The Body in the Bracken Read online

  ‘I’d like to know too.’ I didn’t feel as if I’d learned enough to be a threat to anyone. Making links … but what link had I made between Ivor’s death and John Georgeson?

  We worked until the shelves were full of tea sets arranged in order of how many there had been: a pair of cups, saucers and plates, three, four, five, and just one complete set from all five boxes, guarded carefully from new, and used only at Christmas and New Year at home, and taken down to the local hall for weddings and funeral teas.

  It was dark when we came out. The sky was ringed round with cloud still, but the stars shone bright around the moon: the W of Cassiopeia, the square of Pegasus, the misty ribbon of the Milky Way. The air was cold, the tide as far out as it could go, leaving a dark width of pebbles and the iodine smell of seaweed. There was a red car waiting by the boating club, and as we came towards it the driver’s door opened, and someone got out and stood there, silent, watching us.

  It was Donna.

  Even in this light I could see that she’d been crying, and her breath still caught in her throat, as if it would take only a word to set her off again. I was tired of people making me the repository for their problems. I wanted to curl up in my bunk with a hot water bottle, and Cat purring at my neck, to read my book by candle-light until I was ready to sleep … but she was standing there, shoulders drooping, and I couldn’t turn her away.

  ‘Hi, Donna.’ I smiled at her. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ She hauled a crumpled paper handkie from her pocket and plunged her face into it. Standing beside her, I found the pixie face gave a false impression; she was a good four inches taller than I.

  Reidar glanced at her, then shepherded us both along the pontoon and onto his motorboat, as if he regularly had strange young women coming to burst into tears on him. ‘I am Reidar. Come, I have a heater, and I will make hot chocolate for you.’ He motioned Donna into the U-shaped settee around the table. ‘Do not try to talk until you are warm again.’

  She watched, round-eyed, as he heated the milk and chocolate together, looking uncertainly at me from time to time.

  ‘He’s right,’ I assured her. ‘Whatever’s wrong, one of his hot chocolates will make you feel much better.’

  Reidar whipped some cream, added a tablespoonful of marmalade, divided the chocolate mix between two coffee cups, added a layer of the cream, and placed the result in front of us.

  Donna clasped her hands around the cup and gave a long sigh. She’d brought a waft of sickly, floral scent into the cabin. Her fingers were blue with cold, as if she’d waited in her car for a good while. She was as pretty and vulnerable as I’d remembered, and I felt a flash of anger at Ivor Hughson. She bent her head to the cup and sipped. Her eyes widened; she looked across at Reidar, and gave him a tentative smile.

  Once I’d savoured the last soft marmalade chunk and eaten the last crumb of cinnamon biscuit, I looked across at Donna. The colour had returned to her cheeks, the tension washed from her shoulders, but her face was strung up, as if she was bracing herself for confession. She set the cup to one side, and raised her dark-lashed eyes to mine. ‘Cass, I wanted to come and ask you – to tell you.’ The tears welled up again. ‘I saw you watching me last night. When you came into the restaurant, I thought you’d followed me, and I was so afraid I couldn’t bear it. Everything was all so awful, and then when I met –’ She crimsoned, and didn’t say the name. ‘Everything was all right again, and I couldn’t bear for him to know how stupid I was.’

  I picked on what made sense. ‘You don’t want your new bloke to find out about Ivor Hughson.’

  She wailed into her handkerchief. Reidar leaned forward and covered her hand with his gentle paw. ‘Now, now, you are not to mind Cass. She likes to make things clear. Tell us your history at the beginning, and we will see what we can do to help. It will make you feel better also.’

  His soothing rumble did the trick. She hiccupped a bit, then began. She was from Aberdeen, as I’d heard, and the youngest of three. ‘My older brother Jamie, he drives to the Co-op, a delivery van, like, and he works with the horses.’

  We looked blankly at her. ‘The Clydesdales,’ she explained. ‘They still keep them for the Highland Show, the Braemar Gathering, that kind of thing. You ken, the big horses with the hairy hooves. I used to help him groom them, and we’d brush out their feathers till they shone like silk, and plait red ribbons in their manes, and I’d dress as a boy to sit up beside him on the box. Me sister Shivonne, she’s just graduated as a nurse. I wasna that good at the school, I hadn’t any particular ambition for anything. I thought about a hairdresser, or a beautician, or something to do with children, like, but in the end I didna train for anything. Me ma works in a care home, and I worked with her for a bittie. Then Jamie heard about this job in the Serco Northlink office. It said it was general office duties, and I’d be trained on the job. I went along for an interview and I got it. I was on the desk, checking folk’s bookings, and issuing the cabin cards.’ Her face had brightened while she was talking about her family; now it puckered again. ‘That was where I met Ivor.’ It hurt even to say his name. ‘He was aye friendly when he got his card, and then one day he asked me about the night life in Aberdeen, and what pub I would recommend. He asked if I’d meet up with him there.’ She stopped short, then burst out, ‘Me dad woulda killed me if he’d kent, with Ivor being that much older. I’d say I was going out with me pals, and he’d come and join us in the pub. Then, to celebrate me eighteenth birthday, he took me to a hotel, and we had champagne.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. ‘After that, we kept meeting up, and he said he loved me, and wanted us to be together. I didna ken he was married, he never said anything about that. I wanted to take him to meet my folk, but he wasna keen, because he was so much older. He didna want them to think he was dodgy.’

  Dodgy as hell. Gavin would have to follow up Ivor’s love life. When he had a van to drive, and several nights a week on the mainland, Donna, the supervised baby of her family, wouldn’t be the only girl.

  ‘But he did ask me if I’d go on holiday with him. He was keen on the sailing – well, you’d ken that. He was planning on taking his boat around Skye, so he asked me if I’d come, spend a whole two weeks together, just him and me.’ She flushed. ‘It meant lying to my folk, because if he widna meet them there was no way I’d be allowed to go off with him like that. It was the first time, and I could tell Mam didna believe me when I said I was going with one of the lasses from work. Then, in May, this job came up in the Shetland office.’ She shook her head at herself, her face adult at last. ‘I thought he’d be pleased. I didna want to be over eager to move in with him, so I got a flat, and put all me stuff in me car, and drove onto the ferry. He came to meet me, and we went into the flat together, and I was so happy.’ The tears ran like glass over her porcelain cheeks. ‘I canna believe I was that stupid. Of course I found out the truth straight away, from the other girls in the office talking, the next time he needed a ticket. All about his wife, how they’d been childhood sweethearts, and at university together, and she was a lecturer in the college, and that they were trying for bairns.’ Her fair skin flushed scarlet. ‘I even went to the college and sat in my car, waiting for her to come out. I just wanted to see her. She was Ivor’s age, and smart. Stylish.’

  ‘Did you tell Ivor you’d found him out?’

  She nodded. ‘He said they’d grown apart long ago, she was wrapped up in her teaching and she kind of looked down on him for not having a prestigious job. He said he loved me more than he’d ever loved anyone, and he wanted us to be together and have a family.’ She blew her nose, then sat up straighter, suddenly resolute. ‘I couldn’t have my whole holiday, with changing jobs like that, but I had a weekend, and I said I’d go down and meet him in Mallaig. He said he’d tell his wife about us, and then when he came back he’d move into my flat with me.’

  I wondered how Ivor thought he could keep up this kind of juggling between women. Was he so co
nceited that he thought they’d forgive him anything?

  ‘But it wasn’t true!’ Donna burst out. ‘When I got there, there was this other man, Hubert something, and he and Ivor quarrelled about me. That’s how it came out that Ivor hadn’t told Julie. He hadn’t said anything to her at all. She was arriving the very day after I went back to Shetland.’ The tears came back to her eyes, but she blinked them away, vulnerable mouth set in a hard line. ‘I was stupid to believe any of his lies, it was all straight from a problem page letter where the answer begins “Ditch him”. I was so ashamed of myself. I went back to Shetland and tried to act just as normal, but inside I was devastated. I’d go down to the pier at night, after dark, and look at that black water and think about chucking myself in, and I might have done it if it hadn’t been for –’ She stopped on the name again. ‘My new bloke – I don’t want him mixed up in this. He’s that good to me, he kens, and he doesn’t hold Ivor against me, but his family, they’re the kind of folk me mam and dad would like. His sister’s a teacher, and his brother runs his own business, and I’d just die if they found out how stupid I’d been.’

  She was back where she belonged, being protected in the middle of a big family. This new man would spoil her and love her and look after her. Her family would approve of him, and she’d have a traditional white wedding, with her old aunties crying, and all her littlest cousins as bridesmaids.

  ‘He’s coming with me to meet my parents the next time I go down. I ken they’ll like him.’ Her delicate hands spread in in the air. ‘Then I heard about you.’ Her eyes rested briefly on my scar. ‘How you’d found Ivor’s body down in Scotland, and were asking questions. You’d worked with the police before, they said, and were courting with a policeman down south. And there you were, right at the next table, listening.’

  I looked steadily at her. ‘I really wasn’t. It was pure chance, and if you hadn’t reacted to me, I’d never have noticed you. I knew he had a girlfriend, and that was all.’

  The hands spread towards me. She fixed me with those dark-fringed eyes. ‘What I’m asking – I’m begging – please, please keep me out of it. His family are all church-goers, and they’d think the less of me for having an affair with a married man.’ I canna be a Sathin i Papa, the old folk would have said: I can’t be a bad person among good ones. She flushed. ‘I think the less of myself for keeping on with him, once I learnt. Please, can’t you just forget about me, so they never find out?’

  So that she could have her happy ending after all. Something in me was envious. I’d flung myself into the world at sixteen, with nobody to shelter me from nasty reality. If ever I’d had a hankering for a white satin dress and veil, I’d suppressed it. But Donna too had hit nasty reality; Ivor had conned her, having his cake and eating it, and the Lord knew how long he’d have kept stringing her along in ignorance, if she hadn’t come up to Shetland. I remembered Julie’s angry voice: He told the girlfriend it was over, and she killed him. Had the note been left for Donna, as a last-minute attempt to stop her joining him?

  ‘Did Ivor have a key for your flat?’

  She jerked her head back. ‘A key to my flat?’ Her eyes moved round the cabin, as if she was thinking what to say. She bit her lip. ‘Yes, but I asked for it back, when we quarrelled.’

  ‘When did you quarrel?’ Reidar asked. ‘Was it you who ended the affair?’

  She turned towards him eagerly. ‘Yes. In Mallaig. I got on the bus and left him there on the pavement. I didn’t want to ever see him again. It hurt more than I could have believed it would, like stripping my skin off, but at the same time it was such a relief. It felt like I’d been trying to con myself into believing he loved me when deep down I knew he didn’t.’

  Her story or Julie’s … which did I believe? Then I remembered that judgement was Gavin’s problem. ‘Was it you,’ I asked, ‘who set my boat adrift?’

  She burst into tears again. I understood her to say, between sobs, that she’d been so afraid I was after her, and I was such a good sailor that she knew I wouldn’t come to any harm, but when she’d seen my boat in the storm she’d been so scared, and she was really sorry, and that’s why she’d come to talk to me. ‘I just wanted you not to investigate me,’ she finished. ‘Please, please, don’t tell on me.’

  ‘It’s up to the investigating officer.’ I leaned over the table towards her, hands spread. ‘If I keep quiet, they’ll hear about Ivor having a girlfriend from someone else, then they’ll have to ask about you in the office at Serco. That’ll make far more talk, don’t you think?’

  She was silent, considering that.

  ‘Wait and see if it is Ivor’s body,’ I coaxed. ‘Then, if it is, you should go to the officer in charge and tell them all you’ve told me. If you do that, I won’t need to say anything, and nobody else will know anything about it.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I asked, tentatively, ‘that you might be better letting your new man tell his family the truth?’

  She shook her head so hard that her hair flew out like spikes around her head. ‘No, no, I couldna.’ She rose from behind the table. ‘I must go. Now mind, you promised.’ She gave Reidar a last smile. ‘Thanks for the drink, it was fabby.’

  I put out a hand to stop her. ‘Donna, did Ivor give you a ring? Two gold hands clasping a heart?’

  She froze, face defensive. ‘No. No, I never had a ring like that.’ She snatched up her bag, and bolted up the companionway, clattering the two doors open and slamming them behind her. Her boots clacked along the pontoon, the gate clanged, the car revved up and drove away, until its sound was drowned by the waves on the shore.

  ‘Well,’ I asked, ‘what do you make of that?’

  Reidar shook his head. ‘She talks like a ladies’ hairdresser magazine, but you can see she was hurt by this Ivor.’

  ‘Hurt enough to kill him?’ I mused on that one for a bit. ‘If she really did finish with him in Mallaig, that lets her out. But suppose, just suppose that he phoned her from south, and smoothed things over. He came back from the trip, and went round to see her. Suppose she killed him then. If anyone could get on the ferry with a car at the last minute, a Serco employee could.’

  ‘That little girl, move a grown man?’

  ‘She’s a good bit taller than me,’ I retorted, ‘and she looks as if she does aerobics, or plays hockey. And she was strong enough to come out here in a gale and cut my mooring ropes.’

  ‘And then she drove his body to the loch, and moved it to halfway up the hillside?’

  ‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘I don’t quite see that one.’

  ‘She has a brother who is a van driver,’ Reidar said. ‘She told us so. A driver to the Co-op. A man who spends his days lifting packages of groceries would be able to lift a body. If she talked to him as she talked to us, and begged him to help her, do you think he would not?’

  ‘Plenty of cliffs near Aberdeen,’ I pointed out. ‘Why not just drive to one and throw the body over?’

  ‘Because it might be found and identified. The whole point was to keep her out of it.’

  ‘He should have known she’d be hopeless at keeping herself out.’

  ‘Only because there are rumours that the body is Ivor. If it had been anyone else who found it, it would have remained an unidentified body. Providence. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’

  I was silent for a moment, contemplating the vast jigsaw of little pieces that God would have moved to make sure that Gavin and I had walked that path, to give Ivor justice: the defeat on Culloden moor and the Bonnie Prince’s flight through the heather, Gavin’s ancestor guiding him to that cave, and then, centuries later, the longship murder, and the carelessly taken message that had brought a country DI up to Shetland instead of the top brass; even the rain drying up on that day, to give us a longer walk. ‘Do you really think the universe is such a pattern?’

  ‘I am sure it is. We cannot see it, any more than the red tuft of wool in a carpet know
s that it is part of a flower, but the pattern is there, all the same. Will you tell Gavin about her?’

  I shook my head. I would give her a chance to tell the story first, in her own way.

  Monday 6th January: Epiphany

  High Water at Scalloway UT 00.13, 1.7m

  Low Water 05.53, 0.7m

  High Water 12.19, 1.7m

  Low Water 18.32, 0.7m

  Sunrise 09.05

  Moonrise 10.31

  Sunset 15.16

  Moonset 23.24

  Moon waxing crescent.

  Tuesday 7th January

  High Water at Scalloway UT 01.02, 1.5m

  Low Water 06.43, 0.8 m

  High Water 13.10, 1.6m

  Low Water 19.28, 0.7m

  Sunrise 09.04

  Moonrise 10.47

  Sunset 15.18

  Moonset 00.34

  Moon waxing crescent

  Du could as weel aet aa du sees as believe aa du hears.

  A warning to the credulous: you could as well eat all you see as believe all you hear.

  Chapter Twenty

  I slept badly, waking at each bump on the pontoon. When I went out, just after nine, the sky was misted over with cirrus clouds, coloured a soft pink that intensified the nearer you turned to the east, where the sun turned them to a dazzling deep rose. To the north, there was a bank of lenticular clouds: wind coming, and cold. Red sky in the morning … even as I watched, the rose turned to gold, then began to fade.

  The North Atlantic Fisheries College didn’t give students the long holidays that taxpayers complained about. Today was back to work until the end of March. We gathered together for a welcome from the principal, then it was business as usual. Cat disappeared off to the canteen to talk to Antoine, who had given him a box in a warm corner of the kitchen, and I headed for the workshop. My odd mixture of courses would, I hoped, end up in a Deck Officer of the Watch (Unlimited) qualification with the option of moving on to Chief Mate (Unlimited) once I’d done eighteen months of service at sea. The courses were more geared towards fishing or merchant service more than tall ships, but I was generously overlooking that.