Women of the Dunes

by Sarah Maine

  “That would be marvellous, though rather shaming.” He set the valise on the edge of the bed. “I packed in an awful rush, you see, and just threw everything in. Still a disgrace, I’m afraid. Most of it needs a wash.”

  That lopsided grin brought those less complicated days flooding back, days when there had been sunlit rock pools to examine and shrimps to be caught, and a helping hand offered over the seaweed. Children then, dismissive of class and status, with Mungo following, unwanted and complaining while she and Alick found joy in little things. It had all changed since then, of course, but she would have loved to laugh with Mr. Alick as she used to do, and looked aside lest he read her thoughts. “Shall I sort through it for you?”

  “You’re a treasure, Ellen,” he said, turning away to unbuckle the valise. “But for now, somewhere there’s a gift for Mama.” He began going through the contents, spewing them across the floor like a hound digging out a fox. “Aha!” he said, pulling out a crumpled package, and then he looked down at the mess at his feet. “Oh Lord, Ellen, you’d just tidied!”

  And so she laughed with him anyway.

  She left the room a moment later with a smile still on her lips, carrying an armful of washing, and stepped lightly down the back stairs. But once in the kitchen her stratagem came to naught: the laundry was taken from her and she was sent with a bucket of coals to the library, scolded for her earlier neglect.

  She slipped in, keeping her head down to make herself invisible, mumbling an apology as she went over to the fireplace. There were just two occupants in the room: the master, who raised his eyes from his newspaper, said nothing, and returned to it; and Mungo Sturrock, sprawled in the other armchair. His eyes kindled when he saw her— His outstretched legs were blocking her route to the hearth but he showed no sign of moving them, so she muttered another low apology and he shifted them, but only slightly, forcing her to lift her skirts with her free hand and step across him. She sensed his eyes on her.

  Hastily, clumsily, she filled the scuttle, and a piece of coal fell from the bucket and rolled onto the floor beside his shoe. Face aflame, she bent and reached for it, but he moved quickly to cover it with his foot, pinning it to the place where her fingers held it, and she pulled back her hand.

  The master read on, oblivious.

  “Allow me,” said Mungo, and he bent forward, his face close to hers, his eyes mocking. “Fair Ellen,” he added in a whisper, and he handed her the coal as if it had been a jewel, then pulled out a handkerchief and began slowly wiping his fingers, as his eyes followed her retreat.

  Chapter 8

   Libby

  Libby woke as a smouldering log split and fell into the hearth, and it was a moment before she remembered where she was. Looking up at the clock she saw that it was almost five; she’d slept for more than two hours.

  It must be the stillness of the room.

  She rose and stretched, marvelling again at the timeless quality of her surroundings, and thought of the curious circumstances of her being here. Then she picked up the tea tray and went through to the kitchen to find Alice alone there, lifting scones onto a cooling rack. “You look better. Did you sleep?” she asked.

  “I did. It was marvellous.”

  “Good. Rodri’ll be back soon with the boys, and Maddy’s just finishing off. And I was thinking that you can have only so much tea so I’ve opened a bottle of wine.”

  Maddy came through the door. “I’m driving, remember,” she said.

  “Aye, and I’m to be driven.” She gestured Libby to the table and sat down herself, three glasses dangling from her fingers and a bottle in the other hand. “Rodri said I was to look after you.” She filled the glasses with a pale white wine and pushed a plate of brown bread and smoked salmon towards her. “And that’s left over from the food fair, so eat up. How much did we get done?” she asked, addressing Maddy.

  They discussed butter orders and delivery deadlines for a few minutes, revealing a process more complicated than Libby had imagined, and then they heard the sound of the back door opening.

  “So!” said Rodri, from the kitchen doorway. “I leave you alone for an afternoon and you plunder my wine.” He strode up to the table, picked up the bottle, and examined the label. “Wretched woman. My best Sancerre.”

  “Better get yourself a glass then,” said Alice. “I liked the label.”

  Rodri snorted. “And we’ll need another bottle, by the look of it. Hello, Maddy.”

  Maddy smiled her quiet smile and gestured to the plate of smoked salmon. “We’re eating the profits too.”

  “Worse and worse.” He turned to Libby. “You look better.”

  “Much better,” she agreed, then decided to align herself with the women. “The wine is helping.”

  He snorted again and then the boys trooped in, three of them this time, all talking at once, and she recognised the boy who had been with Rodri’s sons that first night in the pub. He looked a year or two older than Donald, and was taller. But they were surely related? “This is David, Maddy’s boy,” said Alice, and the boy nodded politely at her. “And this is Libby, who’s going to have a shiner you lot can only dream of.”

  All three boys grinned.

  “How was the match?” Maddy asked, and the boys replied in unison. David, it transpired, had been goalie, Donald in defence, and Charlie a staunchly partisan spectator.

  “It should have been six-four but I let a really stupid one in,” said David.

  “Bad luck. Did they give you a hard time?”

  “Not really.”

  “But it was offside, wasn’t it, Dad? We all saw it.” Charlie was clearly outraged. “Shouldn’t have been given.”

  Rodri shrugged as he poured himself a glass of wine. “Maybe not.”

  “See! Dad says it was offside.”

  “No. I said ‘maybe not.’ ”

  “Same thing.”

  “It isn’t.”

  The argument continued in high good humour, neither side giving ground, and then it seemed to Libby that everyone was on their feet, talking over each other in cheerful confusion. “The casserole’s in the Aga, Rodri, and everything’s in it, veg and all. Just dish up,” Alice said, as she gathered up her bag. “And there’s an apple pie on the top, keeping warm. Just one scone each, boys, and I’ll murder anyone who makes crumbs. One, I said. I saw that. Put it back, Charlie, or you’ll have none. See you in the morning, Libby, and make sure to get an early night.” Libby nodded, quite bewildered now. Who was staying and who was going? “Don’t stay up all night finishing off that second bottle.”

  In the end it was Alice, Maddy, and David who left, and the two remaining boys began laying the table while Rodri refilled the glasses. “Is the head really feeling better?” he asked.

  Had she completely misread the situation here? “It’s fine,” she said. But perhaps Alice was just out for the evening.

  “Alice says she’ll get a shiner,” said Charlie, as proud as if it had been his own.

  “Aye, I heard her,” his father replied. “Now, go and wash your hands and then sit up.”

  School and football continued to dominate the conversation as they worked their way through Alice’s casserole, and she sensed this was the norm. Rodri included her but his focus was on the boys, deftly checking manners and balancing opinions, drawing them out. Hands-on fathering.

  No mention was made of the body.

  “The referee was rubbish,” Charlie concluded as he scraped up the last of the gravy with a piece of bread. “The one David let in was definitely offside and should—”

  “Have you got homework, either of you?” their father interrupted, rolling his eyes at Libby.

  “McFadden should have said something,” the child continued.

  “Mr. McFadden to you. Homework, I said. Who’s got any?”

  Both boys admitted to having some and were told to cut themselves some pie and go and get on with it. And when they had gone, Rodri turned to Libby. “You slept, Alice said?”


  “Yes, in the library. What a room!”

  “Aye. Ossian made manifest; a flight of Romantic fantasy. Very trendy in its day and I do rather like the madness of it.” He began to clear away, waving her back to her seat when she rose. “I’ll put the pots in the dishwasher and leave the rest for Alice to do in the morning.” Lucky Alice. He angled the bottle over her glass. “Top up?” She nodded, wondering what had happened to the boys’ mother. But with that attitude to the division of labour, perhaps no explanation was needed.

  “So tell me about the business,” she asked, and studied him as he explained again what the two women had told her earlier. He was somewhere in his mid- or late thirties, she decided, younger than she had first thought. When they had met at the mound yesterday (was it only yesterday?), he had looked hard-faced and austere, but she’d seen a different side to him during the meal. More humour, perhaps, and yet she sensed a suppressed tension which made him difficult to read. He was a coiled spring of a man, and might not be easy to live with, but Alice seemed able to handle him, and his sons clearly had his measure.

  Something he said suggested he had once been in the army, and she asked him about it.

  “I was a trainer at Aldershot for a while,” he said, “and came back here when the boys were small, just after their mother died.” So that question was resolved, but he moved swiftly on. “Hector had married a woman from Trondheim who’d found life a little, shall we say, difficult here, so they live in Oslo, an arrangement which suited everyone.” She caught a dryness in his tone. “When my wife died I baled out of the army, brought the boys up here, and took over managing the estate for Hector. It’s working out fine, after a fashion. But enough of me,” he said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  And so she did. Or some of it. She told him about her childhood in Toronto, fractured as it had been when her artistic mother left her oil prospector father and went to live in New Zealand. It had been a difficult time but, as her host had done, she stuck to the bare facts, not dwelling on the sense of dislocation which had characterised her adolescence. “I moved around a lot after that. My mother is English and my fixed points were a rather grim English boarding school and my grandmother’s house in Newfoundland. Gosse Harbour. Sometimes my father came out, and those were the best of times.” He kept his eyes on her as she spoke; they had an oddly piercing quality and she could imagine a sharp brain working behind them. The trick would be knowing what it was doing. “And then I decided to go to university here and study archaeology. The Vikings were the obvious research choice if your life is in Britain and Newfoundland.”

  “So no fixed abode, then?”

  “Not really. Except for my job.” Which was alright, for now. She’d made her choice when she let Simon go. And she’d had no ancestral home to retreat to—but then again, Sturrock House was his brother Hector’s, not Rodri’s.

  She wondered if he minded.

  He suggested that they take the remaining wine into the library, where he built up the fire before excusing himself to press the issue of homework and bedtime. He had drawn the curtains and she saw that they too were old and faded, continuing the Celtic theme, and showing signs of needing repair. Perhaps his brother kept a tight grip on the finances; running this place could not be cheap.

  “You’ve a lot going on,” she said when he came back and slumped into the other armchair. “With the boys, and the business, and running the estate.”

  He picked up his untouched glass. “The estate is pretty full-time. Alice keeps house and sees to the boys, and she and Maddy run the business.”

  “It’s good to have a second income stream.”

  He frowned at that. “The business isn’t part of the estate. We pay a token peppercorn rent for the dairy, and something for the Sturrock House branding, but that’s it.”

  “I see,” she said, but didn’t really.

  He glanced at her, and explained a little more. “Hector will probably come back to live here one day and want to run things himself, and then I’ll be out of a job. So the business is a safeguard for the future.”

  “But where would you live?” None of her business, of course, but she was curious.

  He answered readily enough. “In the old manse. I bought it off Hector for a quid, so when he comes back, me and the boys will move there, once I’ve fixed it up. And Hector has no use for the dairy, so I imagine we’ll carry on.”

  He gave the hearth a long, hard stare and she took a sip of wine, wondering a little at the change of tone. It must be strange living in another man’s house, even if he was your brother, knowing that at any time he might come back and boot you out. Difficult for Alice too.

  Maybe that explained the tension.

  His expression discouraged further probing, but she risked one last question. “Has your brother got a family?” she asked.

  “No.”

  A question too far. Conversation flagged after that and her host seemed preoccupied. Then he looked up and snapped back into the moment. “And so are you alright with what’s planned for tomorrow? If you don’t feel up to it, you must say so, and you can always just watch while the police do the work.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  He considered her. “You weren’t fine this morning, though, were you? I suppose you don’t often find bones wearing boots.”

  She laughed, a little shakily. “No. I sort of surprised myself. It . . . it was suddenly a dead man, you see, not a skeleton. All wrong . . .” And she felt an echo of that same dread feeling.

  “Foul play.”

  “Yes. Don’t you think?”

  Rodri looked back at her. “I do, and Alice is probably right. I’ve bullied you into agreeing.”

  Perhaps he had, but nothing was going to stop her now. One way or another she was hooked. “I’ll be fine once I get going.”

  He continued to regard her, then his face cleared. “And we can’t have the police churning up your cultural compost, can we? It’ll be an early start and I’m for turning in. I’ll knock on your door when I wake the boys. And then tomorrow we’ll take things one step at a time.”

  Chapter 9

   Libby

  The storm had more or less blown itself out next morning when Rodri tapped on her door. From the window the ocean was steely grey, the waves still tipped with white against a blurred horizon, but at least it was no longer raining. Libby dressed quickly and went down to find Alice in the kitchen, where she informed Libby, in low tones, that she had been detailed to take the boys to school early before the police arrived.

  What exactly did keeping house entail? Libby wondered.

  The school run had only been gone ten minutes when Fergus arrived with another officer, who he introduced as PC Ranworth. “He answers to Duncan, though,” he added with a smile, and they set off for the dunes.

  The storm might be easing but it had left a lowering sky and a petulant wind which blew in cold gusts from the sea. They’d be shielded from it amongst the dunes, Libby thought, as they left the shelter of the garden wall, but she was mistaken. The wind, like the sea the night before, found many ways through the low, contoured landscape, whipping up little flurries of sand, and she turned her face away to avoid the sting of blown grains.

  The police had brought bags, boxes, and other equipment, and they set themselves up as best they could in a sheltered spot, then discussed how to proceed while Libby took photographs of the undisturbed mound. It was agreed that she would uncover the bones while they watched, and would stop if she found anything significant.

  Rodri had remained silent up to this point, listening attentively, but now he swung round to her. “Alright with that?” he asked, and she nodded.

  It was easy digging; the sand was light and dry on the surface and damp a few centimetres below, making progress swift. She would have preferred her own trowel to the cumbersome one she had been given, but the sandy soil fell away easily enough, and she was able to brush the light stuff off. Carefully she worked her way
up the skeleton, following the femur until she reached the hip where the sand was slightly darker, having taken the stain of the decomposed flesh and clothing. Under the ball joint of the hip, she spotted a scrap of textile which she pointed out to the police, who carefully retrieved it with tweezers, placing it in an evidence bag.

  This was alright, she decided as she got into her stride, just like any other excavation, careful methodical work where the same standards of good practise applied. They were joined after an hour by the keeper, Angus, who stood beside Rodri, but her audience remained silent and she was able to forget about them as she exposed the pelvis, the other leg, and the lower vertebrae before stopping to allow more photographs to be taken.

  She straightened, easing the tension from her shoulders.

  “Alright?” Rodri asked again, and again she nodded.

  It had been agreed that she would expose the whole skeleton before lifting individual bones so that they could record how the body lay and, with photographs done for now, she carried on. Blanched bones, once a man, now a mystery— And that strange uneasiness she had felt the day before began to creep up her spine.

  And then she encountered the first small finger bone.

  “His hand must have lain beside his hip, elbow crooked,” she said, swivelling round to address the policemen.

  “And the other one was squashed below, I suppose,” said Fergus, crouching beside her.

  “Probably.” The hand had been in the flexed position when buried, and now was curled into an open fist. Once exposed, the disarticulated bones could easily fall apart, so she left a supporting block of sand beneath them, then carefully sculpted around it, following the ulna and the radius to the elbow. Other small scraps of textile survived; some were probably fragments of shirt, others looked more like tweed. And as she revealed first the well-developed humerus and then the scapula, she found her breathing quickening; she wasn’t looking forward to the next stage. So far there had been no indication of cause of death, but what would the skull reveal?