Women of the Dunes

by Sarah Maine

  Chapter 27

   Libby

  Libby expected that Rodri would come down to the site in the morning and explain, but he didn’t; the path to Sturrock House remained empty. He was clearly up to something but she’d no idea what, so there was nothing to be done other than get stuck into work and await developments. Work helped, but her sense of unease grew as the morning wore on. The students had uncovered all of the stone setting at the mound and proved that it was indeed a long oval. “Boat-shaped,” said Callum with a satisfied smile as he finished photographing it. At the beginning of the year that in itself would have made the whole project worthwhile, but now she merely nodded. The mound might go a long way to encapsulating the legend of Ullaness, but there was more hidden here than old bones and ancient wrongs.

  It was midmorning when she looked up and saw Laila on the track walking briskly towards them, and went on alert. What now? She went forward to meet her before she got within earshot of the students. “Good morning, Laila—”

  “Where is Rodri?” Her face was hard and angry.

  “I’ve not seen him this morning.”

  “No?” She looked disbelieving. “But you know where he is.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Laila made an angry dismissive noise. “There’s no one at the house. He’s not answering his phone or replying to messages. No Alice, no boys, and only this on the kitchen table.” She thrust a piece of paper at Libby. “So where is he?”

  Called away. The boys are with Maddy and Alice after school and will stay there until I get back. Alice will pop along sometime to see you have all you need.

  She handed the note back.

  “Called away!” Laila almost spat at her. “He said nothing about it last night.”

  “Perhaps something came up.”

  “After ten o’clock at night?”

  Libby spread her hands. “I’ve really no idea. He said nothing to me.”

  Except, early start tomorrow, she remembered suddenly, accompanied by a steady stare. That sharp brain had been busy scheming as he stared into the fire last night. But doing what? And then she realised he had known that Laila would come asking these questions, and wanted her to be able to look the woman in the eye and say, with truth, that she knew nothing.

  She turned back to find Laila viewing her with cold suspicion. “He must have told someone. And he sneaked out early, taking the boys. Far too early for school. Where did they go?”

  “To Alice and Maddy, he says.” Like a fox moving its young out of danger, and she remembered his expression that time during Laila’s last visit when they had stood on the headland and watched small hands waving from Angus’s fishing boat.

  “The lesbians! And do I now have to wait until Alice chooses to come to work?” Laila turned to go. “And how will I get to the airport in the morning? Rodri was going to take me. It’s an early flight.”

  “I expect he’ll be back.”

  But where was he?

  “Yes. Because he is employed to be here.”

  But not for much longer, she thought, so why care? “Perhaps it’s estate business he’s gone to,” she offered.

  “Or a woman, more likely. Did you think of that?” Spite briefly curled those lovely lips; then Laila turned and went swiftly back up the path.

  Callum strolled over to her. “Problem?” he asked, his eyes following Laila’s retreat.

  “Not for us. Come on, time for tea break.”

  Alice appeared at lunchtime with another of her baskets, and the students circled her like greedy gulls. “Go on, take it away. Off you go,” she said, and pulled Libby to one side. “Where’s he gone?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” But she’d come to the conclusion that the exchange of text messages last night was pivotal to Rodri’s disappearance. Hector must have told him something that he hadn’t read out. But for now she would keep quiet about it. Better so. “I really don’t.”

  Alice explored her face a moment, then nodded. “Angus said he arrived just after five this morning with the boys, bundled them into the cottage with instructions that no one was to let them out of sight, other than at school, until he got back. But he didn’t explain. Normally I sleep over if he’s going away, but he’d said nothing. Just left a message for me to go and see if milady needed anything. Other than a slap, that is.”

  “Did he tell Angus when he’d be back?”

  Alice shook her head. “A day or two was all he said. And he’s not answering his phone.”

  “Laila goes back tomorrow—”

  “I know! And she’s spitting like a scalded cat. Got me to order her a taxi in case he’s not back in time to take her. Tried to tell me I had to take her until I pointed out that I work for Rodri, not her. I just loved saying it!” She laughed and the tension broke for a moment; then she gave Libby a direct look. “He’s up to something, isn’t he?”

  “I think so, yes,” she replied, holding the look.

  “Something big?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then there’ll be no stopping him.” Alice had lost something of her jauntiness, and just for a moment she looked fearful. “Angus said he kept telling him to watch over the boys, all three of them, and to keep them out of Laila’s way until he got back. I don’t like it.”

   Odrhan

  Odrhan watched the boy run down into the waves, squealing with delight, sending up sprays of water which caught the sunlight, and he smiled. Pádraig was a happy child, and an unexpected joy. When Morag had brought him back, newly weaned, Odrhan had protested, but she had shrugged, saying that they had enough mouths of their own to feed.

  Odrhan had grown thin from self-neglect since Ulla died, his hair and beard long, but he had taken himself in hand when the child returned. He named him Pádraig and taught him to love God, describing his own boyhood in Ireland, and had shown him the wondrous chalice. And as the boy grew he told him about Harald, who had died a pagan, and about Ulla, his mother, and how she had turned to God in the end and found comfort there.

  He almost convinced himself that it was so.

  And he and the boy grew close.

   Libby

  It was hard to focus on work after Alice left, but with the students now engrossed in their own parts of the project Libby was able to spend the afternoon simply going between the mound, the church, and the surveyors, giving at least the appearance of being engaged. Surely Laila offered no threat to the boys, how could she! Libby crossed the little stream, back towards the church. And if Rodri was worried, he wouldn’t leave them for long, and even if he wasn’t answering his phone he’d be receiving messages, so if there was an emergency they could reach him.

  But Alice had looked fearful. And Alice knew him well.

  What on earth was he up to?

  “Libby!” Callum called from the mound, and she saw him beckoning. She went over. “Skull fragments,” he said.

  Libby pulled her trowel from her back pocket and crouched down and saw that he was right. Distinctive curved fragments of bone had appeared in the sieve and there seemed to be a concentration of them in one patch of sand, well away from the other bones. “Keep going,” she said, and straightened.

  At the end of the hour they had recovered most of the skull, and Libby stood looking down at the finds tray. It was going to take conservators hours to reconstruct the many fragments and make a skull from them, but it didn’t take a bone specialist to recognise the force of the injuries it had sustained. If this indeed was Harald, then his cranium had been smashed by a mighty blow, and a cut mark through the upper vertebrae showed where the head had been severed from the body. But all this, if she was right, was postmortem, and probably post-burial. In other words, someone had dug the poor soul up and then wreaked fury on the remains.

  It was a sickening thought, and somehow served to heighten the current tension. “Bag it all up,” she said, “and go carefully through the rest.”

  In the middle of the afternoon Alice was bac
k, and again dragged Libby aside. “You’ll have to come up to the house. Laila’s hysterical.” She dropped her voice. “It’s about the students.”

  “The students?”

  “I don’t know what, but you’ll have to come, or she’ll be down here making a scene.”

  That would never do, so Libby followed Alice back up the track. “She’s quite bonkers, you know,” Alice said, over her shoulder, “and she’s bloody well packed up another one of the paintings just out of spite. Then she went upstairs to get the rest of her stuff together and two minutes later came storming back down ranting about the students being in the house.”

  “But they weren’t! I said two of them could charge their phones in the dairy over lunch, if they asked you first—”

  “Aye, and they did, and I told them to use the kitchen sockets, it’s cold in the dairy.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She wouldn’t say. Just told me to get you up there fast.”

  Oh God. And one look at Laila’s face was enough to see that this was serious. She was pacing the floor with her phone to her ear, but she slammed it down on the table as Libby entered. “Those kids who were here this morning. What are their names? I’m calling the police. They’ve taken everything—passport, credit cards, money. Left me with a pile of loose change and a plane ticket for Oslo tomorrow, for a flight I cannot now take.”

  Libby stared at her. “But why do you think one of my students took them?”

  “It was all there last night.”

  Last night—

  “Perhaps you moved them somewhere else,” Alice suggested, looking from Libby to Laila.

  “Don’t be a fool, girl.”

  Libby went and sat down, buying herself a little time to think. Last night— How did Rodri expect her to handle this one? It was clearly his doing. Far from wanting Laila gone, for some reason of his own he wanted her stranded here. “You’re making a very serious allegation,” she said.

  “Yes,” Laila snapped back. “And so I shall ring the police.”

  “By all means.”

  Laila stopped pacing, arrested by Libby’s calm compliance. “You must search their tents first, of course,” she said.

  Libby looked back at her. “I doubt if any of my students are stupid enough to steal a passport, cards, and cash and then stuff them into their sleeping bags and hope no one will notice.” And fail to take an expensive phone at the same time; Laila seemed not to have remarked that oversight. “Where was the stuff?”

  “In my room. In my handbag.”

  “And where was your bag this morning, Alice?”

  “Where it is now.” Alice gestured to the counter where her bag was in plain sight, lying half open.

  “Then you’d better check it too.” Alice gave her a swift look, went across to her bag, and tipped out the contents. She picked up her wallet and made a play of counting the bills and checking the cards.

  “All fine.”

  “So why risk going upstairs and robbing you instead?” Libby asked, and Laila glared back at her. “Are you quite sure Alice isn’t right, and you didn’t repack it all somewhere?”

  In the end there was a sort of stalemate. Libby agreed to go and question her students while Laila said she would go through her things again, with Alice’s help, even though she declared it to be pointless.

  It could be only a matter of time before she worked out who the culprit was. As Libby left, Alice came close and murmured: “Rodri?” and Libby gave a nod and a shrug. “Oh God.” Alice’s eyes widened; then she turned back at Laila’s sharp summons.

  Back down at the camp, and in response to Libby’s carefully casual questioning, the students all denied having gone anywhere except the dairy and the kitchen, and she left it at that. Callum raised his eyebrows, but she shook her head and said nothing more. A little later she told him simply that something had gone missing at the house but that she knew the students weren’t involved, and work resumed with a minimum of fuss. If Laila did contact the police, she could now truthfully say that questions had been asked. The ball was back in Laila’s court. Alice, she felt sure, was woman enough to deal with whatever was happening up at the house, and would play her part with style. We’re a good team, she had said. But when the team leader abruptly absented himself without explaining the rules of engagement, it was a nerve-wracking experience.

  At the end of the day Alice’s little car appeared at the end of the track, and Libby went over to speak to her. She got out and leaned against the door, her eyes alive with merriment. “Oh, but is she cross! Quite beside herself. She’s decided that Rodri must have taken them.”

  “I thought it wouldn’t take her long. Has she called the police?”

  “No. She’s giving him until tomorrow to come back and explain himself and, if not, then she will. But she’s brought forward his eviction date to August, and says he can’t have the manse.”

  “Can she do that?”

  “Not without Hector’s say-so.”

  Libby thought swiftly. Alice deserved to know something of the truth. “I think this is something to do with Hector,” she said, and told her about the messaging backwards and forwards which had somehow electrified Rodri. But of her suspicions regarding Laila’s pregnancy she said nothing.

  Alice listened. “Dear God, what a pair! And why the cloak-and-dagger stuff? What’s Hector up to?”

  “I thought they were barely on speaking terms.”

  “It’s not been good and got worse this last year, but Maddy said they were close when they were young, just normal kids like Donald and Charlie. Then that woman came between them and messed up all their lives. Rodri’s told you all this?”

  “Some of it.”

  Alice gave her a slanting look, but there was a smile in it. “The man’s so buttoned-up! Hector and Maddy had had a thing going, off and on, since childhood, and when Hector got her pregnant neither of them knew straightaway. His leave finished and he went back to fight but came home wounded soon after, and it all went pear-shaped. Maddy had never been good enough for precious Hector so having him immobilised in the house suited Lady Sturrock very well. Just imagine! The keeper’s daughter? No way. So Maddy was kept at arm’s length, and Hector, to be fair, was so stoned on medication he was out of it. About then Rodri brought Laila home to meet the family, and the lovely Laila realised she’d hitched herself to the wrong brother and became Hector’s devoted nurse. Lady Sturrock thought she was an angel.”

  “Poor Maddy.”

  Alice smiled a complacent smile. “But lucky me, eh? Maddy realised she was pregnant and took off, terrified of what Angus would say, though she’d no worries on that score, the silly girl. Anyway, she came to Glasgow, where we met.” She paused. “And lucky Rodri too, escaping the Ice Queen’s clutches. Hector and Laila deserve each other.” But it had left a legacy of resentment that went deep. “And Laila hates the very thought of David, poor kid.”

  “Were Hector’s injuries—”

  “Leg and chest. Don’t know about the bits in between. Don’t want to.”

  Perhaps that accounted for the false pregnancy, though surely there were simpler ways! Or did inheritance have to follow the bloodline? Libby wondered how far Hector was involved in the deception. The text messages Rodri had read out had been cordial enough, but there must have been something in them which had prompted his disappearance.

  And she found herself wondering how long it took to fly to Dubai.

  Chapter 28

   July 1890, Oliver

  Damn Alick Sturrock! Oliver sat back in his chair as Ellen shut the study door behind her, and dismay was replaced by anger. How could he have said such things to her! Oliver got to his feet and went and stood at the window. Two ravens were tearing at the remains of a rabbit, squabbling and pecking at each other as they bounced around the corpse.

  “You’re looking a little better today, my dear,” he had said, when Ellen had brought him a tray of tea, noting the dark rings under her eyes and
the translucency of her skin. He tried again to reach her through her aura of grief. “Ellen, I feel sure that your mother would not have wanted you to grieve overlong.”

  “No, sir.”

  “She was a good person, a gentle soul.”

  “Yes.”

  It was not a promising start, but he had persevered. “And you can draw comfort from the thought of her, looking down on you from heaven—”

  She had straightened at that and given him an odd look. “But how can I know that, sir?”

  “My dear Ellen! She was a good woman, a godly woman. How could it be otherwise?”

  She looked strange and fey, almost wild. “Do you mean that her soul is in heaven?”

  He replied with studied calm: “Yes, that is what I mean.”

  “And her spirit?”

  “Her spirit?”

  “If her soul is in heaven, can her spirit still be here in the . . .” She paused as if struggling for the word. “. . . the . . . the ether.” Oliver had frowned, wondering where she had learned it. “Though I don’t feel her around me, like I do with Ulla.”

  This obsession with Ulla was becoming unhealthy, and he wondered if her mother’s death might have affected her mind. He tried for a reproving but gentle tone. “This belief in spirits is misguided, Ellen. Christian teaching tells us—”

  “Should we not question it?” A suspicion began to enter Oliver’s mind, and was quickly confirmed. “Mr. Alick says—”

  “Stop there!” He spoke with enough force to make Ellen jump. So while he had been tiptoeing around Ellen’s sensibilities, Alick Sturrock had become intimate enough to talk of spirits and the ether, had he? And had he, Oliver, saved her from the physical assaults of Mungo Sturrock only to have his brother corrupt her mind? “I can well imagine what Mr. Alick has been saying, but I tell you this, Ellen, he has got in with a bad group of people, misguided people, intellectuals who would undermine centuries of teaching and learning, and cast doubt on the word of God.”