Текст книги "Red Bones"

Автор книги: Ann Cleeves

Соавторы: Ann Cleeves
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She leaned back in her chair. Despite the expensive make-up he saw the fine lines on her forehead, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

‘I don’t have enough here to put it down as anything other than accidental death,’ she said at last. ‘Anything else would cause unnecessary distress to the deceased woman’s family and the sort of hysteria in the community that doesn’t help anyone. I couldn’t justify it.’

He nodded. There was no other decision she could have taken.

‘We’re agreed that we won’t charge Clouston? It wouldn’t be popular in the community.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We’re agreed about that.’

‘As for your reservations about the details of the shooting, I understand them. Perhaps the best course of action would be a discreet inquiry. Nothing formal at this stage. We’d have a post-mortem anyway in a death of this kind. Let’s see what you turn up in the next week or so. Keep me informed.’ A clever decision, he thought. She was covering her back. If Mima’s death did turn out to be murder, she would be able to show that she hadn’t dismissed the idea out of hand.

He nodded again. She hadn’t been in Shetland long enough to understand that discretion in a matter like this was almost impossible. There was no privacy. Nothing went unnoticed. She’d set him on a course of action that he’d be unable to fulfil to her satisfaction. And he’d lacked the courage to tell her.

At the door he paused, remembering another detail.

‘A skull was found on Setter land a couple of weeks ago. Val Turner reported it to Sandy. He did tell you?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you think that’s relevant?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s old,’ he said. ‘Just a fragment of skull. Part of an archaeological dig. A coincidence.’

Chapter Fourteen

Sandy woke from a deep sleep. He heard the sheep outside and smelled baking and immediately realized that he wasn’t in the cramped and messy flat in Lerwick, but at home at Utra croft in Lindby. His mother baked most days, even when she and Joseph were alone in the house. Having Sandy there gave her an excuse. He lay for a moment looking around the familiar room. His mother had tidied it after he’d left, taken his posters off the walls, removed the dartboard, put up fresh wallpaper and different curtains. He’d remembered to get rid of the stash of pornography, hidden under the bed since he was a teenager, before he’d allowed her into the place, smiled despite himself at the memory of his smuggling the pile of magazines out of the house in a couple of Somerfield carrier bags. How pathetic was that! She always made him feel like a fourteen-year-old. Now the room was clean and anonymous and even the smell was different. Evelyn had decided that this was where the baby would sleep whenever Amelia and Michael came to stay from Edinburgh. It wasn’t his space any more. He looked at his bedside clock. Eight o’clock.

If he had a day off in Lerwick he’d be straight back to sleep, but in Whalsay it was different. His mother was here, with her expectations and her judgement and her baking. You’d think he was still a peerie boy the way he cared what she thought of him. He wondered if he’d ever escape her.

He stretched and stumbled towards the bathroom, but already his mother had heard him.

‘Sandy! The kettle’s just boiled. Will I make you some tea?’ She’d never got it into her head that he preferred coffee in the morning.

‘Not yet. I’m going in the shower.’ His voice was more aggressive than it needed to be. Their relationship was made up of these tiny stands for independence; he was certain she never noticed them and that made the exchanges even more frustrating. Standing under the new power shower, he wondered about his father’s relationship with Mima. Had he felt the same resentment when Mima called on him to kill her hens when they stopped laying? Sandy thought it hadn’t been the same at all. Joseph had loved Mima and delighted in her company. They had laughed at the same jokes. Sandy was sure Joseph told Mima things he’d never have confided to his wife. Sandy had spent his life finding ways of not talking to his mother about anything important.

In the kitchen he felt the same mix of irritation and affection. Evelyn was standing at the table rolling out pastry, the sleeves of her sweatshirt rolled to her elbows. She’d be making a fruit pie because she knew it was his favourite. She had so much energy. Maybe she felt trapped here on the island. Maybe she’d sacrificed all her own ambitions to be here, bringing up her two boys, keeping the family together while Joseph was working for Duncan Hunter. It couldn’t have been easy for her struggling over the finances, watching Jackie Clouston and the other fishing wives with so much money that they didn’t know how to spend it, knowing that if she’d been born into a different family, or married into one, she’d have been wealthy too. He knew there were times when she brooded about it.

‘There’s tea made,’ she said. Then with a frown, remembering, ‘Or would you prefer coffee? I can easily do that. The kettle’s not long boiled.’

‘Tea’s fine.’

He poured the tea and helped himself to a bowl of cereal, found a clear corner of the table.

‘Would you be able to phone that nice Inspector Perez today, sort out when we can fix a day for the funeral?’

So Michael can arrange to get up here, he thought. So she can show her fine eldest son off to the whole island, with his fancy suit and his hand-made shoes. And it occurred to him then that his relationship with his mother was troubled because she cared so much more for Michael than she did for him. I’m jealous, he thought, astounded. That’s what all this is about. How could I have been so dumb that I didn’t realize?

‘Perez might come to Whalsay,’ he said. ‘It depends what the Fiscal said.’

‘You mean he could be here to arrest Ronald?’

Sandy shrugged. She didn’t have to sound so pleased at the prospect. But she’s jealous too, he thought. Jealous of Jackie and the flash house on the hill and the new BMW every year and the trips to Bergen on the boat. After Andrew’s illness you’d have thought she’d have realized there was nothing to be jealous about, but she just couldn’t help herself. She doesn’t really want Ronald prosecuted, she only wants Jackie’s nose put out of joint.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s gone over to Setter. That cow still needs milking and the hens and the cat need feeding.’

‘I’ll wander over. See if he needs a hand.’

He thought she was going to say something to stop him. Perhaps she wished the two of them got on as well as Sandy did with his father. But she stopped herself. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘The rain’s stopped and the mist has lifted. It’s a fine day for a walk.’

By the time he reached Setter, his father had finished with the animals. Sandy found him standing in the kitchen. He waited in the doorway and looked in. His father looked lost in thought and it seemed like an intrusion to blunder in, but he felt kind of foolish just waiting outside. At last Joseph saw him.

‘It’s hard to think of this place without her,’ the older man said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll come up behind me, full of mischief and gossip.’

‘How did she keep track of everything that was happening in the island?’ Sandy had wondered about this before. His grandmother knew about his friends’ escapades and love affairs before he did. No wonder Evelyn had talked about her as a witch. ‘She didn’t go out so much towards the end.’

‘She made it to the Lindby shop every couple of days,’ Joseph said. ‘People were always coming to visit her. Cedric called in every Thursday to chat, but it wasn’t only her own generation who liked her company. Besides, she could smell a scandal like other folk smell rotten eggs.’ He looked around the room, seemed to be scoring the details on to his memory. The postcard from Michael and Amelia’s last foreign holiday propped on the dresser, the religious sampler which perhaps she’d stitched as a child, that seemed out of place in any room where Mima had lived, the enormous television, the dirty glasses by the sink. The photograph of Joseph’s father that had been taken during the war, looking young in his Norwegian jersey. They both knew Evelyn wouldn’t rest until everything had been dusted and scrubbed and tidied away.

‘Do you still think of this house as your home?’ As soon as he’d spoken Sandy thought that was a daft sort of question. Joseph had lived in Utra since he’d married. Utra had been in Evelyn’s family and had been a tumbledown wreck when they’d moved in. Joseph had made a home almost from nothing.

But his father considered before speaking and then it wasn’t a direct answer. ‘It wasn’t easy growing up here,’ he said. ‘My father died while I was still a baby and Mima was never the sort of island wife to have a meal on the table when I got in from school and clean clothes for me to put on each morning. I learned to look after myself pretty quickly. But it was a happy time. She was full of stories. She said it was us against the world.’ He laughed. ‘She always did have a dramatic turn of phrase. I grew up with tales of my father, about how well off we’d have been if only he’d lived. “He promised me the earth. Fine clothes and a fine house.” She loved telling stories; it was a mix of real island characters, make-believe and myth. I could have listened to her for hours, though sometimes I’d have preferred to do it with a full belly.’

For the first time Sandy could see what had attracted his father to Evelyn. She’d make sure there was dinner ready for him when he got in from work and the house was always clean, the clothes washed and ironed.

‘Why do you think she went out that night?’

‘Why did Mother do anything?’ Joseph laughed. ‘I’d known her all my life and she was still a mystery to me.’

Sandy thought that was too easy and was just about to push it, when there was a tap on the open door. He saw the two lasses from the dig standing outside. Sophie was wearing a shirt that was open at the neck and one size too tight around the chest. She had on shorts with walking boots and thick socks; that should have made her look like a geek, but her legs were long and brown and shapely. He tried not to stare. He didn’t want to get attracted to a girl with a brain. It was Hattie who spoke.

‘We wondered if it’d be all right to get on with our work. The police don’t mind, but we’ll understand if you’d prefer it if we left it for a while. I mean I suppose you might rather we stopped the project all together.’

Sandy could tell that was the last thing she wanted. He’d chatted to her a couple of times in the Pier House Hotel, when he was there visiting the boys. She was always on the edge of the crowd and her work was all she could talk about, all he could imagine her being passionate about. He remembered her leaning over the table towards Ronald Clouston, giving him a lecture about Iron Age tools. Sandy thought it was good to have the lasses in Lindby. They brought a bit of life to the place. ‘What do you think, Dad?’

His father frowned.

Sandy wasn’t sure if he’d even heard the question. ‘Dad?’

‘I don’t know,’ his father said. ‘Things are different now. We don’t know what’ll happen to the croft.’

Sandy wondered then if Joseph dreamed of selling Utra and moving back here, to the house where he’d been so happy as a child. He couldn’t see his mother going along with that! It would mean leaving behind her new kitchen and bathroom and starting all over from scratch.

‘But they can carry on with their work?’ he said. ‘At least until you decide? You know how Mima liked having them around the place.’

His father hesitated again and Sandy thought he would refuse. But at last he smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. Why don’t you show us what you’ve been doing out there?’

Perhaps Joseph just didn’t like having the strangers standing in his mother’s kitchen. Certainly outside he seemed more friendly and helpful to the young women. It was Sandy who found it weird to walk right past the spot where he’d found Mima lying in the rain. The memory of her stick-thin body distracted him and he missed most of the conversation. When he tuned in again Hattie was describing what they were doing.

‘It’s just a couple of exploratory trenches. At this stage there won’t be any more disruption than this. If we find anything really interesting we’d apply for funding to extend the dig, but of course we’d need your permission to do that. Mima had already given it in principle. The initial results have been fascinating. And Evelyn thinks it would be a great boost for the island.’

She looked at Joseph anxiously. Sandy could tell she was hoping for reassuring words from him. Of course you must go ahead with your dig. Mima’s death won’t change anything. I can see how important it is.

But the man frowned again as he had in the kitchen.

‘Is this where you found the skull?’

‘Yes, in this practice trench here. Outside the wall of the main house. It’s gone off to a lab in Glasgow for dating. I hope we can date it at fifteenth-century. That would fit in with my theory about the place. Of course it could be older. We know there’s been a settlement in Lindby since the Iron Age. But it was quite near the surface so we don’t think it’s that old.’

‘Could it be younger?’

‘I suppose so, but it seems unlikely. There’s no record of a more modern building here.’

Joseph was quiet for a moment.

‘I think it’s too early to be making any decision about the future of the dig just yet. There’s no rush, is there? We can talk about all that later.’

Sandy wondered why his father, usually so easygoing, especially if a pretty lass was around, should be so discouraging about this. There were no crops in that part of the croft and it wasn’t needed for grazing. What would it matter if a dozen people came to make holes all over it? Joseph was sociable, he loved a party, a few new folk to chat to. Again he wondered if the man had his own plans for Setter and what they might be.

Sandy’s phone rang. It was Perez calling from his mobile. Sandy walked away from the group so he could talk without being overheard.

‘I’m at Laxo,’ Perez said. ‘I’ve just missed a ferry. I wondered if it was worth bringing my car or if you’d be able to meet me in Symbister.’

‘I’ll meet you.’ Sandy felt his mood lift. He had an excuse to run away from the family for a while, even if it was just to the end of the island. It was only as he was driving down towards the pier that he thought Perez’s arrival on the island might be a bad sign and that he could be here to arrest Ronald Clouston.

Chapter Fifteen

Hattie’s feelings were spiralling out of control. She loved being in the islands but whenever she imagined Mima lying in the rain, shot by Ronald Clouston, she started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her imagination was a curse.

Perhaps she was ill again. Depression had first appeared when she was at school, but then it had been insidious, almost gentle, so for some time the people around her hadn’t recognized what had been going on. When her mother had finally bullied her into seeing her GP, he’d prescribed medication, talked about stress, said it was unlikely to happen again. But at university there’d been a major breakdown and there’d been a couple of short episodes since.

It usually started with an obsession, an inability to let go of one thought or idea. At eighteen it had all been about her schoolwork, the individual project that was submitted as part of the history course. She’d been relatively relaxed about the other subjects. She’d wallowed rather in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, but her English teacher had told her anxious mother that many adolescents did that. No, it was her work on a nineteenth-century almshouse close to her home that had taken over her life and her dreams. She’d stumbled on to the original records by chance through a friend of her mother’s, and from reading the first page of neat and tiny writing she’d been hooked.

The idea of the essay had been to set the records in their social context, to explore the conditions that had allowed the formation of the houses and how their establishment fitted in with the political debate of the time. But it was the individual stories that had captivated her. She had felt herself living under the humourless regime of the almshouse trustees, saw the world through the residents’ eyes. Before she became ill enough to need a doctor she had the sense to change her university application from history to archaeology. It was the specific and the human that fascinated her, not the political or strategic. What could be more grounded than digging in the earth?

Somehow she completed her examinations and submitted her dissertation. It was when school broke up for the summer and the familiar routine of revision and writing was over that she lost any sense of perspective. Then she heard the old women in the almshouse talking to her and couldn’t let them go.

The depression had come back big style at the end of Hattie’s first year at university. She stopped eating and her mother wheeled her off to see a specialist. But then it had been Paul Berglund rather than her academic work that had triggered the illness. At school she’d had no time for men or sex, watched the antics of her friends as if they were the mad ones with their dressing up and flirting, the parties and the desperation. Falling for a man seemed just as ridiculous to her as getting excited about food. Then in her first long vacation she’d volunteered on a dig managed by Professor Berglund. It had been a hot summer, day after day of clear skies and sunshine. They’d camped out in a barn quite similar to the Whalsay Bod. The team was full of oddballs and eccentrics and Hattie had felt wonderfully at home. Here, she was no weirder than the rest of them. In the evening they went to the pub and drank pints of beer and rolled home singing.

The site had been surrounded by fields of ripening corn and her first view of Paul had been of him striding down the side of a field towards them. He’d been wearing a yellow T-shirt, slightly ripped at the neck. Because of the angle of the field she hadn’t been able to see his legs. He was a bull-necked, blunt northerner quite different from anyone she’d ever met before. None of her mother’s friends were so forthright or so rude. So this is what all the girls at school were going on about, she’d thought. Paul Berglund had become her obsession. Later, when she returned to London she lost her mind completely. She found herself unable to sleep. The events of the summer continued to haunt her. Images flashed into her head with the jagged brilliance of a drug-induced trip. Again she couldn’t bring herself to eat.

She’d been admitted to an enlightened NHS psychiatric hospital that ran a residential unit for teenagers. She supposed her mother had pulled strings to get her in. By that time she was hardly aware of what was happening. The stated cause of admission was the eating disorder, which had become the focus of her mother’s concern. An eating disorder was fashionable, almost commonplace among the children of the high-powered women with whom Gwen James worked. But quite simply, Hattie thought she’d been mad. She developed paranoia, heard voices again, this time loud, controlling, battering into her brain. She couldn’t trust anyone.

The unit had twenty-four beds and had an old-fashioned emphasis on talking and shared activity. They took pills too, of course, but the other treatments seemed just as important. The place was run by a nurse called Mark who was a little overweight, with a soft doughy face and thinning hair. Perhaps his unappealing appearance was part of his strategy. He was so sympathetic that if he’d been at all good-looking all the young women would have fallen in love with him. As it was they could treat him as a favourite uncle or adored older brother. Hattie had regarded the unit as her sanctuary. She still considered some of the other patients as her friends. She had few others.

Mark had taught her strategies for avoiding stress and for taking control. He told her she wasn’t to blame for what had happened, but that she found harder to accept. He encouraged her to put her thoughts into words. When she first left home for university she’d developed the habit of writing a weekly letter to her mother. A letter was less demanding than a phone call, but it still kept Gwen off her back. Now, in the unit, she continued the practice. There was nothing of any importance in the letters – certainly she didn’t confide in Gwen as she had in Mark – but she enjoyed passing on the details of life in the hospital. Her mother replied with chatty notes about the House, anecdotes about the neighbours in the Islington street where Hattie had grown up. Letters seemed their most effective means of communication. In their letters they could persuade themselves that they liked each other. Stranded in the unit, Hattie looked forward to receiving them.

She was discharged from hospital in the middle of the autumn and came home to prepare for her return to university. Her tutor was understanding – she was so bright, he said that she’d have no problems catching up with the academic work. On the last day of October her mother drove her back to the hall of residence and left her there, Hattie thought, with some relief. Now Gwen could return to her real passion, politics. She convinced herself that the stay in hospital had cured Hattie for ever. The illness would never come back.

Now Hattie knew she had developed another obsession. She’d returned to Whalsay full of hope and dreams. Then Mima had died and everything had become more complicated. Perhaps she was ill again, though she didn’t recognize this as depression. She was suffering from the same symptoms as before – the difficulty in sleeping, a reluctance to eat, the inability to trust her own judgement – but it didn’t feel at all the same.

It had been very different when she’d first arrived back in Whalsay. Then the summer had spread ahead of her, full of possibilities.

Mima had realized how happy she was. Two nights before she’d been shot, she’d called Hattie into the house. She’d poured glasses of whisky, put them on a tray with the bottle and a little jug of water. It had been unusually mild and they’d sat outside on the bench made of driftwood that stood by the kitchen door, the tray on the ground between them.

‘Now what has happened to you over the winter? You look like the cat that got the cream.’

‘Nothing’s happened. I’m just pleased to be back in the island. You know how much I like it here. It’s the only place I feel quite sane. It’s the best place in the whole world.’

‘Maybe it is.’ Mima had gathered her cat on to her lap and given a little laugh. ‘But what would I know? I’ve never lived anywhere else. But maybe it would be good to see a bit of the world before I die. Perhaps you’ll dig up a hoard of treasure in my land and I’ll be able to travel like the young ones do.’

Then she’d looked at Hattie with her bright black eyes, quite serious. ‘And it’s not so perfect here, you ken. Bad things happen here the same as everywhere else. Terrible things have happened here.’

Hattie had taken another drink of the whisky, which she thought tasted of peat fires. ‘I can’t believe that. What are you talking about?’

She’d expected gossip. Mima was a great gossip. She thought there’d be a list of the usual island sins – adultery, greed and the foolishness of bored young men. But Mima hadn’t answered directly at all. Instead she’d gone on to talk about her own youth. ‘I got married straight after the war,’ she said. ‘I was far too young. But my man worked with the men of the Shetland Bus and we got used to seeing them taking risks. You’ll have heard about the Shetland Bus?’

Hattie shook her head. She was dazed now by the whisky, the low spring sun in her eyes.

‘It was after the Germans had invaded Norway. Small fishing boats were used to carry agents in and bring folk out. They called that the Bus. It was run from the big house in Lunna. There were a few Whalsay men who helped and they got close to the Norwegian sailors. I’m never sure exactly what happened. Jerry never liked to speak about it and he wasn’t quite the same afterwards . . .’ She stared into the distance. ‘We were all crazy then.’

Hattie had thought Mima was going to explain, but she had wrapped her arms around the cat, poured herself another dram and laughed. ‘Certainly more mad than dee!’

‘I hope it didn’t upset you too much to see the skull in the practice trench.’ Hattie had remembered Mima’s white face, the way she’d fled into the house. ‘It’s not that unusual, you know. Old bones turning up at a dig. I suppose we’re used to it and we’re not squeamish any more.’

‘I’m not squeamish!’ Mima’s voice had been almost brutal. ‘It was a shock, that was all.’ Hattie hoped she was going to explain further, but the old woman pushed the cat from her lap and stood up. It was clear Mima was ready for her to go: ‘You’ll have to excuse me. There’s a phone call I must make.’ And Mima had stomped into the house without saying goodbye. Hattie had heard her voice through the open door. It sounded angry and loud.

Now Mima was dead and Hattie would never find out what had so disturbed her. Setter felt quite different without Mima there. Even from outside it was different. Before, they’d have heard the radio, Mima singing along or shouting at it if she disagreed with one of the speakers. Sophie saw Sandy through the window as they were walking past and it was her idea to go in.

‘Come on,’ Sophie said in her loud, confident, public-schoolgirl voice. ‘We’d better go in and tell him we’re here. Besides, he might have the kettle on.’ They hadn’t seen Joseph at that point and could hardly turn round and go out again when they realized Mima’s son was there.

Then Hattie had brought up the matter of the dig. So eager to please, so apologetic, the words had tumbled out. And Joseph had frowned and refused to give any sort of commitment about the future of the project. At least that was how it had seemed to her. She thought she might be banished from Shetland and never allowed back. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut? she thought. Why didn’t we just sneak past the house and go on with our work?

After Sandy’s phone had rung he and his father left Setter. Hattie watched them go and it was only as she felt her pulse steady at their departure that she realized how anxious the men had made her. She was kneeling in the main trench, carefully easing her trowel around what could have been the base of a stone doorpost. The soil was a slightly different colour here and she wanted to dig in context. Sophie had gone to turn on the outside tap so the water would run into the flot tank. She was planning to wash the soil from the second trench, allowing the soil to float off and the more dense fragments to sink and be collected in the net beneath. Sophie called over from the tank: ‘Did you get the impression that Mima’s son doesn’t want us here?’

Hattie was surprised. She’d got exactly the same impression but had wondered if she was being paranoid again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did.’

Sophie stretched her arms above her head to ease the tension out of her muscles. ‘I don’t think we have to worry about him throwing us off the croft. Evelyn’s all in favour of the project and none of the men in that family stands up to her.’

Hattie looked up at her and considered. ‘Do you think so? Joseph seems very easy to manage, but if there was something he really wanted I’m sure he’d get his own way in the end.’

Sophie gave one of her wide, easy, slightly predatory smiles. ‘All the men on this island are easy to manage. Don’t you think so?’

Hattie didn’t know what to say to that. She disapproved of Sophie’s relationships with the island men. Sophie continued: ‘I mean what they really want is a bit of fun. The women here take themselves so seriously.’

Hattie thought some of the Whalsay men must want more than fun, but she didn’t answer. As she looked back into the trench the pale sun caught something softly metallic.

Hattie leaned forward on the kneeler. She could smell the soil, felt it damp through her sweater where she must have propped herself on her elbow. She trowelled back the soil around the object. Sometimes it felt that the trowel was an extension of her arm, more sensitive even than her fingers. She could be as delicate as she would be with a brush. Sophie must have sensed her excitement because she jumped across the trench so she could get a better view without blocking the light. Hattie could tell the other woman was holding her breath and realized she was too. Now Hattie did take a brush and cleaned the object that stood in relief proud of the soil.

‘What do you think?’

‘A coin.’ Sophie looked down with a huge grin. For a moment the tension between them evaporated.

‘Similar to the ones they found at Dunrossness?’ It had been in Hattie’s mind from the moment she’d seen it. At a dig in the south of Shetland mainland, a dwelling had been validated by the discovery of a store of medieval coins.

‘Absolutely.’ Sophie grinned again. ‘I’d say you’ve found your merchant’s house. And I think the boss will be in on the next plane.’

And now, Hattie thought with relief, I’ll be able to stay in the islands for ever.