Sailors hate mist. It plays with distance; it hides the sea, the shore, the deadly rock you wanted to avoid. Lost in the mist was the last place I wanted to be. At sea, you’d make for open water, or drop anchor until it had gone, or creep along the ten fathom line on the chart to your destination. I swung my arms to warm myself up, stuck my whistle between my teeth, then tugged my jacket around me. I had a compass, and I’d been walking for ten minutes. If I kept going for another five, I’d get to the loch.
I gave the whistle a blast. There was a scrabble and a scurry almost under my feet, making me jump back, heart pounding. A shape moved in the mist, swelling upwards, then I saw grey wool as a sheep leapt up and bounded off, and heard the patter of hooves as others joined it. Thanks, ladies. I took a deep breath, gave another blast, walked twenty paces and blasted again. Between blasts I listened, but there was nothing. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, as if someone was watching me from the whiteness.
I walked on. The mist thinned for a moment, and I saw something ahead of me, a pony lying down maybe, some twenty metres ahead. I blasted again, but it didn’t move, and it was too small for a pony, flatter to the ground. I felt my breathing tight as I came towards it. There were two legs straggling towards me, a body hunched under a dark jacket. My foot caught on a stone and I stumbled forward and fell, hands flat on the mossy ground, knees soaked through. I pulled myself back onto my hunkers, and felt a stone under each hand, smoothed, sizeable boulders buried in the earth. I knew where I was now. This was Haltadans, the stone circle where the trows had been turned to stone as the sun came up. I pushed myself to my feet and walked forward to the centre.
It wasn’t Laura, but a man. He was lying between the two centre stones with his legs stretched long and his arms tight round his body. One hand clutched his shoulder, white against the navy and grey Musto jacket. His hood was pulled up, shading his face.
I went forward in as few steps as I could to crouch down beside him and feel for a pulse. The cold weight of his hand told me straight away that he was dead, but I tried, all the same, then put my ear to his mouth in the shadow of the hood to listen for the sound of breath, or feel the warmth of it. Nothing.
Carefully, handling it with my fingertips, I slid the hood back.
It was Daniel who lay there, mouth twisted open. I noticed his eyes first, staring sightlessly up into the mist. Then I saw the neat red hole, crusted with a blacker rim of blood, in the centre of his forehead.
My heart thudded as if it wanted to leap from my chest. It was the suddenness of it, finding him like that, and him being the wrong body, and that horrid red hole, so neatly in the centre of his forehead, as if someone he trusted had walked up to him and pressed the trigger before he could even react. If his face had any expression, it was disbelief.
I tried to think what Gavin would have done. Time, first. I checked my watch: twenty to ten. I crouched down, keeping my feet still, and touched his hand again. The outer side of it was cold and damp, but underneath, where it had lain against his jacket, my fingers felt a faint warmth lingering. The pathologist would know what that meant. The blood round that hole had dried.
There was nothing I could do but fetch help. I called the map to memory. Straight south would bring me to the top of the loch, but slanting slightly to the east would either get me help sooner or have me miss the loch completely. Safe, not sorry. I said a prayer for Daniel, standing over his crumpled body, then set off due southwards, going always to the left when I had to deviate, then picking up my straight path again. I could see only ten metres before me, tussocks of hill grass, the dulled colours of the flowers, sheep tracks leading into the blankness. My footsteps were silent on the turf; I could hear only my own breathing, the rustle of my jacket, and the silence was more menacing than sound would have been. There was a killer with a gun out there, perhaps not far away, hiding in this mist. He, she, could be following me, and I’d never know it.
I stumbled on. No time to keep looking at my watch. Southwards – and then, with a snick of stones under my feet, I’d found the loch, fringed by a pebble beach. I turned left and made my way along, feet crunching the stones until I couldn’t bear the noise in this silence, feeling it was signalling my presence too easily to someone waiting in the mist, and moved back to the grassy rim. At last I heard a faint whistle blast ahead of me. I grabbed my own from my neck and gave a good answering blow that split the mist around me. From somewhere on my hill side there was a scrabble, a noise of thudding feet. Startled sheep, I told myself, and found the energy to break into a jog.
The search team burst into view twenty strides later, a group of shapes in the mist, gradually becoming neon vests, dark trousers, hooded faces. I skidded to a stop beside them and leant over, catching my breath.
‘Cass,’ our leader said. ‘Good. That’s everyone. OK, homewards, keeping together.’
I put out a hand to stop him and tried to control my breathing. ‘Wait,’ I managed. I took another couple of breaths. ‘There’s a dead man up there. Up at the Haltadans. He’s been shot.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The fiddle and accordion music, the thump of dancing feet, echoed through the wall. I sat in a corner of the playgroup room, warming my hands with a mug of tea, and still shivering with a combination of cold and shock. Someone had flung a knitted-squares blanket over my shoulders, and someone else had pressed this mug of well-sugared tea into my hands. I sat and watched while our group leader explained to Gavin. Sergeant Peterson began mustering her troops, and Gavin came over to me. ‘You found him, Cass?’
His hand was warm on my shoulder. I nodded. ‘In the middle of the Haltadans,’ I managed, through chattering teeth. ‘At 21.40. It was Daniel, and he’d been shot.’ I took a deep breath and clutched my mug in both hands. ‘The skin that was exposed to the air was cold, but where it was against his jacket it was still warm.’
He made a note of that. ‘Any sign of anyone else around?’
I shook my head. ‘It was too misty. I felt like I was being watched, but I was on edge. Probably imagination.’
‘OK. Stick here with other people until you go aboard again.’ His hand tightened on my shoulder, then lifted. ‘I’ll see you back on board.’
I nodded and watched through the window as they piled onto the shuttle bus. It had just brought the third rescue team back: Alain’s. He gave the mustering officers a quick, intelligent glance, and came into the committee room. He sat down beside me. ‘You found her?’
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what I was allowed to say, but my group of the rescue team knew it wasn’t her. ‘A body. Not hers. A man.’
He jerked back from me, staring. ‘A man? What had happened to him?’
I shouldn’t answer that, I knew, and surely ‘Who?’ would have been a more natural question. I shook my head again and drank more of the over-sweet tea. It was surprisingly comforting.
He gave me a curious look. ‘Where did you find the dead man?’
My search team knew that too. ‘In the stone circle.’
‘A local man?’
I took refuge in evasion. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about it.’
Alain made a face and was silent for a moment, then he glanced over at the door. ‘If they’re looking at a body they’ll be hours. Drink that up, and let’s get you back on board.’
Stick here with other people. I shook my head and stood up, letting the blanket slip from my shoulders. ‘I’m fine now. We’re on duty, remember.’ I jerked my head towards the music. ‘The dance. Any word from Nils’s team?’
‘They’re not back yet, but there was nothing the last time we spoke.’
I glanced out of the window. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’
‘Nothing,’ Alain repeated. ‘Two women disappeared.’
There was a massive land and sea search, but nobody was found, nor any sign of them …
‘I need to report to Captain Sigurd,’ I said, and headed for the door into the main hall.
The blast of sound hit me: the fiddles and accordions giving it laldy in a Foula Reel. I looked around, but there was no sign of the captain. He’d likely stayed on board, where the VHF radio would help him keep in touch with the lifeboat, chopper and coastguard operations. The coastguard SCOO would have reported back.
I went back to the committee room, and over to the window. Gavin and his team would walk up to the Haltadans more quickly than I’d come down, going straight across from the end of the airstrip. I imagined them gathering around Daniel’s body and putting some sort of protection over it until scene-of-crime could arrive from Inverness or Aberdeen.
The shuttle bus passed the hall, heading for the east of the island, to get the team Nils had gone with. I waited for five minutes, ten, until the lights reappeared in the distance. When the minibus pulled up on the tarmac, I could see by the faces that they’d found nothing.
I left the window and returned to the main hall. It looked like everyone was having a good time. There was the entire population of the island as well as our trainees: children running round, teenagers in vest tops and jeans, women in flowered dresses, men who’d shed their search jackets and changed into cloth breeks and shirts. Seats were set out all around the hall, but they were mostly empty; the Foula Reel I’d heard had just ended, and the floor was packed with people clapping the band and laughing with their partners. They’d got some Shetland Folk Dance members to lead the dancing, women in ankle-length striped skirts and scallop-edged shawls over white blouses, and men in dark breeks and waistcoats, with kerchiefs knotted round their necks. One woman stepped forward to the microphone. ‘Don’t sit down, here’s a nice gentle dance to let you catch your breath and let you get romantic with your partner. It’s called the Valetta Waltz, and it’s one of our easiest waltzes.’
Four of the group came to the cleared centre of the floor. ‘We’ll just demonstrate it,’ the leader said, and they walked through a simple dance, swinging out and in, two steps, repeat, walk a square, waltz for four. ‘Take your partners, please, and we’ll walk through it a couple of times.’
Alain had gone straight for what had to be the Gord B & B woman’s Italian tourist. Her hair was glossily dark and curly, held back with a scarf tied Alice-band style over her head. Her dark eyes had been made enormous with mascara and eyeliner, and the scarlet of her lips exactly matched her shiny stilettos. She was wearing a floral sundress, patterned in pink and black, with its flared skirt stiffened out with petticoats. Her arms were smooth and evenly tanned, that tan of a world where the sun shines all the year round. She stood out from the casually dressed trainees and Sunday-best locals like a hummingbird in a flock of sparrows.
Nils came up behind me and spoke in my ear. ‘Will we set a good example, Cass, the officers dancing with the trainees?’ He nodded towards the seats where a handful of people were still sitting. It was the last thing I felt like, but I nodded, and we went forward to ask them to dance. Nils had one of the women from his watch, and I persuaded one of my two Swedes, Valter, to give it a go. We managed not badly, though with none of the grace of Alain and his partner, twirling merrily around the middle of the floor. Even as she danced, she was talking animatedly in broken English, freeing her hand to gesture, and he was laughing. I shouldn’t have felt jealous, I had Gavin, yet there was a pang at my heart that she could be so carefree with him where I was tongue-tied, unable even to say, ‘Do you remember …?’ I turned my head so as not to look at them, and focused on Valter. By the third section of music, we’d mastered the steps enough to try some conversation. ‘Your search did not find the missing sister,’ he said.
‘No,’ I agreed. We did the walk in a square, the four waltz turns, then went back to swinging.
‘These cliffs are very steep. She could have fallen. It is sad, a girl so young.’ He looked around. ‘Her brother, will he stay with the ship, or wait here for news?’
‘I don’t know.’ We began the square again. If Laura had gone over the cliffs, her body might never be found. I tried to think what would look natural for Oliver to do. To continue his holiday would seem heartless. To go home straight away would look uncaring. No, he’d stay in Lerwick, waiting for news for two days, at least, and then go home.
‘Is there a shuttle to the ship all evening?’
I was sure Jenn would have told them that. ‘Yes, there’s a boat on duty.’
‘Ah, then he will have gone back, the man who looks out of place.’
My heart missed a beat. ‘Who?’
‘He is in the red watch. Daniel.’ The square again, the waltz. I waited for the swing and steps, and Valter continued. ‘I was watching him earlier. He did not dance, he was too busy playing with his phone – you know, the way younger ones do nowadays, always sliding and tapping. Restless. I thought perhaps he did not like the fiddle music. It is not to the taste of young ones. Then he went out, and he has not come back, so I thought he must have gone back to the ship.’
Playing with his phone. ‘Was he phoning someone?’
Valter shook his head. ‘Texting, or checking his emails, or updating his Facebook profile, how should I know? But I don’t think he was talking. Anyway, he went out, and he has not come back, so I suppose he got fed up and returned to the ship.’
It began clicking together in my head. Daniel had made a lousy Second Murderer, giving himself away all over the place. He’d gone to the böd to meet up with Anna Reynolds, but she hadn’t been there, and he’d been like a cat on hot bricks, wondering what had happened, if something had gone wrong. He’d gone back there to look again, drawing even more attention to the place. Maybe she’d been upstairs, waiting, while Gavin had bandaged my ankle. She’d have seen how hopeless a conspirator he was. To make herself safe, she’d need to get rid of him before he gave them both away … so she’d texted him. Meet me at the stone circle. They’d met, and she’d killed him.
But if that was how it had been, where did Oliver fit in?
The dance ended with a flourish. Valter made me a formal bow, and I did a curtsey-bob as best I could in jeans. The big fireman, Berg, swooped on the pretty Italian and Alain’s arm came around my waist. I shrugged it off, and he caught my hand. ‘No, don’t sit down. I’m getting the hang of this.’
‘We’ll liven you up again,’ the leader said, ‘with a Gay Gordons, the one we did earlier.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said perversely, although a youth of hall and regatta dances meant my feet could do a Gay Gordons in their sleep. ‘And I’ve walked miles today.’
‘We just need to watch the others,’ Alain said.
Before I could protest his arm was around my shoulders, his other hand reaching for mine, and we were marching round in the circle. Four steps, turn, keep going backwards; four steps forward, turn, continue backwards. Time fell away. I was back at the regatta dances we’d attended as teenagers, back at student ceilidhs, whirling around in the four steps of polka before we turned side by side for the march again, our bodies fitting together as if they’d never been apart. His arm was firm around my waist, his hand tight on mine, and our steps matched just as they had always done. The memory of the fun we’d had, and the sadness of these eleven years I’d been mourning him, swept over me. I felt tears well up in my eyes. They’d play three tunes for each dance, but I disengaged myself as soon as the first tune stopped. ‘Thanks,’ I said, in as casual a tone as I could manage.
He didn’t let go of me. ‘They do each dance three times.’ His eyes were mocking now. ‘Only two to go. I can’t steal you from your detective in just two dances.’
‘You can’t steal me from him at all,’ I retorted, and did my best to keep a distance between us, stiff in his hold.
‘I shouldn’t have reminded you,’ he murmured. ‘You’re spoiling it now. It’s just a dance.’
It might have been just a dance to him, but it was a million memories to me. I gritted my teeth and tried to relax, and was glad when it ended at last. I tried to pull away, but he had hold of my hand still. ‘Come
on, you could do with a drink. The bar’s here.’
A struggle would have everyone looking at us. I let him tow me over to the bar hatch, to where a local of our own age was serving.
‘Noo dan,’ he said. ‘What’ll you hae?’
Then the moment I’d never thought of came. There was a man draped across the bar, our age too, medium height, with fair hair that was already receding. He turned to look as we came over, and the look turned to an incredulous stare. He leant forward with the wavering abandon of the very drunk, pushed himself off the bar, and slapped Alain on the back. ‘Alan! I’m no seen dee since the Anderson. What’s du been up tae?’ He turned to me. ‘Cass, lass! I kent dee straight away. Still together then, and still as mad aboot boats as you ever were. Good work. There’s ower many divorces this days.’ He reached behind him to his hip pocket, and brought out a quarter bottle of Grouse, and flourished it into my hand. ‘Hae a dram.’
The universe seemed to stand still. Suddenly there was a deathly silence around us, and the air felt as if it was pressing in on my chest, sucking the breath from my lungs. The bottle was smooth against my palm. If ever I needed a dram, that time was now. I took a large swig and felt it burn down my throat.
Alain hadn’t looked at me. He tilted the bottle to his lips and drank, five long, steady mouthfuls, his throat moving each time, then gave it back. The drunk clapped him on the back, leant forward to give me a whisky-reeking kiss. ‘Fine tae see dee,’ he said, and ambled towards the dance floor.
Death on a Shetland Isle Page 19
