The Body in the Bracken Read online

  The Body in the Bracken

  Marsali Taylor

  DEDICATION

  To my sister, Joan, and my brother, Niall, and in memory of our parents, Margaret and Douglas Gordon Baxter, who took us year after year to Gavin’s remote loch, to a cottage three miles by boat from the road’s end, with neither water nor electricity, and so gave us the most wonderful childhood memories of messing about in boats, checking out Foxy’s lair and Otter’s slide, watching seals and red deer, finding incredible furry caterpillars, reading by candlelight, and brewing ‘fizzy’ over a driftwood fire on remote beaches.

  The proverbs heading each section come from the wonderful collection Shetland Proverbs & Sayings, edited by the late Bertie Deyell. Thank you to Bertie’s family for letting me use these.

  For those who enjoy finding new words, there is a Shetland glossary at the back of the book.

  Monday 23rd - Tuesday 31st December

  Monday 23rd December

  Low Water Mallaig UT 03.26, 1.7m

  High Water 09.05, 4.5m

  Low Water 15.59, 2.2m

  High Water 21.31, 4.2m

  Sunrise 09.07

  Moonset 11.14

  Sunset 15.38

  Moonrise 22.52

  Moon waning gibbous .

  If I dunna see dee in Lerook, I’ll see dee in Liverpool.

  Said by sailors accustomed to travel.

  (For Cass’s passage plan, see appendix)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter One

  It was like sailing into another world. The north-westerly wind that had blown me down from Shetland funnelled behind me as I turned into the outer loch, and Khalida flattened as I let the mainsail out and goose-winged the jib. The slap of the waves turned to a gentle rolling. Cat came up from my berth, stretched his white front paws on my varnished cockpit bench, and hunkered down, looking around. The sun picked out the faint white stripes running through his glossy grey fur, and the paler owl tufts behind his ears. I reached for my binoculars to check the position of the rock I wanted to avoid, picked a shore-mark to steer to, then gave an enormous yawn.

  I was dog-tired. We’d set off from Scalloway at half past five the day before yesterday, anchored for a sleep yesterday afternoon, then pressed on southwards. Now the hills of one of Scotland’s dramatic sea lochs enclosed us; the giant Ladhrbheinn soared up to the right, its ridged summit fissured with snow, its lower slopes rust-red with dried bracken and heather. Ice-hardened brown kelp silvered the sea’s edge.

  It was a crazy voyage, going down to spend Christmas with the family of a man who was barely even a friend. We’d spent so little time together, DI Gavin Macrae and I. He’d invited me down, and I’d taken a deep breath and decided to risk beginning a relationship I was scared to want. I got cold feet even thinking about it, but I’d said I’d come, and so here I was, threading my way down an unknown loch sprinkled by unmarked rocks and sandbanks, with two extra jumpers keeping out the December cold, and my only pretty dress hanging in the locker, protected by a plastic cover. I kept an eye on my passage plan and list of compass headings, and my primitive GPS pinged as I neared each of the waypoints I’d typed into it. I was just thinking I should phone and say I was almost there when I heard the steady put-put of an outboard somewhere ahead, and saw a white wash at the head of the loch, two miles away. I reached for the spyglasses again. It was just the sort of boat I’d have expected Gavin to own, an old-fashioned clinker dinghy, varnished the colour of Oxford marmalade, with what sounded like a genuine Seagull outboard on the stern. He was alone.

  I turned my own engine on and left the autopilot in charge while I stowed the sails. By the time the boom cover was on, the ties snicked, and my mooring rope ready on the stern, the varnished dinghy was curving round Khalida. Gavin raised a hand, and spoke in Gaelic. ‘Fàilte!’ Welcome. Then he switched to his soft English, with the consonants precise, the S sounds lingering: ‘I thought you might like a pilot through the narrows, with the water low and the tide falling.’

  ‘My very wish,’ I agreed. When pride and seamanship clashed, pride went overboard. ‘Your chart gives me less than a metre below my keel.’

  ‘About that,’ he agreed, and set off before me. One of my Khalida’s glories is that she goes as smoothly in reverse as forwards. I turned her and stood facing the stern, looking over her aft locker at the rocks on the bottom of the clear water, with the bladderwrack curving upwards from them, and the darker channel between rippled by the wash from Gavin’s dinghy. If we touched, I’d get advance warning, and she’d have her full forward power to push her clear. The shore was only five metres away when he turned in a smooth U-shape towards the north side. Khalida moved in his wake. Great squared boulders like a wardrobe and grand piano left on the beach topped the opposite shore. We came within spitting distance of them, then turned at last and came diagonally into the pool at the head of the loch. The mooring buoy was in the middle. I putted up to it, threaded my rope through the ring, and made it fast.

  ‘I won’t come aboard,’ Gavin said, from the dinghy. His russet hair was covered by one of those fishermen’s hats whose brim bristles flies (his ghillie grandfather’s, I’d have bet), and his tanned cheeks were reddened by the wind that fluttered the green folds of his kilt and the tabs on his socks. ‘Would you like to come up to the house now, and meet everyone over a cup of tea, or do you want to sleep first?’

  ‘Sleep,’ I said. ‘Give me two hours, and I’ll be human again.’

  ‘I’ll come back at five.’ Without any fuss, he backed the dinghy away and rowed smoothly for the little stone jetty that jutted out from the shore. I hung up my lifejacket, crawled into my berth, and was out cold in five seconds flat.

  When I woke, the wind had fallen away. The sun was gone, the moon not yet risen, and only starlight glimmering on the surface of the loch let me see water from shore. I hoisted the anchor light, a white star to beckon to the yellow light that shone from Gavin’s farm. I’d just changed my sailing thermals for my best jeans and navy gansey and put Cat into his travelling basket when I heard the creak, dip of oars. Gavin called, ‘Ahoy, Khalida.’

  ‘My taxi,’ I said, and handed down Cat’s basket. There was one of those awkward silences as we rowed over, but by the time I’d caught the jetty and helped secure the ropes it was all fine; we fell into step together up the dark road as if we were walking along the seafront in Scalloway. A light on the farm wall flicked on as we passed it, showing a cobbled yard with wide byre doorways and a grange window facing us, and a corner doorway with two steps up to it. It opened as we came to it, and Gavin’s mother held out her hand. ‘Come in, Cass. You must be cold now, coming all this way by boat.’ She waved me past her. Her voice was softer than Gavin’s, the lingering Highlan
d S sounds pronounced. ‘Come in to the fire.’

  I was glad he had warned me. ‘My mother had an accident to her face when she was a girl, with a threshing machine. She was lucky not to lose her eye.’ Her scar was far worse than mine, even after sixty years, puckering up the whole of one side of her face in a network of white and red. I smiled at her, straight on. I knew how it felt to see others looking at the bullet-scar across my cheeks, then glancing away. She was even smaller than I, barely reaching five feet, with her grey hair coiled in a bun, and a print pinnie covering her dress.

  ‘Thank you for having me.’ I gestured at the basket. ‘And Cat – I hope there won’t be trouble with your cats.’

  ‘Only Solomon comes indoors.’ She nodded at Gavin, busy hanging up his oilskins in the passage. ‘Has Gavin told you about him? Half-wildcat, and speaks to nobody else. He probably won’t come in with a visitor here. This is my older son, Kenny.’

  Gavin was only half a head taller than I, and compactly built, so I wasn’t prepared for the man-mountain that rose up from the couch. Kenny was well over six foot, broad-shouldered and dark-haired, with a ruddy outdoor complexion and green-hazel eyes that crinkled in laughter. His hand was twice the size of mine. ‘Sit ye down, Cass.’ He motioned me to the armchair beside the fire. He had a resonant voice, honed with years of directing sheepdogs, a stronger lilt than Gavin’s, and a hesitant way of spacing his words, as if he was translating from Gaelic in his head. ‘Let me have your jacket.’

  I took my slippers from my pocket, hauled off my boots and jacket, and handed them to Kenny, then unfastened the straps and opened Cat’s lid. He put his paws on the basket edge and jumped out, ready to spend the next half hour sniffing round, trying each chair for size and checking out any windowsills. I sat down on the couch and looked round.

  It was my sort of room. The walls were lined with varnished pine, darkened with age to honey-gold, the armchairs differed from the couch, and all three were piled with non-matched cushions. On the mantelpiece, a pair of black-and-white china dogs with foolish King Charles faces jostled envelopes, newspaper clippings, and complete sea urchins – scaddy man’s heids, we called them in Shetland – and the fire below crackled between a set of brass fire irons and a wicker kishie of sawn driftwood. A tall clock ticked in the corner, and the smell of roasting meat drifted in from the kitchen. I didn’t need to surreptitiously dust off the seat of my jeans before sitting down, or worry about the carpet. It was all homely and worn and welcoming. It was going to be all right.

  Chapter Two

  The days sped by. I helped Gavin’s mother with preparations for the Christmas meal, and we all decorated the tree on Christmas Eve, with the men reminiscing and occasionally disputing over who’d made which cardboard snowman or toilet roll angel in primary school, and their mother arbitrating: ‘Ach, no, Kenneth, it was you made the blue angel, and Gavin the green one. I remember it well. You boys have no memory at all.’ Midnight Mass was in a little chapel an hour’s drive away; the men were magnificent in their scarlet dress kilts and black jackets, and we sang the carols with gusto. On Christmas morning, we exchanged presents: I’d found a Shetland cattle book for Kenny, and a lace wool shawl for Mrs Macrae. I gave Gavin a daft present, a Shetland children’s picture book called The Grumpy Old Sailor, and he responded with equal lightness: a thirties copy of Olivia Fitzroy’s The Hunted Head. We ate a huge Christmas dinner of one of their own geese, surrounded by home-grown vegetables, and followed by a home-made Christmas pudding, then collapsed in front of the Queen’s speech and the TV’s film offering, which turned out to be Casablanca. Even Solomon had come in to the house then, lured by goose skin scraps. He was just as Gavin’s mother had described, a lean, tawny wildcat with tufted ears and eyes green as sea running over sand. He came in warily and leapt to the back of the couch, then settled on Gavin’s shoulder. Cat sank into the couch, pressing closer to my leg; Solomon looked, hissed, and ignored him thereafter.

  On Boxing Day, I was initiated into the life of the farm. Mrs Macrae showed me how to coax the sweet-smelling milk from the cow’s pink udders, and I carried the warm enamel can proudly to the table. I scrunched short walks with Gavin and Kenny along the shore and helped count the sheep; we carried buckets of feed to the long-horned Highland cattle, and nets of hay to the Lodge’s two Highland ponies – garrons, Gavin called them – which were kept for the stalking in the autumn. They were Luchag and Ribe: Luchag was the fawn of dried bracken, Ribe dappled silver. ‘Mouse’ and ‘Cobweb’, Gavin translated.

  One day, taking the evening haynets, the wind in our faces, Gavin touched my arm and crouched down among the shore boulders. I imitated him and looked. There, two hundred yards away, half a dozen deer were coming down to drink at the river. I’d never seen Scottish deer in the wild; they were bigger than I expected, and so delicately made, with their slender legs that stepped among the shore stones like dancers. The stag had a great sweep of antlers that turned like a fencer’s foil as he checked out his kingdom before drinking. We watched them for ten magical minutes before they turned away and dissolved into the dusk.

  Evenings were spent with Cat sprawled between Gavin and I on the couch. Gavin tied trout lures, the finished flies nesting in a round tin like dandelion clocks, or made notes in his small, neat script for the history of the loch that he was writing (‘Not that it’ll ever be finished,’ Kenny interposed, from his armchair by the fire, ‘for as soon as he thinks he’s got everything, then another letter comes in from Canada with a whole new branch of family tree.’). Their mother knitted by the driftwood fire that blazed with blue and green flame and scented the room with woodsmoke. I found their bookshelves and began working my way through Scott’s Waverley, a leisurely tale of a young Englishman getting caught up in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, bound in three volumes that you could never take to sea, with gold embossing on velvety red leather. I joined Gavin’s mother with her knitting, and completed an all-in-one for an African baby, with a stripe of Fair Isle pattern across the chest. The comfortable, friendly silence was broken every so often by an exchange of news. At last I understood why Gavin thought I’d fit in there, and I relaxed, and felt that this was a winter land-life I could live.

  Before I’d come, five days had seemed long enough. Now, with the days slipping by, it felt too short; but there was a low moving across the Atlantic, and I’d need to get home before it.

  ‘You must come for a ride,’ Gavin said, on my second-last day. We caught the ponies and bridled them, then Gavin gave me a leg-up on Luchag before swinging himself up on Ribe’s bare back in a swirl of pleats, looking instantly as if he was part of the beast. I knew now that Luchag was trustworthy, though I’d have felt safer out at sea in a force 8 than I did perched perilously bareback, with only her mane to hold on to, but by the time we’d scrunched along the shore and wound through the Lodge plantation of rhododendrons and resin-scented pines, the ground felt less far away, and I was starting to feel at home. The hairy hooves squelched through the last marshy piece and began climbing, up to the shoulder of the hill.

  ‘Just keep yourself vertical,’ Gavin said. I swayed and jolted until we came out on top of the rise, and the loch was spread before us: the pool at the head, with Khalida nosing the orange mooring buoy, the Z-shape of the narrows, then the loch twisting and turning from headland to headland until it reached the Sound of Sleat. The Cuillins reared up like organ-pipes of snow-covered stone. The colours were glorious: the smooth grey of the loch, the striped line of foreshore, the rust of the heather and gold of dried grass below the dazzling white of the snow caps. I drew a long breath and sat back, contented just to look. Luchag dropped her head and began tearing at the olive grass.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Gavin said, ‘how you can’t remember the summer colours once the winter comes.’

  ‘Shetland’s the same,’ I agreed. ‘Though the other way – the minute the sun shines, it feels like it’s always shone.’

  ‘The mind’s protection. Otherwise
we’d all go “Why do we live in a place with six months of winter?” and move to Benidorm.’

  I made a face. ‘I’ve done the Med in winter. Trust me, you don’t want to. Besides –’ I spread my hands, trying to marshal my thoughts. Luchag lifted her head at the tug on her reins, then pulled them out of my hands. I leant forward to take them back. Ribe remained statue-still. ‘You need to have lived through the winter to enjoy the summer. If you went to Benidorm, it would always be warmer there, so you’d just freeze when you came back.’

  ‘I put it down to the Reformation,’ Gavin said. ‘The belief that you have to suffer six months of cold and wet to have earned the summer.’

  ‘The Scots psyche.’ I agreed. ‘I wonder how long it took the emigrants to get used to Australian sunshine.’

  ‘They never got used to it.’ Gavin was suddenly serious. ‘Not the first generation. This loch –’ he swept an arm outwards along its length – ‘once supported a whole clan. Sixty families, cleared to Canada. My family was only kept because we were the laird’s servants, his farmer and his best ghillie.’ His grey eyes caressed the loch. ‘My great-grandmother’s sisters prospered there, but their letters show how they never forgot their own country. Every so often we have a Canadian Macrae who comes home. There was one, a fourth cousin, who was so like me that I could have shaved by him.’ His voice lightened, teasing. ‘At the entrance to the loch there was one of the best attested kelpie sightings, by several ministers, no less, and one of them a distant cousin.’

  ‘Kelpie?’ I thought of the giant silver horses tossing their head near the Falkirk wheel.

  ‘Ach, it’s the water horse, a great dark hump in the water. You’ll meet it on a dark night, just like an ordinary Highland pony, grazing by the waterside, with its saddle and bridle, all of the best quality, but if you’re so daft as to jump on its back then it’ll take you down to the depths of the loch.’