The living room was in half-darkness, with only the little lamp by the telephone casting a soft circle that lit the empty armchair and one arm of the couch. Dad had gone straight for the whiskey, and he must have downed one fast and poured another, for he looked drunk already, one arm sprawled along the back of his armchair, feet planted square on the floor. He had a glass tilted in one hand, the pale liquid diagonal against the tube of glass, and a half-empty bottle of Redbreast Single Malt on the table in front of him. He glanced up with an odd mixture of hope and shame-faced apology as I came in, then turned his face away again.
‘Dad?’ I said.
‘Now, Cassie.’ He motioned vaguely at the couch. ‘What’re you up to tonight? Have a dram.’
A drink seemed a good idea. I fetched myself a glass from the black wood cabinet and poured myself a generous slug. I’d have preferred the smoky peat taste of Laphroig, but the Redbreast burned nicely in my throat as it went down.
Suddenly Dad sat upright, blazing with self-righteous anger, and launched in. ‘You were doubtful about Maree, girl, and you were right. You’ll never believe what she did. Never believe it.’
‘What?’
‘Had my sperm tested. Have you ever heard the like?’ Generations of affronted Irish male shouted in his voice. ‘Tested! She must have taken some –’ He reddened, remembering it was his daughter he was speaking to. ‘She sent it off to a laboratory and had it tested, to see if I was able to father children. How old does she think I am? I’m telling you, girl, I’ve never been so insulted.’
It did seem a very odd thing for her to have done. Besides, I’d thought, with that crack about needing my room for a nursery – but she hadn’t actually said she was pregnant. Maybe that had been an expression of longing. She liked Dad, she wanted a life of her own, but didn’t want to risk being tied to him if he couldn’t still have children.
‘And me with you grown up under her very eyes, and the boy –’ He broke off, re-filled his glass.
‘What a strange thing to do. How did you find out?’
He reddened again. ‘There was this letter. Saying these were the results of the tests on the sperm. If I was a violent man I’d have knocked her down there and then.’
‘But – presumably she didn’t just show it to you?’ Maybe this was standard American pre-marriage practice. Check the fertility of both parties and put it in the pre-nup. What would I know?
Dad wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘She’s so much younger than me,’ he mumbled, ‘and there’s that cameraman, Michael – so when I felt the letter in her coat …’
Dad had the old-fashioned habit of helping a lady on and off with her coat.
‘… well, I went back and read it. Just stuffed in the pocket of her coat, it was, as if it wasn’t important. I wouldn’t have gone through her handbag, or anything like that.’
‘So,’ I said, with daughterly bluntness, ‘you read a private letter.’
‘It wasn’t private,’ Dad said. ‘It was about me. Testing me. Without my consent. If she’d asked, if she’d made such a point of it, well, I’d have put her mind at rest. But to go behind my back like that, I had a right to know, didn’t I? It was my letter as much as hers.’
He had a point, but I knew how I’d feel about someone taking a letter of mine from my pocket.
‘So I asked her, straight out,’ Dad said. “‘What d’you mean,” I said, “by getting me tested like that, without so much as a word?’”
‘What did she say?’
‘Gaped at me. Then she asked what I was talking about, and I said it was in the letter, in her pocket. Then she threw a real wobbler – how dare I search her pockets, that kind of thing. And, well, I said a few things too, and it ended with her throwing a mug at me and storming out.’
It all made me glad I was single. Dad drained his whiskey, poured another. ‘And right enough I shouldn’t have read her letter. I know that. But she had no right – no right …’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘she hadn’t.’
There was a long silence.
‘I always wanted a son,’ Dad said suddenly. ‘She knew that. Your mother didn’t want children.’
I didn’t want to think about that, that the goddess in her white Grecian robes with her shimmeringly clear voice and no human frailties, didn’t want me. For her, being married, being a mother, was like being marooned on dry land for me: stifling, dying. It wasn’t personal. The words burned like the whiskey.
‘That’s why she went,’ Dad said. ‘She thought I didn’t know. She said it was her singing, and I believed her, but when she came back, he was gone. She went to France to –’ The glass slammed suddenly on the table. ‘My boy.’ He lifted the glass, drained half of it and set it back. The soft light glinted on a single tear that oozed itself from the end of his eye and rolled slowly down his cheek. ‘My boy.’
Suddenly I was very cold. ‘Maman went to France for an abortion?’
‘A mortal sin.’
With the cold came nausea. My little brother. I knew enough about abortion to visualise the limbs being torn apart by suction, the remains being dumped in a sack in a hospital waste department. My brother, my flesh and blood. I would have dandled him and sung him songs. I would have taught him to speak, and taken him playing on the beach, and raced chocolate wrappers down the burn with him. He’d have come out in the boat with me and learned to trim the jib. We’d have shared a taxi for discos, and run from France together. ‘When was this? How old was I then?’
He answered in his own way. ‘He’d have been twenty-five. His birthday was to be July. He was Patrick, after me father.’
Two children stifling that clear, cool voice. Four, I’d have been. Inga’s baby sister had been born that year. Patrick would have been mine, just as little Saskia was Inga’s. I’d have taken his hand on the first day of school, and waited for him going home, and protected him from bullies in the playground. I’d have helped with his first snowman. In the two minutes since Dad had told me, he’d become as clear in my head as if he’d been born after all, and lost again, killed on the roads, maybe, running out in front of a car, in spite of the times I’d told him. I shook my head to clear his image away.
‘Dad, he wasn’t born. You mustn’t think of him as if he’d lived.’
Dad turned on me, suddenly fierce. ‘Don’t you let me hear you say that, girl, as if you don’t know any better. Sure, he lived. He has a soul just like you and I, and before God his name is Patrick, and he’s with the holy souls in innocence right now.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said.
‘I’m ashamed of you, now, forgetting Father Peter’s teaching like that.’
‘I didn’t mean he didn’t have a soul,’ I persisted. ‘I meant –’ It wasn’t good for Dad to mourn a child that had never quite been there in the first place. I moved onto the couch beside him, laid my hand over his. ‘It’s a shock for me, this.’
He nodded. One hand came up to brush the tear away, then clamped round the bottle. He poured us both another drink. I hadn’t planned on a tumblerful of whiskey and I knew I would regret it in the morning, but for tonight I didn’t care. I took another swig and screwed up my face as it went down.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking that,’ Dad said suddenly. He sat up straight and took the tumbler from me. ‘That’s not a lady’s drink.’ He stood up, swaying. ‘Sherry.’
I watched him go to the cabinet. The glasses chinked as he fumbled among them for a little goblet and filled it too full, so that it spilled over his fingers as he brought it to me. It must have been the last of the Christmas sherry, sticky-sweet. I took a mouthful, set it down. ‘I’m not a lady.’
‘Time you learned to be,’ Dad said. He leant back, closed his eyes. I thought he was going to fall asleep, but then the eyes opened, bright as a Siamese cat’s. ‘How old are you now, twenty-seven?’
A sharp pang of jealousy shot through me, that he knew that lost brother’s age so exactly, yet could not remember mine. ‘Twenty-
nine.’
‘You’re leaving it late. Time you gave up this sailing and found yourself a fine man, now, and had children. You could give me a grandson, how about that?’
There was no point in arguing about it. ‘That would be fine,’ I said peaceably.
He nodded, and his eyes closed again. I’d not manage to get him to bed, but I could find a blanket to spread over him.
The airing cupboard still smelt of Maman’s mother’s potpourri, and when I looked up the lavender heads were hanging in their spiked wheat-head bunch above the top shelf. I wondered that they still retained any fragrance. Perhaps it was just memory re-creating the smell for me. There were no blankets here, just sheets and pillowcases and Maman’s summer curtains. She had gone in winter, and they had never been hung again.
There used to be blankets in the big wardrobe in their room. I took the three steps down the corridor and opened my dad’s bedroom door, feeling like a trespasser.
It was startlingly unchanged. The only trace of Maree’s hasty departure was the white lace runner of the dressing-table dragged sideways under Maman’s glass bowls, water-clear on the polished wood of the dressing table. Her little china clock stood beside them, its hurried tick loud in the silence. Even her dressing-gown still hung from its padded hanger on the back of the door. I went softly to the wardrobe door. The dresses hung there, the full skirts stirring a little in the draught, just as they’d hung when my fourteen-year-old self had gone to look, to make sure she was coming back.
Strange, this ghost house where Maman might walk in at any moment to find her lavender hanging above the clean sheets, and her dresses still in the wardrobe, and the piano tuned and waiting, and her husband brooding still over his lost son of so many years ago. It wasn’t healthy, any of it. He needed to do a clean sweep, give all these dresses to Oxfam, sell the piano to whoever wanted it, and throw out her lavender and her waiting curtains. It would have been easier if she’d died, instead of walking off with a shrug of her elegant shoulders, leaving these obsessions and tangles behind her.
I banged the door on her dresses and tugged the bottom drawer open, took an armful of blankets. No doubt they’d not been touched for fifteen years either. Be damned to the lot of them. If Maree didn’t come back, then whatever Dad said I’d be in here with a black bag before I left Shetland.
As I laid the blankets over him, he stirred. His eyes opened, not quite focusing on mine, and his rough hands drew the wool up to his chin. He said clearly, ‘Sorry –’ before his head rolled sideways, his mouth opened, and I knew he was out cold till morning.
I went slowly back down to Khalida. One whiskey. The mist hadn’t reached the water, but stayed clinging to the sides of the eastern hills. Just as I reached the pontoon, the sun suddenly blazed from amber to scarlet, too bright to look at, then a veil of cloud turned it blood-orange: trouble ahead.
There was a breath of wind yet. I hoisted the main, unfurled the jib, and shoved her away from the jetty, holding the main out to make sure it filled. Soon the water was trickling under her bow and we were moving steadily seawards. The noises of the land gradually fell away and the western horizon lay before me, still with a last stripe of creamy sky above the shifting sea. Tir na nOg, the isles to the west, Paradise. Khalida’s navigation lights patterned the sails with white reflection. I set her nose towards the Atlantic and hooked up the autopilot, then went forrard to lean my back against the mast, legs stretched out along the foredeck. The water was a pathway of palest blue, fretted in the centre. A single star shone to the west; Venus rising.
When my mobile rang in the cabin, I didn’t move. I wanted to sail on, away from the messiness of human contacts. Maree and Dad, Michael; Ted and Favelle, Elizabeth; Maman and the child who hadn’t lived to be born. I wanted to lose them all in the vastness of the ocean, where the stars hung like nightlights above Khalida’s white sails, and the mareel flashed green and silver on the water. It was only when the dark bulk of Papa Stour came close enough for me to hear the waves breaking on the cliffs that I turned Khalida around, swinging the boom out and setting her on a reciprocal course. Back to civilisation. Back to prison. Give me the open sea any day.
It was as I turned that the thought I’d lost earlier returned. ‘Thanks, Cass.’ Favelle didn’t know my name; she didn’t know anyone’s name. She called us all ‘honey’ to save trying. That hadn’t been Favelle who had ducked away from me, clutching her Viking cloak around her; that had been Maree.
Click, click, like rudder pintles slotting into their sockets. Maree’s voice, the other evening : ‘I was a cheerleader, and in the athletics team, and I learned fencing. All that stuff. Favelle was hopeless at it.’
Jessie: ‘only the one, the Baker lass, she’s taken the whole house – but you’ll ken all about that.’
Jessie’s house, nicely placed between Busta and the marina. A white limousine stopping just above it, yesterday, for just long enough for one person to get out and another to get in. Maree. Favelle. Maree, the athlete; Favelle, the emotional actress. Favelle, who’d made her name in movies as an action-woman. How long, I wondered, had this substitution gone on?
Now I thought about it, I knew by the way they moved on Stormfugl which was which. The close-ups at anchor, with the long green dress tangling around ropes: Favelle. Yesterday with the dolphins, the at-sea takes this morning, the woman who wasn’t scared to perch up on the prow: Maree. The woman who’d posed for photographs and signed autographs: Maree. No wonder Ted had looked so grim; a good close-up of the wrong Favelle could ruin everything.
I had another thought. Michael must be in on it of course, waving us all back out of shot so that only he was close enough to tell. Dad must know too; he’d hired Jessie’s whole house to keep the secret safe. A wave of sympathy flooded through me. Poor Maree, the invisible woman, living a half-life behind dark glasses in a motel carefully chosen to be between Favelle’s swanky hotel and the filming location. A limo pausing to let one person out and another in. Openly, she could be the double where every star had one; hidden, hers was the intrepid derring-do that had made Favelle famous.
Poor little rich girls, living their lie.
It was getting on for 3 o’clock. The early sun whitened Khalida’s mainsail and dusted the land, making the marsh marigolds a gold river down each little cleft in the low hills of Vementry, and turning the pink-orange granite of Muckle Roe to fire-red. It was so still that I could hear the suck of each wavelet on the pebbled beach at the hill foot. The surging movement as Khalida breasted each slope of Atlantic swell was the only sign that we were moving on the glassy water.
I hooked up the wind vane and limped below to make a mug of tea. As I’d expected, my ankle had stiffened in the night. While I waited for the kettle to boil I eased it in circles.
As we came around the point into Busta Voe, the yellow-spotted seal on his rock raised his head to look at us, then spread his tail up to dry it, like a Spanish lady displaying her fan. Now the land world began to enclose me again, the smell of summer grass coming green from the hills, starlings gossiping among the low sycamores around Magnie’s white crofthouse, the rattle of a lone car coming along the single-track road: Magnie, returning from his Saturday night binge. He clambered out of his car and stood a moment, looking around, then raised a hand to me. I waved back.
He was the only one awake. Film stars and saboteur alike were sleeping as we glided past the white bulk of Busta House. The modern houses closer to the rock arms of the marina were silent under the sun’s gilding. Even the sheep were tufted rocks in the emerald grass, with their knobble-kneed lambs gleaming white beside them. The standing stone above the marina glowed gold, and below it, like a ghost from Shetland’s past, was my Viking ship, with the white gulls wheeling around her.
It was then that I found the body.
Chapter Nine
It was half an hour before DI Macrae came back. He sat down in the same position, just as if he’d gone to the toilet for five minutes, unruffled as
ever, and for the first time I was afraid of him. The gentlest swell on sand can break a beached yacht to pieces, just by persistence.
‘Was it Favelle?’ I asked.
He didn’t bother to answer. The hook was still lying on the table; he took out the tin and put it away, then leaned forward. ‘Take notes, please, Sergeant.’ His shoulders were broader than I’d realised. Dark brows hooded the sea-grey eyes.
Sergeant Peterson flipped her book open. The case had moved into another league for them: not an unknown woman dead on a boat in a remote corner of Scotland, but Favelle, murdered on her film boat. The world would be watching them, and they had to get a suspect arrested quickly, for the honour of the Scottish police. If, of course, they were allowed to keep the case. The death of Favelle would warrant the biggest of big brass.
You and me both, boy. Fighting for survival.
‘What on earth was Favelle doing aboard Stormfugl?’ He didn’t reply. ‘She did die on board, didn’t she? I mean, she wasn’t brought there after her death?’
He gave me a reflective stare. ‘Now why should you ask that?’
I remembered the head pillowed on the arm, the curved back, the lower leg drawn up, the outer stretched down, and the other arm flung out behind. Was it you who moved her? ‘It was the way the body was lying. Too tidy.’
DI Macrae nodded. ‘She died on board, we know that, and someone moved her after death, or as she lay dying.’
‘But why? Why was Favelle on Stormfugl?’
‘Had you or Anders any particular connection with her?’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘She’d only just got here. We were introduced, we got on with sailing the ship.’
‘But then,’ he said, gently, ‘you weren’t knowing she was Favelle.’ He looked down at Sergeant Peterson’s notes, then back at me. ‘You thought she was your father’s girlfriend, Maree. How did you feel about your father taking up with an American thirty-five years his junior?’
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