Offshore: A short story collection

by Ann Cleeves

  After eating the soup I felt stronger. I sat at the computer and began to make my plan, to plot my story. I realized that I would have to meet Eileen again. I had a number of theories surrounding Billy’s death, but I needed information that only she could provide. When I checked my emails I half-expected another message from my stalker, but there was nothing. The threats confused me. I didn’t see how they could fit into the story at all.

  It was almost dark when I set out and the snow had started again. I should have stayed in and put off my trip to the Anderson house until the morning, but I’m not a very flexible person. When I make a plan I stick to it. I parked at the end of the Anderson track, not worrying about blocking the gate. I thought it unlikely that Eileen would have any visitors, especially in this weather. I’d put on boots and my thickest jacket, but still I didn’t feel properly prepared. There was just enough light for me to see the track, but I wasn’t sure how I’d find my way back to the road without a torch.

  All the rubbish in the yard had been covered by snow and the house seemed almost attractive. There was a light in the kitchen window. I knocked at the door. No reply. People don’t lock up their homes in Shetland and I went in, shouting: ‘Eileen! It’s me, Jackie Tait.’ Usually I’d have taken off my boots, but the floor was so mucky that I didn’t think it would matter.

  She was sitting in the kitchen. There was a bit of heat coming out from the stove, but not much, and I kept on my jacket. She was wearing layer after layer of clothing: thick woollen tights and socks and some moth-eaten slippers, an old tweed skirt and jumpers, and on top of them all a grey cardigan, long and loose. But despite all the clothing she still looked skinny, and the fine-knit cardigan could have been a shroud.

  She turned her head slowly.

  ‘Where did you get all that stuff for the newspaper article?’ I asked.

  ‘I never spoke to the reporter,’ she said. ‘That was Malcolm.’

  ‘And where did he get it?’

  ‘From you,’ she said, and there was surprise in her voice, so I believed her. ‘He said you’d told him what happened.’

  ‘I never spoke to him after Billy died.’ None of this was making sense. Facts and theories whirled round my head like the snowflakes outside the window.

  ‘You posted a letter through the door.’ She turned to face me again, just moving her head, so that she looked like a clockwork toy. ‘A confession. It was your writing. We checked it against a note you left for Billy one day.’

  ‘Did you show the letter to the police?’

  This time she shook her head. The same jerky movement. Click, click. ‘Malcolm never had much time for police. And what would they do? It was suicide, everyone was agreed on that.’

  And besides, I thought, the newspaper would pay. Malcolm would get no money from the police.

  For a minute I wondered if it were true after all. That night at the party, had we all turned on Billy? Had we teased him and pushed him, mocked his drunken father and his weird mother? The scene seemed almost familiar. I felt that if I tried hard enough I could reconstruct the events in my head. Had he run off into the calm almost-night, then come back to kill himself? To reproach us for our cruelty.

  But still I couldn’t see things that way. I’d drunk so much that even the next morning I remembered little about what happened and the recollections that did remain were quite different. Andrew kissing me. The two of us walking hand-in-hand along the sand as the sun slid up over the horizon again. All the other guests had disappeared by then and we were alone.

  ‘Do you still have the letter?’ I asked.

  ‘Malcolm gave it to the newspaper,’ Eileen said. ‘Besides, it was spiteful, horrid. Why would we keep it?’

  ‘I never wrote it.’ But, even as I said the words, I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. Because by now I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Another picture slipped into my head. I got to my feet and left the house.

  It was still snowing, but not so heavily, and occasionally the clouds parted and there was a moon. I turned the car with difficulty and slithered back to the main road. When I got to the Bod there was a note on the door. It would be from John, checking that I was OK and perhaps inviting me to his chaotic house for supper. At least I hoped that was the case. But when I pulled out the pin and took the note outside, I realized that it was from the stalker again. This time in enormous letters, screaming out at me: GO AWAY SOUTH. YOU’RE NOT WANTED HERE.

  That night I decided that I would go. I couldn’t face a month of threats and uncertainty and, besides, perhaps I had found out all that was needed. I got online and booked myself onto the afternoon flight south the following day. I sent a couple of emails, and then brought up the synopsis of my story. It seemed that the plot lines were working out and I had an ending in mind. For the first time since arriving in Shetland I had a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.

  When I woke there was still little light. In winter it takes the sun a long time to reach Scalloway in the west. I made coffee and checked my emails. There was the reply I was waiting for. And the television film had been given the green light by commissioners. My agent was ecstatic: Where are you? We need you back in London. As I drove south, the sun was rising as a huge orange ball to my left. I felt a sudden burst of energy. Soon I would be back in the city, anonymous and safe. There would be no more ridiculous notes to disturb me.

  I arrived early and that had always been the plan. I had been organizing this moment for a long time. Certainly before I flew into Sumburgh two days before. Because, deep down, I’d always suspected what had happened to Billy Anderson. My meeting with Eileen had only confirmed it. The narrative of his death had run through my novels, over and over again, driving me a little mad. Now was the time to put an end to that particular haunting.

  I left my car by the pier at Grutness and walked up the bank. The snow had frozen hard and crunched under my boots. There were no other footprints, so I knew I would be there first. Below me I saw another car pull up beside mine. It seemed I had got there just in time. At the top, right on the edge of the cliff, there was a stone hut, used by the coastguard service as a lookout. The walls were solid enough and a large window, of the sort you’d get in a bird hide, faced the sea. Gannets hovered just below the lip of the cliff. In the spring they would breed there, with puffins and fulmars and kittiwakes. The door stood ajar. It must have been opened recently, because it had scraped the snow from the entrance. John Sinclair was already inside, leaning against the far wall. He must have come up from the other side, wanting to surprise me. He’d always been good at that.

  This wasn’t how the story should have played out. I should have been waiting for him, the sharpened kitchen knife from the Bod in my hand. I should have forced him to the edge of the cliff, the knife in his back, and I should have shoved him over. Another terrible accident on the treacherous cliffs of Shetland. Revenge for Billy’s death. And for the death of my parents.

  ‘You’re early.’ I kept my voice light. Perhaps, after all, it would be possible to rewrite the denouement. ‘In my email I said half-past.’

  ‘I’m a busy man now, Jackie. Important. I don’t have the freedom to plan my own day.’

  ‘Not like when you were a teacher with a couple of babies at home,’ I said. ‘You were prepared to drop everything to see me then. You said I was your muse, the love of your life.’

  ‘It was a difficult time for me. Suddenly tied down with all that domestic stuff.’ He stared out to sea. This had been our special place for stolen meetings. Was he remembering that summer?

  ‘You killed Billy,’ I said, ‘and you made it look like suicide.’

  ‘I did it for you!’ He almost sounded as if he believed it. ‘You had your whole life ahead of you. Such a talented young woman! I knew you’d be a writer one day. And Bill was so lippy and stupid, turning everything into a joke. I knew he’d come out with some suggestive comment in class, thinking it was funny. One day someone would realize he was talking about us.
Why did you tell him?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him.’ But I hadn’t needed to. Billy had followed me around like a besotted puppy. He would have seen John and me together. That was why he’d run into the party, all tearful and upset, needing to talk.

  ‘I came to your party,’ John said. ‘It was late and I hoped to find you on your own, but you were on the beach with some lad. Billy was there, sitting on the rocks, watching you. “Look at that, sir. Andrew and Jackie getting it on. More suitable, don’t you think? At least he’s not old enough to be her father.” I was jealous and angry and I lost my temper. There was a bit of fishing line caught up in the shingle. I twisted it around his neck until he died. He was only a skinny young boy. Easy enough to carry him back to the barn and make it look like he’d hanged himself.’ The words spilled out and he couldn’t stop them. He’d been saving them up for a long time. Was that why he’d invited me to become his own writer-in-residence? He looked at me. ‘Wasn’t I enough for you, Jackie? Did you need to take up with that boy?’

  ‘Tell me about the confession,’ I said. ‘The letter I was supposed to have written. The letter pushed through the Andersons’ door.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘It was an essay,’ I said. ‘The first bit of creative writing for you, as part of my standard grade exams. I remember the comment you gave me: Maybe you’ve let your imagination run away with you here, Jackie. This is a bit Gothic for my taste. It would be in my file at school.’

  Still he remained silent.

  ‘Why did you invite me back here?’ I said. ‘Why drag up the past?’

  ‘I needed to know,’ he said. ‘Your writing grew darker and darker. Had you guessed what happened that night? One day would you come out with it, as a piece of fiction? It’s been driving me crazy. The thought of seeing the story in the bestseller list.’

  ‘Not guilt then,’ I kept my voice even, but I knew in that moment that I’d kill him. ‘It wasn’t guilt that kept you awake – just the fear of being caught.’

  He walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘We’ll leave it, shall we? Let’s put it behind us and get on with our lives.’

  I felt the handle of the knife in the pocket of my jacket and grasped it. ‘Why the notes?’ I asked. ‘Why try to scare me away? It was you who’d brought me here.’

  ‘That was nothing to do with me.’ He turned suddenly and started to leave the building, an adult bored with the tedious questions of a child. I pulled the knife from my pocket and stuck the point into his back, under the ribs, where I could do most damage. He was only wearing a fleece, and he’d have felt the point of the knife on his skin. It was very sharp. I tapped his shoulder with my other hand.

  ‘Walk,’ I said. There was a sudden exhilaration, as the waves below sounded very loud in my ears. It came to me that I might jump after him. I imagined how it might feel, floating past the gannets, held in the bright sunlight.

  ‘The notes were my idea.’ This was a different voice, and it came from right behind me. A Shetlander with an accent I didn’t quite recognize. The man went on, ‘Not very clever, as it turned out. But I couldn’t warn you off professionally. I’m still on compassionate leave.’ I felt arms around me, the knife prised out of my hand. ‘I remember the Billy Anderson case. I never quite accepted it was suicide, though I couldn’t persuade the Fiscal. She’ll believe me now, though. She’s in her office and she heard that conversation on her phone.’ I turned and saw the tall man who’d greeted me on my first night in Scalloway, walking through the blizzard. He was waving a mobile phone in his free hand. He was still wearing the long coat. He was dark and untidy and had a sad grin. ‘I thought Sinclair might try to harm you. Never thought it would work the other way round.’

  In the distance we heard sirens coming from the direction of the airport. For a moment I thought John might jump. He hesitated on the brink of the cliff, his arms held stiffly a little way from his sides. Perez – because that was the strange detective’s name – did nothing to stop him. But John Sinclair didn’t jump. He sat on the snow and put his head in his hands. He waited until a couple of uniformed officers scrambled up the bank and took him away.

  Perez saw me onto the plane. He’d talked to me immediately after Billy’s death and I’d remembered the exotic name. I thought I might be in trouble because of the knife, but he only referred to it obliquely, saying that stabbing was a horrible way to die. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that even to a man like Sinclair.’ I wondered if he’d lost someone close to him, if that was the reason for being on compassionate leave.

  The sun was still up when the plane took off. I saw the white, snow-covered island beneath me, and the glitter of the water, and remembered Perez’s last words. He’d taken my hand in the airport building. ‘You’re a fine writer,’ he’d said. ‘But I could do with something more cheerful now. A bit lighter, eh? Maybe it’s time to move on.’ Then he’d grinned again and walked away.

  The Spinster

  She twisted the carded fleece between the fingers of her left hand and fed it into the spinning wheel. Her right foot rocked on the pedal and kept the rhythm smooth and regular. The view from her window was of her neighbour’s croft land towards the sea. She’d grown up in this house and usually she took the scene for granted, but now Stuart’s digger was biting into the peaty soil and preparing the foundations for his new home. It wouldn’t block her whole view, and he’d come to her, very polite and quiet, explaining that – with the new baby on the way – the old house wouldn’t be big enough.

  ‘Much easier to start from scratch,’ he’d said. ‘The planners have given their permission.’

  She’d seen that, even if she objected, the house would be built, and Stuart had always been a good neighbour. She’d known him since he was a bairn and she didn’t want to fall out now. So she’d smiled and said of course they needed a bigger place and it would be good to see a child playing from her window. Joan was a spinster and there hadn’t been a child in Holmsgarth since she and her sisters were young.

  But the sight of the digger made her uneasy. It disturbed the rhythm of her spinning and when she looked at the yarn it was uneven and bobbly. It would knit in an interesting way, but it wasn’t how she’d intended it to be. She set her spinning aside and went to the kitchen to make her tea, but even from there she could hear the rumbling of the machine, and she fancied that she could feel its vibration under her feet.

  Later she took up her knitting. She was working on an all-over jersey, a commission from an American woman, who’d wanted natural colours and traditional patterns. By now it was dark outside and she had the curtains closed. She switched on the television to hide the sound of the digger, but the headlights were so bright that they shone through her curtains, making weird shadows on the wall. Then the lights went away and everything was quiet, and for the first time that day she could concentrate on her work.

  She knitted as her mother had done with a leather belt, padded with horsehair, and three pins pointed at both ends. One of the pins she’d stick into the belt and the garment grew as a tube. There were three colours, Shetland black, grey and mourrit, a natural reddish brown, and she kept the tension even as she wove the wool into the back of the pattern. She was working on the anchor motif and that reminded her of her father, who’d had his own fishing boat and had been lost at sea. Soon she was so lost in her memories that when there was more noise on the building site she hardly noticed it.

  They’d been three sisters. Half-sisters in fact, because Joan’s mother had died when she was a bairn and her father had remarried. Joan was the oldest by ten years, and then there’d been Annie and Edie. Now Edie was away and Annie was dead, taken by cancer just two years before. None of them had found a man. The nearest any of them came to it was in the Seventies when the oil had first come into the islands. Then men had flocked to Shetland, like the seabirds arriving on the cliffs in the spring, jostling for space on the rocky ledges. Men were everywhere, and girls could take their pick.
Joan was in her thirties then, already considered something of an old maid, but Annie and Edie had been young and wild and looking for husbands. It was a while since Joan had remembered that time, but now, her fingers busy with the knitting, stopping occasionally to follow the pattern she’d made by plotting tiny crosses on graph paper, she relived those months in the summer of 1974.

  She’d watched from the sidelines as her sisters made fools of themselves at dances and parties. There was one particular man from the Scottish mainland. He was an engineer with the construction company and he had digs with Margaret Hay, who lived just down the road from Holmsgarth. He’d hired a car and set off to work every morning looking very smart. Both Edie and Annie had thought he would make a fine husband and often found excuses to drop in on Margaret when they knew the man was at home. Joan paused for a moment and rested her work in her lap while she struggled to remember his name. James Mackie. How could she have forgotten it, when he had caused so many arguments in their house? So much disruption to their lives.

  She continued knitting. The anchor pattern was finished and she felt a moment of calm. It was superstition, but knitting the anchor always made her uncomfortable. Now she had three rows of mourrit to work. Easy and needing no concentration.

  James Mackie, quiet and respectable, from somewhere on the west coast of the Scottish mainland, with an accent that was soft like cream. All three sisters, starved for so long of new male company, dreamed of James Mackie when they went to sleep at night. Even Joan, who understood that she was too old to have a chance with him, who would always be a spinster. By then their father had died, drowned in an accident, his body never found, and they were just four women living at Holmsgarth. Joan’s stepmother and the three sisters.

  Without realizing it, she’d finished the three rows of plain knitting and she took up the graph paper again and focused on the pattern.