank you for the lift.’

  He got out to open the door for me. ‘Thank you for the information.’ A jerk of the chin towards the marina. As luck would have it, Anders had just come up into the motorboat’s cockpit. ‘You didn’t mention that Anders is back.’

  ‘He came over last night,’ I said. So that was what this coldness was about. Well, be damned to the lot of them. I shouldered my bag and stalked towards the gate, without turning to look back. Anders was just coming through it, and I was tempted to greet him with more enthusiasm than I otherwise would have, and knowing it wouldn’t be fair, only to be taken aback by a casual nod, as if to a pontoon aquaintance. ‘Fine day,’ he said, face expressionless, and passed by without a further word.

  I heard the soft whiff of the police car’s engine, then the scrunch of gravel under the tyres as it moved off. Let Gavin make what he wanted of that little exchange. I hoped it puzzled him as much as it puzzled me.

  There had to be a reason for it. Then I looked along the shore road and saw the three crows strolling away, their grey clothes merging into the dimming buildings. That made it obvious. Anders had gone along the street, made connection with them – now I thought of it, I’d told him they could be found hanging about by the Shetland Bus memorial, wreathed in smoke – and thought he was getting somewhere. I’d text him later.

  Besides, I wanted to be alone. I could have groaned aloud when I heard a Shetland voice call my name. A dark-jacketed figure lounging in the boating club doorway straightened and came towards me, head twitching over his shoulder, as if he was afraid of being overheard. James Leask. I was sorry for his loss of Annette, truly I was, but I didn’t feel I could do sympathy right now.

  He came straight to me. ‘Cass, I was hoping to catch you. Listen, I can’t speak right now, but I need to talk to you urgently. It’s about Annette.’ He looked over one shoulder, back at the college. His eyes bored into mine. ‘I know.’

  ‘You know who killed her?’

  He almost put a hand up to cover my mouth, then realised how obvious it would be and let it fall again. ‘Ssssh. Don’t say it. Can you meet me later? After dark.’ He gave the already-dimming sky a haunted look. ‘Half past six. No, seven. Seven o’clock … in Mary Ruizland’s garden, in the little hut at the back. Nobody will see us there. Come alone. Will you come?’

  ‘Why all this secrecy?’ I asked.

  His head twitched to his shoulder again. ‘Seven, in the shed in the garden. I’ve got to go.’ He hurried back into the college.

  Melodramatic idiot. It was the detective story classic. Man who has discovered the murderer won’t tell the inspector, and the next you know, his body turns up. Girl is given mysterious appointment and is abducted. I made a disgusted noise and kicked a pebble across the road and into the far gutter. Above me, the sky was covered by mottled clouds. The moon had not yet risen above the north-eastern hills, but her silvery light glowed in the sky behind the sentinel wind turbines.

  I walked along the swaying pontoon, clambered down the companionway, and put the washboards back up. Home at last. The warmth from the sun lingered in the cabin, and it was still light enough not to need the lantern. The kettle had just boiled when Cat slipped in, with Rat behind him. I made my tea and sat down, patting my lap so that he’d jump up. Rat swarmed up onto the fiddle and whiffled his whiskers at me. He hadn’t forgotten Khalida. I stroked Cat as I drank my tea, trying to forget my curiosity over what Anders was up to, and the cold ache in my heart. I couldn’t blame Gavin, after all; I’d jumped back when he’d seemed to think of kissing me, and now Anders was here, without me mentioning he was coming. Maybe it would be easiest to go for the devil I knew, and become a Norwegian girlfriend. ‘With,’ my inner voice pointed out, ‘a hostile mother-in-law, and only a small boat to start living-together life in. Your boat too, turned into our boat.’ My Khalida. We’d managed to live aboard together for a summer in reasonable harmony, but she was too small for long-term. We’d have to sell her, and buy something bigger. Anders was one of the black-clad Lutheran persuasion too. That wouldn’t cause difficulty at first, but later I knew it would come to haunt us. The gulf between that and my own Catholicism was too wide.

  Yet how could I explain to Gavin without seeming to blow hot and cold? Oh, I could describe how Anders and Reidar had arrived last night, out of the blue, but that in itself didn’t mean anything. What I had to explain was that even though on paper Anders was right, and Gavin wasn’t, in practice, with Gavin in front of me, he felt right and Anders didn’t. Why had I dodged, then? Because of the paper; because I was afraid it wouldn’t work, and then we’d both be hurt. I didn’t know how I could begin to explain that. I knew that if I wanted to take a step towards having a relationship with DI Gavin Macrae I’d have to try. Otherwise, this wall would remain, because it had been I who’d rejected him. The Highlanders were a proud race. I understood that.

  I was dozing off when there was a light step on the pontoon beside us, then on Khalida’s side. A dark shadow blocked the companionway window. I tensed; Cat sprang to the floor. Then a hand knocked on the sliding hatch, a bass voice rumbled, ‘Cass, are you home?’

  Reidar. I got up and let him in. He had two cups of drinking chocolate in one of those moulded mug holders, and several homemade biscuits, crumbly ones that smelled of orange peel. The man was a genius. We sat companionably sipping in silence for ten minutes before he got down to business.

  ‘Anders spoke to your chief witch,’ he said at last, when both cups were empty, and Cat had finished licking the finger of cream I gave him off his nose. ‘He went along to the shop, and saw them hanging about there, so he poured on the charm. He told her that he was on a boat on the pontoon here, and then he hung around, you know, sat with a fishing rod in the sun for an hour on the pontoon, and they came along to talk. Now he is meeting her after work. He said she was excited. She was not exactly dropping the hints, but he said she was all lit up, jumping with that “something exciting” feeling.’

  ‘It’s Hallowe’en,’ I said.

  ‘I do not know this word.’

  ‘The evening before All Hallows, that was the old name for All Saints’ Day.’ In France, my cousins would be buying chrysanthemums. ‘I have information too. I found out about Scottish witches.’ I told him the story of Isobel Gowdie, and he nodded, and made rumbling noises in his beard. ‘Then perhaps there is a coven meeting tonight?’

  ‘Perhaps … I don’t know. It depends if Nate was their Devil.’

  ‘You think that he was?’

  ‘I suppose I do.’ That feeling of unease swept over me again. ‘If the werewolf suit was his, he was the one who clawed Annette. But someone else wore the Devil costume, to kill him.’

  ‘That someone else would have to be stupid, to hold a meeting this night, with the police everywhere.’

  ‘I’m not sure if he could help himself. That kind of power, it’d be addictive.’ Skippers knew about power. You held the safety of the ship and the life of its crew in your ability to read the pattern of isobars that meant fair weather or foul, in your navigation towards a clear passageway or a rocky shore. Power was lonely. However much you consulted your officers, in the end it was your orders which counted. Skippers found it hard to adjust to life ashore, with a thousand petty checks to each move. ‘Without his coven he’d just be an ordinary person again. Besides, he doesn’t know that Shaela saw him, that he’s linked to Nate’s death.’

  ‘So if it is not this Nate,’ Reidar said, ‘you are looking for someone overlooked, someone who feels that he is special, except that the world does not recognise this.’

  ‘Or someone who had power and has lost it,’ I said slowly. An idea was strug
gling to the surface of my mind. Claws … snatching, holding. Rachel saying that Lawrence didn’t like her to be out. She’d been independent, then become part of a couple, her wings clipped. Nate was of slight build; a suit made to bulk Rachel out could have been left in his room. It would have looked a fit for Nate – and who could come and go more easily in the house than the daughter who’d lived there?

  I liked Rachel. I didn’t want her to be mad. ‘I’ve been asked to meet someone,’ I said abruptly. ‘James Leask. He says he knows who killed Annette.’ He’d kept looking over his shoulder at the college, as if he’d been afraid of being overheard. Rachel? Lawrence?

  ‘Where does he want you to meet him?’

  ‘In Mary Ruisland’s garden.’ I looked out of Khalida’s port window into the dusk. ‘It’s over there, the garden with the flowers, just above the little roundabout.’ Above the shore where Nate had died. ‘There’s a shed in one corner. I’ve to meet him in there.’

  Reidar voiced my thoughts. ‘It is the classic chapter in the detective story. The heroine is lured to the lonely place to be murdered.’

  ‘I’m not anyone’s heroine,’ I said, ‘and I’m not going to be murdered if I can help it. But I need to talk to him, and he said to come alone.’

  ‘Then I will go there first,’ Reidar said. ‘When have you to meet him?’

  ‘At seven.’ I glanced down at the little clock attached by velcro to the bulkhead just by my berth. It was quarter to five.

  ‘Very well. I will go at six and a quarter, somewhere I can see his approach, and yours. Then you can learn what he has to tell you, in safety.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The moon was above the eastern hills by the time I set out towards Mary Ruisland’s garden, a silver penny with a twisted smile smoking the clouds with light. A full moon gave a full tide, but not quite yet; it was two hours to high water, three-twelfths still to come in, pouring into every bay and voe and geo on this side of Shetland, then swirling around to fill each inlet on the other side. The sea below the pavement was molten mercury washing up the beach. Every little stone had a bright summit, a magnified shadow. Darkness and light …I’d thought Cat would want to stay with Rat, but he came up the cabin steps with me, and trotted before me along the pontoon, the moon glinting on the silver underside of his plumed tail. He’d stop and go home when he thought he’d gone far enough, or wait in the ditch, out of sight, until I returned.

  Hallowe’en. The guizers were out. There was a group clustered in front of the sheds where the men of the Shetland Bus had repaired their boats. They were dressed in a bizarre assortment of costumes left over from Up Helly Aa: a fur fabric parakeet, a Spanish dancer with a high mantilla, an inflated sumo wrestler, a long-nosed witch, an Elvis in a silver poncho. His false head had a high rubber quiff. They’d stopped under the shadow of the sheds to raise their bottles, and the Elvis was drunk already, staggering between two of his mates. If I’d been on the mainland I’d have dodged into a side street until they’d passed, but there was no side street here, just the long promenade, and this was Shetland, so I had nothing to fear from gangs of young folk out for a spree. Cat pressed closer to my heels.

  I stepped into the road to pass them. Suddenly I was surrounded. The Spanish dancer flung her shawl over my head, and the parakeet grabbed my arms, and before I could yell or strike out my wrists had been bound with thin cord. The shawl was pulled away. The witch stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth, and held it there with claw-fingers, while the dancer pulled a false head over my face. A blanket dropped over my shoulders. A woman laughed. There was a growl from Cat, and a hiss, then a cry of pain, another voice that could have been young man or woman. ‘It fucking bit me.’

  Good for Cat. I was trembling with fury. Whoever this was, whatever stupid joke they’d decided to play on me, they’d be sorry. It wouldn’t just be Cat who bit and scratched, once I got my hands free.

  ‘She’ll no get out o’ that in a hurry,’ a voice said, with satisfaction. It was the girl who had worn the dog-collar. Her drawled, flat voice was like a bucket of ice water poured over me. Not my college mates being stupid, but the hooded crows, the witches. There had been five of them in the road, and five knots on the piece of string I’d found under my pillow. The coven … and its master? There was a cool intelligence behind this. The way they’d caught me had been thought through, efficient. I didn’t see the lead hoodie craw working like that. She was too emotional. No, this was done under the master’s orders. James Leask, I fumed, making sure I’d be on the road at the right time. A pretty piece of acting that had been, the artistic glances over his shoulder towards the college. Damn and damn, letting myself be taken in like that. Reidar had worried about me being grabbed at the meeting place, but we’d neither of us thought of the dangers of the road there. Worry about me, Reidar, when I don’t turn up. Phone the police.

  An arm each side of me linked through mine and pulled me forward, swaying me as if I was drunk, and they were supporting me. A passer-by wouldn’t look twice at me, any more than I’d looked at the drunken Elvis. If I fell, they’d have to drag me, but there were enough of them to be able to do it, and they wouldn’t do it gently. I’d just have my hands and knees scraped to ribbons on the gravelled road. I was better to stay upright, and save my strength for when I could use it to help myself. If the sandpaper scrape on my wrists was baler twine, then the little multi-tool in my pocket would cut through it in seconds, once I got my fingers to it. The cloth in my mouth tasted of fabric softener, the sort that would be called ‘Summer Meadow’, and the intense floral taste made me want to gag. The head over it was one of those uni-size plastic affairs with wider cheeks than mine. I might be able to work the cloth out of my mouth and into the pouch of its cheek. The head would muffle a scream, but I’d still be able to make enough noise to attract attention. If we kept moving forwards, we’d arrive at the street.

  I darted a glance each side of me. Trying to see through the eyeholes was like looking through a letter box. I turned my head left, then right. It was the parakeet and the Sumo wrestler who were holding me. I could hear footsteps behind me: the Spanish dancer, the witch, Elvis. I focused on the cloth in my mouth, working it forward with my tongue and lips. We’d be at Norway house in fifty yards, the start of the people zone –

  They’d not mentioned Cat any more. I hoped that meant he’d bitten and run into the safety of the ditch, where his grey would blend into the shadows, where he could slink safely home to Khalida. I hoped he wasn’t following, with some dog-like instinct of sticking with his mistress. He didn’t usually; once we started meeting people who were likely to want to stroke him, he headed for home. Girly stuff …

  My captors turned left, dragging me with them. Now we were facing the burn up the hill, the traditional route for witches to be marched to the gallows on the summit. Kate had said once that she’d been working in her studio later than usual, on a black night with no moon, and she’d heard the chinking of chains, and the roaring of the crowd. She’d been too afraid to move, she’d said, but had stood there, paintbrush poised in her hand, as the crowd growled past. When silence had deadened the night once more, she’d slipped out of the door and run like a hare for the house. She’d put her head under the pillow, she said, but she didn’t sleep. Kate would have heard if I’d yelled her name, but it was too early for her to be in her studio. She and Peter would be in their dining room on the other side of the house, eating their roast lamb with silver cutlery, chatting across the white tablecloth. My captors hustled me past the garden wall, as if they’d thought of that too. I felt the tarmac of Ladysmith Drive under my feet, then a gravel track between the last pair of gardens, and finally there was grass underfoot. We’d reached the foot of Gallow Hill.

  Now there was nobody to hear me if I screamed. I was cold with anger at being man-handled like this, a stranger on each side with a rough grasp around my arms, forcing me onwards. The multi-tool in my pocket bumped like a talisman against my thigh. Just thir
ty seconds with these heavy hands off my arms, and I’d have this baler twine cut, and my hands free. The false head wouldn’t let me see what was underneath my feet, but I’d seen it in the daylight, a rough earth path a foot back from the burn banks. I stumbled upwards between my captors, my shoes slipping on the uneven ground. They were less fit than I; the parakeet’s breathing became laboured before we were half way up, and the wrestler’s pace was slowing. I’d soon give them the slip once I was able to run. Someone shoved me from behind: ‘Get on, hurry up.’ It was the lead hoodie crow’s voice. I looked behind. She was the witch. Five of them … the three crows and two unknowns. I was pretty sure Dog-collar was the parakeet, and wouldn’t have been surprised if the sumo wrestler was the third one, who’d worn the sea-green corset. I tried to visualise Rachel’s height and built. Yes, she could be the Spanish dancer or Elvis behind me.

  ‘We’re going as fast as we can,’ the wrestler retorted, her voice raggedly breathless. I recognised it: Sea-green Corset. I’d be able to outrun these two, even on a path as bad as this. If they would let go of me, I’d make a run for it. I jerked forward suddenly, as if I’d stumbled. The parakeet let go, then grabbed my arm again, but the wrestler overbalanced, and went down on her hands and knees, pulling me with her. My knee hit a stone with a painful crack, making me spit a cry of pain into the mouth cloth. I was glad they didn’t hear it. The parakeet gripped my arm with both hands while the wrestler sorted herself out, then they hauled me to my feet again. Someone jabbed me in the back. ‘Keep moving, you.’

  It felt as though the walk would never end. My face was wet with sweat under the stifling mask. Up, up by the burn, then into open ground at last, where the moonlight poured like silver on the heathery moor. Now I was stumbling over ankle-deep tussocks of heather, fumbling forward with each foot to make sure I wasn’t going to break a leg in a rabbit-burrow. How far had the Gallow Hill been, when we’d looked at it from the boat? An hour’s walk, maybe, but that would have been a brisk walk with swinging arms, not this stumbling progress. The frost sparkled in the air, and my captors breathed ragged smoke. Left foot, right, left, right. The drudgery of putting one foot in front of another was stopping me from thinking, and I had to think, to keep my brain alert. What time was it now? I could calculate that. I turned my head to catch the moon in my letterbox, then looked downward at the black islands on the shining sea. The silver penny was over the hills of Quarff, sailing through the clouds like a full-rigged ship. Once I got through this, I’d be away on a ship myself, and having no more dealings with land people. The island of Trondra was due south. I visualised the map in my head and laid a compass rose over it. The moon was around 120 degrees. She’d risen around 1600, in the north-east, say 60 degrees, and she would set at 0700 just north of west, say 290 degrees. 230 degrees divided by fifteen hours, fifteen degrees an hour. If she was at 120 degrees now, she’d moved 60 degrees, 60 divided by fifteen, four. Four hours on … around eight o’clock. An hour for Reidar to realise something had gone wrong, and for the police to start looking. I hadn’t mentioned the witches’ sabbat this evening, just kale-casting, but the children who’d come guizing had mentioned meetings up on Gallow Hill. Gavin would know that Hallowe’en was the night of the dead. Help should come soon, however annoyed he was with me. Anders too, he’d had been talking to the chief hooded crow. She might have told him where they were going that night.