by Lin Anderson
‘And it’s going to?’
‘Without a doubt. Check the tide clock on the kitchen wall of the cottage. Assume a couple of hours to get out to the island, take a look round, and come back again. Aim for the centre of that time zone to be low tide.’ He checked his rear mirror, then drew into a passing place to let the local minibus with its complement of passengers pass.
‘The eastern side of the causeway is treacherous underfoot, rocky and slippery with seaweed. The western side is sandy and can be waded easily at low tide, but the water rises there more quickly. I prefer a barefoot crossing on the sand myself. Don’t leave it too late to come back,’ he warned. ‘The island is bigger than it looks from here. It was home to a fully functioning farm back then. The buildings are still there, plus a row of cottages for workers.’
They were approaching the schoolhouse now. Rhona asked to be let out there and she would walk the final leg.
‘I’d like to check the excavation site,’ she said.
‘Don’t get blown away,’ were Derek’s parting words.
Rhona quickly sought the leeward side of the building. As she turned the corner, she noted the outside light come on as the door opened and a small figure emerged. It was a little girl, dressed in a waterproof jacket and wellington boots. Then the back door banged shut.
In moments, the figure had disappeared into the rain and wind.
Rhona approached the grave and checked the cover to find it secure; then, curious about Mike’s visitor, she knocked at the kitchen door. He didn’t answer at first, so she tried again. Eventually his tall figure appeared on the other side of the glass and, seeing her there, opened up.
‘Is there something wrong?’ he said, looking worried.
‘No, I was just checking the cover was secure.’ Rhona expected him to invite her in. When he didn’t, she said, ‘May I come in for a moment?’
As though he’d just remembered his manners, he apologized and ushered her inside.
‘Your assistant’s checked a few times today already,’ he said.
‘I’m glad Chrissy’s on the job.’
They stood there awkwardly, with Rhona realizing he desperately wanted her to leave. Mike Jones had never been at ease with the presence of an investigative team on his property, but it seemed the incident in the shed had served to make matters worse.
‘The evidence is safe now?’ he enquired.
‘We hope so.’
‘Did you locate your tripod?’
‘No, but DS Flett’s bringing a replacement tomorrow.’
His face fell. ‘I thought you’d finished the excavation.’
‘The soil below the body has still to be collected.’
‘Why?’
‘It may contain evidence,’ she explained.
They stood a further few moments before she decided to come right to the point. ‘I see you’ve made contact with one of the local children.’
His face went white, red, then white again. ‘What?’ he said stupidly.
‘The girl who was visiting when I arrived.’
She realized he would have denied the child’s existence, but the certainty of her announcement gave him nowhere to go.
‘She was only here minutes,’ he rushed on. ‘She asked for permission to search for the skull around the house. I told her you’d done that already.’
‘DS McNab spoke to some of the local children at school today. They’re keen to help.’ She smiled, hoping to ease his obvious discomfort. ‘Maybe those are the kids you’ve been hearing around the place.’
He didn’t respond to this, his mouth now set in a stubborn line. Rhona decided to take the hint.
‘DS Flett says the weather will improve by tomorrow night, so I should finish up the next day, all being well.’
‘And then you’ll go?’ He looked relieved.
‘My work will be over, but not DS McNab’s.’
He looked frightened by that. McNab had that effect on people, the innocent and the guilty alike. Rhona bade Mike goodnight and was shown the door.
As she battled her way along the path to the cottage, she continued to wonder about Mike Jones. Everyone had secrets, things about them they didn’t want others to know. Herself included. Having the police on your doorstep was an unnerving business. Sometimes those responsible for a crime sought to put themselves in the spotlight, craving the attention, while acting the innocent.
Mike Jones was the opposite of that. Every moment the investigation team was there was apparently torture. And his reaction to the children was odd. If he’d been a teacher, why did he seem so afraid of kids?
21
When he’d moved back into the family croft house, Sam had changed virtually nothing. The house sat in a time warp and he liked it that way, particularly now he was alone. When Jean died, he’d given up the house they’d shared, and come back here. Why he wasn’t sure, except that it felt right to be where his life had begun.
And his and Jean’s house had become the home of a young couple, who now had two children to play in the garden and on the beach beyond, where Erling had played as a youngster during the long summer holidays twenty years before.
Because he’d never thrown out any of his mother’s belongings, except her clothes, Sam was certain he would eventually locate what he sought.
It took him some time to unearth the photograph, but find it he eventually did. The box contained an assortment of black-and-white photos, mostly of people he had no recollection of.
His mother had enjoyed taking the box out of a winter’s night and rifling through its contents, telling him the names of those pictured and events that had been captured. It had seemed to a younger Sam that the whole world was in that box. A world of stories of Sanday, Westray and Kirkwall, and even on occasion further afield, especially the pictures featuring people from the camp, some in their uniforms.
A young Sam had been impressed by those uniforms, even though, by the time he was old enough to admire them, the camp had been disbanded and the excitement it had brought departed with it.
He’d often thought as he played soldier or pilot among the empty buildings that he too would like to join the forces and wear a smart uniform and see the world. He had certainly left the island for a time. Secondary school in Kirkwall during the week, then off to university, then back to teach another set of young Sanday residents.
That, he decided, had been adventure enough for him. So he had never got to wear a uniform, although he’d worn a teacher’s gown for a while before it stopped being a requirement, like the tawse had stopped being used to administer punishment in the classroom.
Sam drew his fleeting memories together and focussed on the photograph.
His father and stepbrother Eric stood at the back. His mother sat on a chair in front of them with no sign of Sam, the late baby – yet.
Sam checked the back of the photograph and found his father’s neat spidery writing with a date, 17 June 1944. His half-brother, Eric, had been a strapping seventeen-year-old in the photograph. And beside him on the far left was another figure, someone near Eric in age, but tall and thin, where Eric was broad-shouldered and sturdy.
‘Jamie Drever,’ he said.
Snatches of conversation came back to him. Not from when he was young, but when his mother had been fading. Her body frail, yet her eyes still burning with life. She’d always been like that, glowing with life. His father, older by nearly twenty years, had been the taciturn one. Sam had often seen his father steal a glance at his Ella, as he called her, as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune to have married her.
There were plenty of times they’d argued, mostly about his mother’s ‘fanciful ideas’ as his father called them. Fanciful ideas about new curtains or her attempts to cultivate a small flower garden which had to have a wall of flat stones built round it to give shelter to the few things that would grow there.
Red hot pokers and red poppies with dark blue stamens. And prickly wild rose bushes, much loved by
the blackbirds that sheltered in them, singing their hearts out. To an Orkney farmer, fertile land was for growing crops and grazing beef cattle. What flowers grew naturally were to be found in the machair, the grassy plains that lined the shore.
Despite this, his father and Jamie, who’d worked on the croft with them, had built the wall for her garden.
She would sit in it, tucked in a sheltered corner, catching the sun on her face, watching the birds flit in and out of the bushes. As he’d grown older Sam had realized that Eric had the same disposition as his father. Taciturn, hard-working. Sam, everyone said, took after his mother. Sensitive, bookish. He was predicted to go to university and become something other than a farmer, which turned out to be true.
Sam had no lingering memory of Jamie or his big brother Eric. It was in his mother’s latter days that she’d spoken of him, and often. Then Sam had come to know the affection she’d had for the tall lanky lad, who’d spent so much time at their house.
Looking at the photograph reminded Sam of other memories, ones that weren’t as pleasant. As the dementia had taken hold, his mother had grown confused, vividly reliving times when she’d been unhappy, worried or upset. And during those times, Eric’s name had kept occurring.
She’d gone back too, in her mind, to when the camp had dominated this part of the island. When she’d stopped going to the dances because of her pregnancy, but when his half-brother had spent a great deal of time going there, much to the annoyance of their father.
There had been a girl involved. That much Sam had deciphered. A girl from the camp. Trying to recall the confused ramblings of a woman who spent more time in the past than the present, Sam had gathered that his father had disapproved, and that there might have been some rivalry between Eric and Jamie for the girl’s affections, which had resulted in a fight, after which Jamie was banished from the house.
Sam had no idea if his recollections were true, or whether he was reinterpreting his mother’s ramblings in the wake of what had happened recently. But one thing he was sure of. Eric had been a man who enjoyed a fight, and who liked to get what he wanted.
As Sam shut the tin, a glint of something metal below the photographs caught his eye. Tipping the contents onto the fireside rug, he discovered it was a sweetheart brooch similar to the one Dr MacLeod had shown him, with the RAF insignia.
Who had that belonged to?
His mother had never mentioned it, nor shown it to him, even when she’d been reminiscing about the war.
Everyone who knows what happened is dead.
What was the point in raking up the past like the body in the schoolyard, and the flowers in the attic? None but the dead were left to tell the tale.
Sam put the brooch back and shut the lid.
He would show the photograph to the policeman. Compare it with the one he had. If the man they’d found in Glasgow was Jamie Drever, he would arrange to have him brought home to Sanday. That was the best he could do.
22
If the wind howled all night long, McNab didn’t hear it, and when he opened his eyes, he found a different Sanday, quiet and apparently calm.
Rising, he found himself whistling as he headed for the shower, which surprised him. Emerging ten minutes later, he caught the scent of bacon being cooked below, and his mouth started to water in anticipation. At that moment he experienced a brief but almost fond thought of PC Tulloch, who’d found him such good digs.
Heading downstairs, he followed Torvaig’s instructions from last night and made for the kitchen, where he found his breakfast ready at the agreed time.
‘Have a seat, Sergeant,’ Tor gestured to the big kitchen table. ‘I take it you’ll have a bit of everything on offer?’
McNab indicated that he would, and with pleasure.
‘I can’t do you an espresso, but I can make the coffee strong?’
‘News travels fast around here.’
‘Strangers are like a book. Folk are keen to turn the pages. Find out their story.’
‘And that doesn’t take long?’
‘It depends on the stranger.’
Tor placed a heaped plate in front of McNab and a pot of strong coffee.
‘Enjoy. Oh, I almost forgot, this came for you.’ He handed McNab an envelope with ‘For the policeman’ written on the front.
McNab turned it over, to find it sealed.
‘How did this arrive?’
‘I found it on the front mat when I came into work,’ Tor told him.
McNab tore the envelope open to find a single sheet of paper inside, with the words ‘Ask Mike Jones why he’s here’ written on it.
McNab put it back in the envelope.
‘A lead?’ Tor looked interested.
‘Maybe,’ McNab said, and proceeded to attack his plate of food.
After breakfast, he decided to wait outside for the arrival of PC Tulloch. After all, as Tor had intimated, this might be the only day he would experience Sanday without a galeforce wind blowing.
The previous evening, while McNab had enjoyed his pint, Tor had told him how, back in the day, the pub windows were directly over the water. ‘Unfortunately drunk folk had a habit of falling out of them, so the new owners moved the bar back a bit and built the wall. If they fall out now, it’s only a few feet.’
The tide was out and the stretch of shore below the sea wall was thick with rocks and seaweed, or tangle as Tor called it.
‘It used to make folk a packet of money. Tons of it gathered and sent to the mainland. It contains a natural gel like gelatine.’
Tor had kept him entertained with such stories in between serving two darts players, a couple who were more interested in checking their mobiles than drinking, and the Norwegian girl, who’d popped in to ask when he wanted the music to begin the following night.
Her appearance had been a welcome surprise, but unfortunately short-lived, and although she’d acknowledged McNab’s presence, she hadn’t indicated a need to hang about and talk to him. His disappointment at this had resulted in a stab of guilty conscience and he’d attempted to call Freya. When it had gone to voicemail, he’d covered his relief with a jokey message about being cut off in the wilds, and said he would try again tomorrow.
If I call now, there’s a chance I’ll catch Freya before she heads for the university library.
Before he could make up his mind on this, his mobile rang. McNab glanced at the screen to find an unknown caller.
‘Sergeant McNab, Sam Flett here. I’ve found an old photograph of Jamie Drever.’
McNab thanked him, and they arranged to meet at the heritage centre, after the interviews at the community centre.
‘I’ll be there most of the day. PC Tulloch has a list of folk wanting to speak to us.’
‘You’re the big attraction around here at the moment,’ Sam told him.
McNab brightened momentarily at the thought of a morning being served espresso and home-made Battenberg cake by the young lady from Norway, then PC Tulloch drew alongside him, wearing a beaming smile.
Erling reached out to discover Rory’s side of the bed empty and already cold.
The wind’s dropped so he’s headed back to Flotta.
And I’m bound for Sanday.
He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, his head suddenly reminding him how much red wine they’d drunk the previous evening. Erling smiled, deciding the residual pain was worth it. He headed for the shower, noting that Rory’s toilet bag had already been removed, which meant he’d been out of here early.
Turning on the shower to full power, he reflected on the night before with some pleasure. In particular when Rory had told him what he believed was the explanation for the mysterious phone call that had so worried him.
It turned out that Rory had a sister. Well, a half-sister to be precise, and that’s who’d called him. Based in New York, they rarely saw one another.
‘I thought a trip to the Big Apple might be our first holiday together,’ Rory had then suggested.
Erling had been pleased by both the explanation for the call and the offer. Of course, he hadn’t exhibited relief, or admitted that he’d been aware of the sister’s call in the first place. Although at one point in the proceedings, he’d intercepted a look from Rory that made him wonder if he had in fact been spotted in the porch that night.
That’s the policeman in me.
His mood on the way to Kirkwall was improved even further by the transformation in the weather. Scapa Flow and the hills of Hoy were in full view, with hardly a breath of wind to ruffle the waters. The forecast had promised a calm break of at least forty-eight hours, hopefully sufficient to let Dr MacLeod finish her excavation, and have all the evidence transported south.
The mystery of the body buried beneath the playground would take longer to solve, if solve it they could, with most of the witnesses of the time already dead.
And probably the perpetrator also in his grave.
According to PC Tulloch, Sanday folk were turning out to help with their enquiries, and they had been given at least one possible name for the victim, which Erling was following up on. Had they located the skull, a photofit would have probably avoided an unnecessary search.
Just like the more recent destruction of some of the evidence, the removal of the skull now looked like a wilful attempt to disrupt police enquiries, but to what end he had no idea.
The police were no more popular on Sanday than anywhere else. Regarded as a necessary evil to the majority of the population on the mainland of Scotland, it was the same on Orkney.
Sanday, unused to a police presence, didn’t think it needed one and there would be a few folk keen to see them leave. But tampering with evidence wouldn’t help that happen. On the other hand, implicating someone in the tampering might settle an old score, and like anywhere else, there were always scores to settle.
And thus the call that had arrived from DS McNab just as he’d left the house, alerting Erling to a finger being pointed at Mike Jones and asking for his background to be checked. Something he planned to set in motion, but as discreetly as possible.
