I shrugged again. ‘I never really know these days.’
Her face clouded over.
‘We can phone him,’ I added, in a belated attempt to seem helpful.
She shook her head. ‘I’d like to bring a team down here tomorrow, though. It can’t be coincidence that similar runes appear both in your house and on a body found on your property.’
‘Guess not,’ I agreed, not sure where she was going but definitely not liking the implications. ‘You mean she was probably killed in the house? Maybe the cellar?’
Now it was her turn to shrug. ‘We do need to find out who owned this house before you.’
‘I thought Duncan brought the deeds over to the station this morning.’
‘He did. But they don’t tell us much. Some sort of church or religious building used to be here but it was derelict for years before it was demolished to make way for this house. There were trustees named on the document but, so far, most of them seem to be dead.’
‘Dead?’
She shook her head. ‘Old age, nothing significant.’
I finished my supper. I was no longer starving but hardly satisfied; it hadn’t exactly been a relaxing meal. I stood up and took the plate and cutlery to the dishwasher.
‘So what about the runes?’ I asked.
She looked at me, bit on another piece of shortbread, seemed to make up her mind. She leaned down and pulled her camera, a notebook and a small, blue leather-bound book from her bag. There was a runic script printed in gold ink on the front of the book and, although she’d laid it upside-down, I could read the title, Runes and Viking Script. The print was too small for me to make out the name of the author.
‘You say your husband’s father is into all this?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘Very much so. I doubt there are many people who know more about the history of these islands than he does.’
She turned the book round for me. On the inside front cover were pictured twenty-five runes: each a simple, mainly angular symbol. They all had descriptive names, like Disruption, Standstill, Gateway, but when Richard, my father-in-law, had referred to them, he’d used their Viking names.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘There are only twenty-five. Each one appears to have a distinct meaning of its own. How can it form any sort of alphabet and make words? There just aren’t enough characters.’
I started to flip through the book. ‘I think it works a bit like the Chinese alphabet,’ I said. ‘Each character has a principal meaning but also several sub-meanings. And when you use two or more together, each one impacts slightly upon the others to create a meaning unique to that combination: a bit like a word. Does that make any sort of sense?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I think there are over two thousand Chinese characters.’
‘Maybe the Vikings didn’t talk much.’
She opened her notebook and turned it to face me. The page I was looking at had a reproduction of the three runes we’d seen in the morgue the day before. ‘So what we have here,’ she went on, ‘are the runes for Separation, Breakthrough and Constraint, inscribed on the body of our victim. What’s that all about then?’
I looked from her notes to the textbook. On the next page the runes were reproduced again, this time with their Viking names. The fish-like symbol was called Othila, meaning Separation; the kite-bow was Dagaz, meaning Breakthrough, and the diagonal, sword-like rune was Nauthiz, meaning Constraint. I looked up at her. She was watching me carefully.
‘What about the sub-meanings?’ I asked.
‘Go ahead,’ she encouraged.
On the page opposite, lesser meanings for each rune were listed. Othila also meant Property or Inherited Possessions, Native Land and Home; Dagaz meant Day, God’s Light, Prosperity and Fruitfulness; Nauthiz meant Need, Necessity, Cause of Human Sorrow, Lessons, Hardship.
‘Separation of significant internal organ from rest of body?’ I suggested, not entirely seriously. She gave me an encouraging nod. I looked down at the book. ‘Breakthrough . . . umm, breaking through the chest wall to reach the heart? Constraint . . . well, she was constrained, wasn’t she? The bruises around her ankles and wrists . . . And she certainly suffered hardship . . .’ I tailed off and looked at Dana.
‘Seem good enough to you?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Seems like bollocks.’
‘Like meaningless doodles?’ she suggested.
‘Much more elegant way of putting it,’ I agreed. ‘What about the ones downstairs?’
She pressed a button on her camera and pulled up the photograph she’d taken just ten minutes ago. There were five symbols inscribed along the lintel.
‘An arrow pointing upwards,’ I said.
Dana flicked to the back page of the book. ‘Teiwaz,’ she said, ‘meaning Warrior and Victory in battle.’
I looked at her. We both made mystified faces.
‘Next up looks like a slanted letter F.’ I reached over and indicated it on the page. ‘There, what does it say?’
‘Ansuz,’ she replied, ‘meaning Signals, God and River Mouth.’
‘Our third symbol of the evening is a flash of lightning.’
‘Sowelu. Wholeness, the Sun.’ She looked up again.
‘This is just more bo— meaningless doodles,’ I said.
‘Certainly looks that way,’ she agreed. ‘What about the last two?’
‘We have an upturned table called Perth, meaning . . . aah!’
‘What?’
‘Initiation.’
She frowned. ‘I always worry when I hear that word.’
‘Know what you mean. And, finally, a crooked letter H, called Hagalaz, meaning Disruption and Natural Forces.’
‘Warrior, Signals, Wholeness, Initiation and Disruption,’ Dana summarized.
I held up my hands. ‘Meaningless—’
‘Bollocks,’ she said. And smiled. It was a pretty smile.
I laughed. ‘You need to talk to Duncan’s dad. Maybe it’s a question of context.’
‘Who needs to talk to my dad?’ said a voice from the doorway. Duncan had crept up on us. He stood there, grinning, looking from Dana to me, and I felt my stomach tensing the way it always did when Duncan was in the presence of a pretty woman who wasn’t me. They had a way of softening, somehow, around him: their skin would blush, eyes shine, bodies instinctively lean towards him. I braced myself for Dana to respond in the time-honoured way and, to my surprise, she didn’t. Dana, that night, gave me the totally new experience of watching my gorgeous husband and an equally gorgeous babe and feeling no jealousy whatsoever. They exchanged a few pleasantries, she ascertained that he knew nothing more about runes than I did, and then she left. She didn’t promise to keep in touch.
7
‘GO ON, GO,’ I urged, as Henry moved into top gear. I rose out of the saddle and leaned forward, balancing over his neck as he pounded along the beach.
My favourite place to ride on Shetland was a half-moon beach, where dusky pink, grass-tufted cliffs rose like the sides of a pudding basin around a bay of deepest turquoise. As I thundered along, spray blurred my vision and all I could see was colour: emerald grass, turquoise sea, pink sand and the soft, robin’s-egg blue of the distant ocean. There are times on the islands when flowers seem superfluous.
The wind is rarely still on Shetland but it seemed content, that morning, just to whisper its presence, and the ocean was smooth but for small bubbles of white foam at the water’s edge.
I turned Henry and we walked back through the surf. Both of us were panting. Blissful emptiness of mind disappeared and reality came tumbling back.
Thursday was my regular day off. I was expected to stay near a phone and respond to any emergency but otherwise I was free to relax. Some hope. I was having a period of what Duncan called ‘the stressies’. I was finding it hard to get to sleep at night, waking up much too early in the morning and spending the day exhausted. For much of the time, I was grinding my teeth and clench
ing my fists without realizing it. A permanent headache nagged just shy of the point of being disabling and I was loaded up with aspirin and paracetamol twenty-four hours a day.
What was my problem?
Well, for a start, something was worrying Duncan but he wasn’t telling me about it. We were hardly communicating at all; except in bed, if the non-verbal kind was allowed to count. His new business was proving harder to settle into than he’d expected and the hours he was working were as long as mine, but he was doing it six, sometimes seven days a week. The couple of times I’d mentioned babies his face had tightened and he’d changed the subject just as soon as he could. He hadn’t spoken about adoption again. That morning, he’d left the islands on a three-day trip back to London for meetings with clients and I was finding it almost a relief to have the house to myself for a few days, not to have to pretend that everything was fine.
Second, I wasn’t performing well at work. Nothing had gone wrong yet, all my babies had been successfully delivered and were doing well. With the help of the team I’d probably saved Janet Kennedy’s life the other day. But somehow it just wasn’t coming together. I was awkward, clumsy both in theatre and in the delivery room. I was pretty certain that no one, either on the medical team or among the patients, actually liked me. And it was my fault. I couldn’t relax and be natural. Either I was stiff and cold or I tried too hard in the other direction, making inappropriate jokes and getting glassy-eyed stares in response.
Third, I was itching to know what was happening in the murder investigation. The day after DS Tulloch visited me at home I’d been interviewed again by a DCI from Inverness. He’d done nothing but reiterate the questions Tulloch had already asked me and, to my surprise, he’d even nodded sagely when I’d repeated DI Dunn’s theory about the murdered woman being an islander. Since then, I’d heard from Duncan that most of the mainland team had been called home and that Dunn and Tulloch were, once again, in charge, although Dunn, Duncan told me, wasn’t normally based on Shetland but at Wick on the mainland.
I’d thought about calling Dana Tulloch but didn’t much fancy the inevitable rebuff I’d get. I’d made a point of catching the main news each evening for the last few days but had learned nothing. There had been some coverage in the local press and on Shetland TV, but far less than I’d expected. Nobody from the media had tried to interview me. Nobody at work had bothered to ask about it, although I was sure I’d caught one or two suspicious-looking glances. Neither had any of our neighbours been round in a spirit of friendly nosiness.
Sharing a table in the hospital canteen with some other members of staff, I’d found myself incredibly frustrated that the topics of conversation had ranged from school sports days to rising prices on the buses and road works on the A970. For God’s sake, I’d wanted to yell, we dug up a body four days ago, not ten miles from here. She’s in the morgue right now. Does nobody care? I hadn’t, of course. But I had wondered if Gifford’s oblique warning to me in the pub that night had been repeated across the hospital: don’t discuss the particularly grizzly murder that has taken place amongst us, because that will be bad for the social and economic health of the islands; don’t talk about it and it might just go away.
And then there was Kenn Gifford.
I’d met him just four days ago, and during those four days he’d been on my mind an awful lot more than he had any business to be. I’d even gone so far as to buy Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, drinking in greedily any descriptions of the character he’d likened me to and finding myself absurdly flattered by references to ‘superior height’, ‘exquisitely fair complexion’ and ‘profuse hair of a colour betwixt brown and flaxen’.
I’ve been married for five years and of course Gifford wasn’t the first man I’d found attractive during that time. I’d also met quite a few who had found me . . . interesting. It had never really been a problem. I have this simple test, you see; I say to myself, ‘Tora, however amiable, however pleasing to the eye he may be, can he really, honestly measure up to Duncan?’ And the answer has always been the same: never in a million years. But with Gifford the answer wasn’t quite so clear-cut.
All in all, I had quite a lot to think about.
Henry, perhaps picking up on my mood, started to jump and skitter about. Then a guillemot flew close and he shied, backing into the water. Henry had ridden through waves, not to mention rivers, streams and ponds many times and there was absolutely no reason why the feel of water around his hoofs should bother him, but for some reason it did. He started to buck and kick, spinning in the water and going in deeper. He was in danger of slipping and I of losing my seat. I tightened the reins and pulled him up sharply.
‘Pack it in!’ I snarled, pulling him round so that he was facing up the beach and out of the sea. He sidestepped and backed up further.
Mildly concerned now, I kicked him forward, regretting not having brought a whip with me. I raised his head and kicked again. He shot forward, just as I saw a man standing on the cliff top, staring down at us.
Gifford, was my first thought, but it was impossible to be sure. The cliffs were to the east of us, the sun was still low and the man was little more than a shadow blocking out a fraction of the early-morning light. He was tall and broad and his hair, long and loose, seemed to gleam like gold. The sun was hurting my eyes and I looked away for a second, screwing them closed to shut out the brightness. When I opened them again the man was gone.
I urged Henry away from the surf and put him into an active walk along the beach. It was two miles to home and I still had Charles to ride.
Charles was in no state to be ridden.
Missing Henry and with no Jamie to keep him calm, he’d panicked, jumped a fence into the next field, stumbled on the uneven ground and fallen into the stream that runs down our land. That, in itself, wouldn’t have been too bad, but in slipping he’d dislodged an old barbed-wire fence and wrapped it around his left hind leg. The least sensible of my horses was trapped in a stream, with several razor-sharp points digging into his flesh. Not surprisingly, he was seriously distressed. His eyes were rolling and his grey coat was dark with sweat.
I untacked Henry as fast as I could and pushed him into the field. Hearing Charles’s panic he rushed up to the fence and started calling out to him. Horses have a particular whinnying cry when they’re hurt or distressed. It’s a sound you rarely hear, fortunately, because it pierces your heart the way I imagine the screams of a terrified child would. Charles’s cries doubled in volume and he started to struggle and kick.
I knew I’d never get the wire off Charles without some sort of wire-cutter so I turned and ran back into the house. I was wearing an ancient pair of green Hunter wellingtons and they were caked in mud from the last time I’d worn them – Jamie’s aborted burial day. The mud had dried and started to flake off over the carpet as I rushed upstairs to the spare room where Duncan kept his tools. I found a pair of pliers, then grabbed another, stronger pair just for good measure and raced back downstairs again. On the fourth stair from the bottom I slipped and went down, banging my coccyx badly on the stairs. It hurt but I forced myself to stand up and get moving.
Running outside, I found Charles and Henry winding each other up and Henry prepared to jump the fence and join Charles in the stream. He needed to be tied up but the time it would take me to find a head-collar and catch him just couldn’t be spared. Blood was running down Charles’s leg. Even if I did manage to get him free – and from the state of him that was looking increasingly unlikely – he’d probably done irreparable damage to his leg. Surely I wasn’t about to lose a second horse in as many weeks?
Forcing myself to move slowly, I approached Charles. The stream is a narrow one, at times barely visible under rushes and long grass. In summer it doesn’t carry much water but the gully is deep. Charles was using his front legs in a scrambling motion to propel himself out but, fastened as he was by his hind leg, it was impossible. Plus, every effort he made sapped his energy, increased his panic and pushed
the sharp prongs of the wire deeper into his flesh. I hadn’t faced a situation remotely like it before and for a second I was tempted to just throw back my head and scream for help. Except I knew none would come.
I stood just out of reach of Charles’s hoofs and tried to calm him. If he would let me touch his head I was in with a chance.
‘Steady, steady, steady, whoa now, steady.’ I reached towards him. He tossed his head up and towards me, grabbing with his teeth. Then he spun round, trying to scramble away. I’d known this horse since he was two years old; he’d come to my mother’s farm to be broken in and I was the only regular rider he’d known, but pain and fear had turned me into the enemy. I looked down. The left hind leg was pretty well immobilized and there appeared to be two – no, three – strands of wire connecting Charles to the fence. If he let me approach, I might be able to cut through the wire, enabling him to climb out of the ditch.
I jumped down into the gully and Charles glared, swinging round to face me. A kick from a big horse can seriously injure, if not kill – and yet without getting close, I could do nothing to help him. Talking gently, wishing my voice sounded calmer, I moved forward. He was panting heavily and his eyes were rolling. If he sprang, I could be pinioned beneath two very powerful forelegs; if he fell, I’d be crushed. It all looked impossible and for a moment I was tempted to give up and ring the vet. Yet I knew the chances of him being able to come straight away were slim and if there were to be any possibility of saving Charles I had to get him loose from the wire-fence pretty much immediately.
I moved forward again as Charles reared, balancing precariously on his trapped rear limbs. He fell forward and I moved again before he had chance to recover. I was no longer talking to him, my voice just wouldn’t work any more. Crouching down in the ditch, I willed myself to ignore the half-ton of muscle and bone poised above me as I squeezed the pliers around the first thick strand of wire. It snapped in two and Charles chose that moment to kick out with both hind legs. The remaining wire dug deep into his fetlock and he screamed out loud with the pain. He reared again and this time those murderous forelegs were directly above me and coming down fast. I had to move!
Sacrifice Page 8
