The Trowie Mound Murders

by Marsali Taylor

  Once I was warm and loosened up I hugged my knees to me under my fleece, and thought. I was inside a circular mound ten metres across, and two high. If it was like the Tomb of the Eagles, there would be little cells all round the walls, with niches for the bones, and the doorway facing the sea. It would be worth looking at that door stone; perhaps I could lever it out from within. I could put first one, then a second, then more stones in the cracks, easing it forward. Archimedes: give me a lever and a place to stand, and I could move the world. Sailing ships were designed for strong men, and small women got very good at using levers.

  If it wouldn’t shift – and I wasn’t hopeful – then I needed to find Brian’s entrance. It wouldn’t be through the walls; that would be so obvious that others would have found it too. What had Olaf said? I visualised us sitting together on the wooden bench outside the club house, with his hands making careful loops of twine around the grey rope.A gap under one of the big stones, a rabbit hole that went right through. Yes, he’d called it a tunnel: He even filled in the tunnel we went through.

  When the kitten had crept out to eat my sandwiches, I’d been sitting against one of the big stones on the left of the entrance, and the kitten had come from a metre further. If it was the same entrance, if I was lucky, I might be able to find this end of the burrow, somewhere between two and three metres from the entrance, to show me where to dig.

  Which was my better bet? Which must I spend my light on, the entrance stone or the possible tunnel? If I used the light to locate the entrance, then I could work around the inside of the walls to the tunnel, searching for a dent in the earth, a dim glimmer of light, a current of outside air.

  In Brittany, as in seafaring communities the world over, the men used to go for a last Mass dedicated to Our Lady for her blessing before they went to sea. I needed a blessing on this enterprise. I sat straighter, crossed myself, and breathed a fervent prayer for help to think clearly, to use my strength wisely, and for luck or God’s grace to give me a way out. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit … I took a deep breath, turned my watch away from me, and pressed the winder in.

  Instantly the tomb was bathed in green light, sickly and flaring to my dark-dazzled eyes. I saw evenly spaced stone piers corbelling up to the roof, as though I was the hub of a great stone wheel, with dark voids between them where the light couldn’t reach. I turned my head to the wider gap between two piers, the entrance stone, then let the button go. The blackness closed in again, stifling as stale air. Keeping my head very still, I sat for a moment, loosening the green glare from my eyes, then swivelled my body around until I was facing the entrance. The piers were a metre from me. I had to crawl forward for two metres and I would touch the great stone. As I went, I’d feel out for stones I could try to lever it with, and if I didn’t find any, I could then work my way round the perimeter, looking for Brian’s entrance. I wasn’t hopeful about loose stones. That walling had been built to last. Those Neolithic men and women who had brought their dead here would have been proud of it – I shut that thought away. No need to conjure the ghosts of four millennia ago, although I feared their presence all around me. Cool Cass, Brian and Olaf had called me, practical Cass. Don’t imagine bones, torchlit processions, long-dead men and women whispering you to join them, think about escape. I wasn’t going to try pulling stones out of the piers, but there might be a place where some had fallen. If there was, I’d find it as I went round. For the moment, I needed to go forward those two metres to the entrance stone.

  It was much harder than it sounded, to shuffle forwards into the dark. I inched forward on one hand and two knees, the other hand stretched out in front of me, expecting every moment to bump into the wall, or worse, some unseen thing which had crept towards me in the darkness. I concentrated on calculating: the wall was two metres away, and I’d moved my hand forwards ten times – fifteen – seventeen – twenty-one, before my outstretched hand met the smooth stone. Ten shuffles made a metre. Okay. I eased myself into a sitting position and felt the floor around me, as far as I could reach. There was no sign of any stones, just the grit, and that was no good. I put my shoulder against the entrance stone and pushed. There was no give at all. The stone felt as though it slanted inwards, which would make sense from the shape of the outer wall. That meant that what was holding it in place was its own weight, and gravity. I turned around and braced my back against it and put the full strength of my legs to the earth floor, pushing until my muscles began to tremble. Nothing. I mustn’t waste my strength on the impossible. I gave it one more try, this time in short, rhythmic bursts of pushing, as if I was part of a watch heaving a heavy yard round, but there was still no movement.

  If I had to, I’d come back to it. Now I’d try for Brian’s entrance.

  To feel around the perimeter wall, I’d have to go into each pier, where the bones had been laid. There was no need to be afraid; dry bones couldn’t hurt me. All the same, I’d look before I touched. I shuffled back, reached out for the pier on my left and crawled to the opening of the space, then held my watch up again and pressed the button.

  The tightly packed stones sprung up once more, in their green light, laid out like a brick bookcase. Grey dust lay over the shelves, over the bones laid in neat heaps, with a skull beside each pile of long bones. Hazed by cobwebs, the eye sockets confronted me.

  I let the button go and crawled forward. Here, between the piles, the floor was two inches deep in powdery dust that stuck to my hands and swirled up to my face. Even as I coughed it away, I realised that meant something. There had been no dust in the centre of the mound; someone had cleared it. So the mound had indeed been used as a storage place. No wonder the person who had coshed me didn’t want me investigating the entrance. Before I left, I’d use my last light in a final look right round.

  I found the wall and felt carefully along the bottom of it. The floor was even under the soft, clinging dust. The burrow should be in the next cell. I crawled round the pier and began wiping my hand along the join between floor and wall, then drawing it backwards to feel the earth before the wall. I was beginning to think Brian must have filled his tunnel in completely when my knee went down, and I fell forwards, catching my hands with a scrape on a shelf. A smooth cane of bone was under my fingers. I snatched them back, pulled my knee up, and set my hands to explore what I’d found.

  It had to be Brian’s tunnel. It felt like a rabbit hole, as wide as my shoulders, and when I lay down and stretched my hands into it, they sloped down a little way, then began to go towards the wall. I stretched further, and my hands touched a tangle of stiff fibres: heather stems. He even filled in the tunnel … From what Olaf had said, Brian had filled in the tunnel to stop the archaeologists; it was an adult job of filling in. I felt around the heather stems until I found an edge, and another. Yes, he’d taken fells from casting peats, breeze-block slabs of heather tussocks and roots, and pushed them down. I wriggled my fingers into the sides of the first block and pulled until it began to give, then took a firmer hold and hauled it out, my mind exploding in triumph. Thank you, God … I was going to get out of here.

  The second block came as easily. I stacked it on top of the first. For the third, I had to wriggle half into the tunnel, and it was at an awkward angle to pull. It came in a slither of earth and small stones, as if he’d bunged a couple of bags of loose earth on top to camouflage his fells. With the fourth came daylight, a dim film of grey that I’d used to help me place the fell on the others before I realised that I could see the pale blur of my hands on the dark block.

  I couldn’t see the sky yet, but the light filtering through was becoming clearer. The smell of things dead and rotting seemed to enfold me. I couldn’t wait to get up to the air. When I began clearing the loose earth, I realised how much my hands were scraped by the tough heather. I took off my fleece, knotted the sleeves, and used the arms as gloves to scrabble out the loose earth, digging quicker and quicker as freedom came within my grasp. I knew I had to make it la
rge enough for me to slip through without too much shoving. Although the lowest course of stones was slabs of boulder which had stood solid for four thousand years, no foundation likes being undermined, and the tunnel was almost the width of the great rock that formed its lintel.

  I flung the last of the earth out and put my fleece back on, pulling the hood up and tightening its drawstring under my chin. It might protect my head from the scrape of rock. Then I turned back to the tomb. The cleared space in the middle, the thick dust at the sides – I wanted to know.

  I shone my watch round in a slow circle until the light faded and died. There was no doubt now that this place had been used for storage. Opposite me, the green light had cast black cage shadows from a wooden frame, designed to hold paintings upright and separate. Beside it had been five wooden crates, each divided into four compartments of around thirty centimetres square. There was an arm’s-width roll of bubble-wrap, and a litter of smaller pieces, with an incongruously domestic pair of scissors lying on top.

  I was going to get out, to tell Gavin what I knew. I stretched both arms in front of me, like a diver, and went into the tunnel. It was tight around my shoulders, but not dangerously so. Earth trickled over my hood and down into my neck. The stench of something rotting filled my nostrils, making me want to gag. A dead rabbit in the hole, perhaps? I’d just said it to myself, pushing my shoulders onward like a weevil in a biscuit, when the first true daylight blinded my eyes, and my groping hand came down on cold fur, with the inert flabbiness of death under it.

  I couldn’t bear to crawl over it. I pushed it ahead of me through the last metre, and turned my face away from it, although I felt the dead fur touch my cheek, as I shoved the earth of the narrowed entrance forwards. I rolled it out of the hole and hauled myself after it into the light.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I collapsed against the stone I’d sat at to eat my mackerel roll, only the day before yesterday, although it felt like years ago. I must have sat there for half an hour, back against the stone, legs stretched, smarting hands on my belly, face turned to the sun, drinking in the heather-sweet air, the blessed warmth, the gold of light on my closed eyelids. I hurt all over, and I was as tired as if I’d done a full day’s rope hauling in a Cape Horn gale. Soon, I’d go down, get into the RIB, and take it home to Brae, but I needed to rest first.

  Now, with the first shock over, the death of Alex hit home. Poor Kirsten, poor Olaf – he’d been so young, so alive – he’d had the makings of a good sailor. I saw him as I’d last seen him, flushed and triumphant at having got to the RIB first, and then in that last spinnaker run home. Robbie had been helming, and he’d crouched forward on the gunwale, concentrating on keeping his yellow and red spinnaker a perfect curve. Once they’d got ashore, he’d de-rigged the boat and washed it down so thoroughly I’d had to tell him to bale it out before he put it away. That was the last time I’d spoken to him. ‘Alex, Robbie,’ I’d said, lifting the red sail to show them a foot of water in the boat, ‘you’ve maybe overdone the wash-down a touch?’

  ‘Oh,’ Alex had replied, and given me his broad grin. ‘Sorry, Cass. We’ll bale her out.’ They’d set to with the shovel baler, and most of the water went over each other, to shrieks of indignation and threats of revenge.

  It was such a trivial exchange, to be the last time I’d speak to him, yet it seemed important to remember it. I remembered his intent face as he’d trimmed his spinnaker, and grieved. He’d been lively, and daft, and done no harm to anyone. Had somebody feared harm from him? I remembered how he’d asked me about the people in the motor-boat. I ken them, see … I’m seen them afore, anyroad, when I was down at Brian’s. I’d thought then it had been Norman who was asking. Norman was Alex’s big brother, his hero. If Norman wanted to know, Alex would do his best to find out. I’d stonewalled him, but then he’d heard Magnie talking about the trowie lights, and decided to investigate. The quad track by the mound showed he’d been here. He’d seen something or met someone, and they’d killed him. Then what?

  They’d hit me on the head and slung me in the mound, but I could be made to disappear very easily. All they had to do was tow the RIB out to sea a bit and leave it loose. Everyone knew I always wore a life-jacket, but lifejackets can fail, and though they’d search for my body it wouldn’t be that unusual if they didn’t find it. One of these accidents at sea, case closed.

  It wouldn’t be so easy to make Alex disappear. There’d be a huge search the minute he was officially missing. No, for Alex they’d have to engineer an accident. He seems to have come off the road just at Mavis Grind and gone down onto the beach, Gavin had said . The quad turned over on him. Mavis Grind was just north of Brae, south of where I was now, a narrow neck of land between two voes, one reaching in from the North Sea, on the east, and the other a finger of the Atlantic on the west. If you were good at throwing stones, you could chuck one from the North Sea to the Atlantic, and tourists often tried. I tried to see the lie of the road in my mind’s eye, and couldn’t see anywhere that you’d accidentally bounce a quad off the road to land on the beach. Gavin must have meant that he’d apparently driven down to the beach, and overturned the quad there. Then I visualised the chart. Yes, the virtue of Mavis Grind was that it was the nearest place to here where you had both main road and sea access. It wouldn’t take long, by quad, to get back down to Mavis Grind, half an hour maybe, and then a boat could pick you up. There were headlands by the beach where even a sizeable motorboat could nose in, to let someone jump aboard from the hill.

  If they’d hit Alex as they’d hit me, one person could prop him before them on the quad, holding him as if he was still alive, then drive down over the hill to Mavis Grind. If you went direct to the beach, you wouldn’t need to go on the road at all. Then – thinking of it made me feel sick. Then you finished off your inconvenient witness, and upturned the quad over him, to look like an accident.

  I needed to talk to Gavin. If that was how it had been, Forensic would find traces. I opened my eyes and prised myself to my feet, joints protesting. The sun was almost at the horizon now; half past nine. The water dazzled like new-polished brass, and every grass tussock on the hill cast a shadow twice its own size. Beside me, the hump of inert fur I had pushed up from the depth had gold stripes … I looked at it in the daylight. It wasn’t a rabbit, as I’d thought, but a cat – Cat’s mother, whose death had forced her kittens out onto the hillside.

  I realised what had killed her as soon as I turned her over, ready to put her back into the quiet earth of the burrow. Someone had been shooting on the hill, Magnie’d said, the evening before David and Madge, and Peter and Sandra had arrived at the marina. It hadn’t been rabbits the marksmen had been after. Cat’s mother had been shot; one back leg was shattered, with splinters of bone sticking through the fur, and the leg contorted in an agonised spasm, and her belly was swollen up as if with injury there too. A trigger-happy teenager, or someone who wanted to protect their hiding place in the trowie mound even from a cat?

  I grimaced at the irony. If they hadn’t killed Cat’s mother, I wouldn’t have found that starving kitten, wouldn’t have known where to look for Brian’s tunnel. I wouldn’t have survived to tell what I’d found in the trowie mound, to be evidence for what might have happened to Alex. If I had any say in it, their casual cruelty was going to be their undoing.

  It was time to go. I’d just taken a step away from the mound when I heard more than one someone coming up the hill below, climbing silently and fast towards me.

  My first reaction was indignation. I’d had enough. Yet even as I was thinking a reproachful, ‘Oh,Lord!’ I was backing across the cropped turf of the platform, to get to the other side of the mound. It might be rescue, but I’d heard no boat arriving in the time I’d sat here recovering. No, these were people who’d already been here, in the cottage, maybe, and the first thing they’d see, as they came up over the brow of the hill, was the enlarged tunnel entrance. They’d know I’d escaped, and they’d be determine
d to finish me off now.

  I couldn’t play hide-and-seek around the mound, and the hillside here was too open. I’d get a good start on them, and I’d be running downhill, but I’d be seen. I didn’t want to be a target for people with a gun. If I crouched behind a knowe, I’d be flushed out of cover as they came to search, and I’d just be a closer target. There was only one other possibility, and I’d have to take it fast: that cliff ledge some two metres below the platform. I’d be a sitting duck there, of course, if they looked. I was taking a chance on them thinking I was long gone, across the hill to Mangaster, and already well along the main road towards the police station at Brae.

  I slipped to the cliff edge. Shutting my mind to the drop to the sea, I half-slid, half fell, dangling for a moment from my hands while my feet felt for the ledge below me. The trampling feet were almost at the brow of the hill now. Any moment, my enemies would be able to see over onto the platform. I dropped the last two feet, and landed with a jar that had me staggering outwards. I clung to the sharp cliff-face with my hands, and managed to keep my balance.

  My fleece was dark green. I hauled the the hood over my head and hurried to the furthest end of the ledge, where a knobble of rock cast a Cass-sized shadow. I crouched down and froze, like a novice skipper caught in a tanker-filled shipping lane, hoping stillness is safety. If I was lucky, if I was very lucky, I might escape a cursory glance. If they looked harder – well, I hoped they’d shoot to kill, and get it over with quickly.