by Lin Anderson
As PC Tulloch smiled at his own joke, McNab wondered just how many hours of good humour he would be able to stomach.
He’d been promised a town, which to McNab meant more than a scattering of buildings by a small harbour, even if one of them was a hotel. Catching his perturbed expression, PC Tulloch offered an explanation.
‘It was busier, when the ferry docked here. Now the roll-on roll-off comes in at Loth on the southern tip of the island.’
He drew up next to a red telephone box that had seen better days and didn’t look as though it functioned at all.
‘The hotel has wireless and a decent mobile signal,’ Tulloch offered by way of compensation.
‘But are they open and do they have a room?’
‘I called ahead. They’re willing to put you up as you’re on police business. The pub opens in the evenings. In fact, there’s live music there tomorrow night.’
McNab wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so didn’t.
They were met at the door by a young man who apparently worked behind the bar. As he led McNab up to view his room, he revealed that he and Ivan had gone to school together. McNab tried to look on that as a positive, even though he was feeling more the outsider with every moment. Surely he would get good service having been brought here by a friend?
McNab surveyed the room and, in particular, the bed, with surprised pleasure. Tonight he would get a sleep. The only disadvantage seemed to be that the window overlooked the sea, which appeared to be at war with itself. At that moment a squall hit the window with, he suspected, a mix of salt spray and rain.
According to PC Tulloch, the font of all knowledge, the wind had subsided a little this morning because they were in the eye of the storm. It would, he’d assured McNab, in his usual jovial manner, get back up to speed tonight.
McNab stood for a moment, enjoying the quiet in the room, deciding that, high winds or not, nothing would keep him awake tonight. Leaving his bag, he locked the door with a good old-fashioned key, and headed back downstairs, where he found PC Tulloch and his mate in the bar, with its main windows also facing the sea.
Tulloch pointed at a large sign on the wall which explained how to get onto the Wi-Fi connection.
‘It’s best to sit near the window,’ he explained. ‘And Torvaig says do we want some lunch?’
Twenty minutes later, McNab was feeling a whole lot better after consuming a substantial plate of fish and chips. The meal would have reached perfection if accompanied by a pint of beer, but being on duty, he’d refrained.
‘If there’s no police officer permanently on the island, how do you enforce the drink-driving laws?’
‘The locals enforce them themselves,’ PC Tulloch said. ‘In an emergency someone calls Kirkwall and the police launch comes out.’
‘What about a fight?’
‘We pull them apart and take them home.’
‘Guns?’
‘Plenty of them for shooting geese.’
‘But not people?’
‘No.’
‘Knives?’ McNab was enjoying himself.
‘For gutting fish and skinning rabbits.’
‘So you don’t need the police at all?’
PC Tulloch’s face darkened. ‘There was a murder here in 2010. A man battered another man to death and buried the body in shallow sand at Sty Wick. Nobody here believed the story that the victim had left the island. They called the police.’
‘So we can expect as much help with this one?’
‘There’s not many folk left who were here in wartime.’
‘Yet somebody removed the skull and tried to destroy the evidence.’
‘It looks like that, sir.’ Tulloch was obviously troubled by the thought.
‘And it’s our job is to find out who, Constable. And why.’
17
It would take two trips in the Land Rover to transport the soil and bones to the heritage centre. On the arrival of the first load, Sam Flett offered Rhona space in a room used for newspaper cuttings and recorded material of the war years.
‘I guessed you wouldn’t want it stored in the back shed.’
Rhona thanked him. ‘The centre’s locked up at night?’
He nodded. ‘And I’m here most days, even out of the tourist season. I can give you a key, so you can come and go as necessary.’
‘Hopefully it won’t be here for long.’
When Derek departed to fetch the next load, Sam offered to make them a pot of tea.
‘I have some biscuits too.’
They were seated now, teapot between them, at a table in the centre of the room. On the surrounding shelves were blue folders of cuttings and written recollections of the residents of Sanday during both the First and the Second World Wars.
‘I was born in forty-four, but I heard plenty later from my mother. Then there were the buildings they left behind, that are still standing. I used to play in them as a kid. All except the old mortuary.’ He looked straight at her. ‘I hear from Erling that it was a lassie you found and she may have been from back then?’
‘That’s still to be confirmed, but yes, it looks likely.’
‘D’you think she was a local lass?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rhona said honestly. ‘Are you aware of anyone going missing during that time?’
‘No.’ He indicated the shelves of folders. ‘Maybe in some of the local stories of the war years you might find a mention of someone who went missing.’
‘So a long shot?’ Rhona said.
‘Sanday was a different place during the war. Before then, we knew everyone on this island, parish by parish. It wasn’t possible to “go missing”. To leave the island you had to go by ferry from Kettletoft to Kirkwall. Most folk even knew why you were going. A trip to the dentist took two days. We knew one another’s business. City folk don’t like that idea, but that’s how it was. And,’ he added, ‘still is, to a certain extent.’
‘So the answer might be here?’ Rhona indicated the shelves.
‘And in talking to those Sanday folk left alive from those times.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Not many. If you’re talking of folk to the north of the island, Don Cutts is probably the one you want to talk to. He’s in a wheelchair now, but still has all his wits about him. There’s plenty other auld folk on the island, but most of them are incomers, who’ve moved here in the last twenty years or so.’ He paused. ‘Were there any personal items with the body that might help?’
‘There was a brooch,’ Rhona said.
His eyes lit up. ‘Can I see it?’
Rhona extracted the clear evidence bag from the collection and brought it over.
Sam studied it through the plastic. ‘This is a sweetheart brooch, very popular during war time. RAF personnel gave them to their girlfriends or wives. We’ve a selection in a glass case out in the main area.’
‘So it’s not likely to identify the wearer?’ Rhona had suspected as much.
He shook his head. ‘Without an inscription, no. If we knew what she looked like, that might jog a memory.’ He observed Rhona thoughtfully. ‘But without the skull, I take it that’s not possible?’
There was no point in denying it. ‘Height, build and age, even shoe size – but her face, no.’
‘You think that’s why the skull was removed?’ Sam said worriedly.
‘According to DS McNab, the neighbourhood children didn’t take it. He spoke to them today at the school.’
‘Then who did?’
If someone such as Sam couldn’t answer that question, then Rhona doubted she could.
‘DS McNab and PC Tulloch are talking to anyone who might have information regarding the body and the skull at somewhere called Heilsa Fjold. I gather it’s next to the school.’
‘The Sanday Development Trust run the place. It’s the new community and youth centre. They’ll get plenty folk turning up. Probably more from curiosity than actual knowledge.’
Rhona’s mobil
e rang. When she answered it was Erling.
‘The weather is set to worsen again tonight, then ease enough over the following twenty-four hours for you and the excavation material to be transported out.’
‘I can’t go yet,’ Rhona said. ‘I still have the soil under the body to collect.’
‘You’ll send the evidence anyway?’
Rhona agreed. ‘Chrissy can go with it. I’ll manage the rest of the excavation on my own, provided I can replace the camera tripod.’
‘I’ll get a replacement to you as soon as possible.’
‘By boat or plane?’
‘When I come with the police launch, if not before.’
When Rhona rang off she said, ‘That was Erling.’
‘I guessed as much,’ Sam said with a smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it then. I have some paperwork to be getting on with.’
As Sam rose to go, Rhona suddenly remembered.
‘Have you heard of a man from here called James Drever? He’d be ninety by now.’
Sam shot her an incredulous look and put down his mug.
‘Jamie Drever’s alive?’
Rhona didn’t see the point in not telling the truth, but first she wanted to establish that they were talking about the same man.
‘Your James Drever,’ she said. ‘Has he any relatives here on Sanday?’
Sam shook his head. ‘He left during the war and never came back. My mother used to talk about him, and wonder if he’d survived the war.’
‘If I had a photograph of him in his twenties, would you or someone else be able to identify him?’
‘My mother would have, but she’s long dead. Why do you ask?’
Rhona decided to be blunt.
‘We found the recently deceased body of an elderly man called James Drever in a Glasgow flat. We’re trying to trace any relatives he had.’ She told Sam about the newspaper cutting of Lopness in his wallet and the fact that he’d told his neighbour he’d gathered seaweed as a child, which led them to think that Orkney might have been his home at one point. ‘He was tall and slim and sandy-haired. He got married in Newcastle to a woman called Grace Cummings in 1948.’ She looked at Sam. ‘Does that sound like your James Drever?’
‘I have no idea, but if you have a photograph from back then, I could see what I can find out.’
‘I’ll arrange with DS McNab to let you see a copy.’
Sam had been unnerved by his conversation with the forensic woman. Having the excavated material here in the heritage centre wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t the bones and the soil that had upset him.
It was what had happened to him at the mention of the name Drever. Drever was a common Orkney surname, found on most of the islands in the archipelago. Why had he immediately thought that the man she spoke about was that Jamie Drever? And why had that brought such a sense of dread?
He’d found himself trembling in the aftermath of her question, and had been keen to get away from both the woman and the room of evidence. Ever since they’d dug up the bones he’d had the ill feeling that the past was coming back to haunt them.
A past long buried, like the flowers in the loft of the old schoolhouse.
He shut and locked the door of his tiny office as foreboding overpowered him. He’d experienced such sensations before, particularly in his youth. They’d waned during adolescence and while Jean was alive had faded away almost entirely. She’d called them his dark fogs, which she’d dispelled with love and laughter.
Sitting there in the gloom, he could taste the horror of the fog as it descended. It was always the same feeling. He knew something bad was about to happen yet he didn’t know what, nor had he any means to prevent it. Feminine fancies, his father had disparagingly called them, firmly dismissing them. His mother had been more forgiving, but hadn’t encouraged him to speak of them. Instead she gave him jobs to do, one after the other, so that he had no time to think at all. Eventually he’d given up mentioning them.
The blackness usually lasted a couple of days, then abated. At first he linked them to deaths on the island or accidents that happened to their neighbours, feeling sure as a child that he had been foretold of the event. The importance this gave him eventually proved too frightening, and he’d worked as hard as his mother to ignore them.
Marriage and teaching had helped. As he’d grown older, the intensity of the feelings had dissipated. Except when Jean had lost the two bairns during pregnancy. He’d felt, no, known it would happen, although he’d never shared his fears with her on the matter, in case she thought he was the one to jinx the pregnancies.
At the darkest moments of his premonitions, he thought that maybe he had.
He thought of his mother, married to an older widower with a son not much younger than herself. Still young, still pretty. She’d enjoyed the coming of the radar station, welcomed the change to the grinding routine of running a farm. She’d loved going to the dances and the cinema. Then a baby had come along to spoil her fun, or so she used to joke, as she’d reminisced about those days when the outside world had come to Sanday.
And Jamie Drever had been a part of that world. A big part.
I owe it to her to find out if the man in Glasgow was Jamie.
If it was, then perhaps he can be brought home and buried here, near her.
The thought comforted Sam a little, but not enough to counter his dark premonition.
18
Heilsa Fjold – what language was that?
The name rolled off PC Tulloch’s tongue with ease. McNab, on the other hand, had decided he wouldn’t attempt it, but opted for ‘community centre’ instead.
Still, the place had been a good choice for the interview sessions. Light and airy, coffee and home baking on constant supply. (McNab had been seriously missing his espresso fixes.) A good internet connection and a constant stream of folk interested in talking to them, or more obviously, keen on finding out what all the fuss was about. After all, uncovering old bones on Sanday was almost as frequent an occurrence as high winds and rain.
McNab had assembled his materials to help stimulate memory. A map of the exact location of the burial. Photographs of the brooch and what was left of the clothing. A description of what the victim may have looked like, in dimensions at least.
Most folk already knew that the skull had gone missing and had their own opinions on why, mischief-making by kids being the most prevalent. Teenagers from the school showed a great interest in the forensics involved and were obviously fans of CSI or other forensic TV programmes. At that point having Rhona there would have been an advantage.
During the first two hours, he and PC Tulloch spoke to about thirty folk. Though the majority wouldn’t have been born when Sanday had been invaded by servicemen, they seemed to know quite a lot about the island during that time, a tribute he thought to the heritage centre, the school or the work of Derek Muir.
PC Tulloch was, McNab decided, ideal for this job. He put folk at ease, made them feel they were contributing, but most of all, generated the sense that it was a community endeavour to solve this crime.
Just as with large profile cases on the mainland – when someone went missing the local community was organized to search for them – here on Sanday the community was being marshalled to help discover the identity of the woman found buried in a school playground.
‘More coffee, Detective Sergeant?’
McNab looked up to find the young woman who’d been keeping them supplied with refreshments all morning. Tall, blonde, pretty, she’d introduced herself earlier, but her name, Hege, sounded a bit like the name of the centre and he’d therefore not registered it properly. Her voice had a slight accent which he thought initially was the same as PC Tulloch’s, but now wasn’t so sure.
‘A double espresso this time?’ She smiled at his reaction to her offer. ‘The machine makes them too.’
‘How did you know?’ McNab said.
‘I heard you mention it to Ivan.’
‘Ivan?’
&nb
sp; She flushed a little. ‘Sorry, PC Tulloch.’
McNab hadn’t given a moment’s thought to Tulloch’s first name and now here it was. Ivan had vacated his seat and gone to the Gents, although having exited there, now seemed to be in animated conversation with an elderly man who’d just entered the building via the wheelchair ramp.
‘That’s very kind of you.’ McNab gave her what he hoped was a winning smile. ‘I was getting withdrawal symptoms.’
‘Too much caffeine—’ she began.
‘Is bad for you,’ McNab finished for her.
‘But it also stimulates the brain,’ she offered. ‘How are things going?’
‘I’ve learned a lot about Sanday’s invasion during the war.’
‘It’s an interesting story, but not a true invasion, not like what happened to Norway.’
‘Your country?’ he tried.
She nodded.
‘I thought the accent sounded different from PC Tulloch’s,’ McNab admitted. ‘Are you just visiting or have you moved here?’
‘I’m here for a year.’
McNab didn’t ask her why, as PC Tulloch approached with the elderly gentleman in a wheelchair.
‘This is Mr Cutts, sir. His family used to work on Lopness farm when it was bought over by the government to build the radar station.’
The old man’s expression suggested a grievance about that which hadn’t yet waned.
‘They let the crop die in the fields that year. We weren’t allowed to harvest anything,’ he said.
Up to now, most of the folk offering stories of that time had been positive about the impact of the camp on the island. McNab had a feeling this interview might prove to be a little different.
Fifteen minutes later, he’d learned that prior to the influx of servicemen, Sanday had been a God-fearing island, Lopness folk had gone to the kirk, relationships led to marriage and bairns weren’t born out of wedlock.
‘The war changed all that,’ the old man said. ‘They held dances at the camp and sent buses to pick up the local women. There was a cinema showing American movies.’ He regarded McNab with a rheumy eye. ‘As a young man, I have to say I loved it.’
McNab wondered where all this was leading. He didn’t have long to wait.
