A Handful of Ash Page 17

  On the way, I told Maman of what was happening in Scalloway, and was surprised to find she knew the people. ‘You would not remember, but we lived in Scalloway when we were first married, Dermot and I, while our house was being built. I do not know the children, of course, but the parents, yes. The Minister Halcrow and his wife – what was she called now? Maria. She worked in Lerwick, in the Port Authority. He was a good man. Although I was not of his flock, he would call in from time to time, just to say hello, and ask how I was. He liked music. We used to talk of that. A cultivated man, and kindly, to visit a stranger. Maria, now, I have a feeling she was ill. Not in those days, later. Dermot told me. Six years ago, perhaps. The illness when you are suddenly very tired. She had to leave her work, and now I think she needs a wheelchair to go out.’

  ‘Rachel said she didn’t like to leave her mam on her own.’

  ‘He was an old-fashioned man, a family man. He was sorry they did not have children.’ She smiled. ‘Then the little boy came along, and they invited us to the christening. The parents were so proud, and he was very sweet, with big brown eyes, like a French baby. You don’t remember? There was tea afterwards, and you ate a huge slice of chocolate cake, and asked me why I never baked in the English way.’

  ‘What about the family dynamics?’

  ‘What can you tell from outside? I think he would have liked a wife who was more traditional, who would have stayed at home, and run the women’s guild and the baking circle – but she did that once the children were born. The last time I saw her – oh, it was long ago. It was the last regatta I saw you sail at. She had the children with her. The boy was spoiled, I remember that. He demanded attention as of a right, and wanted money for the shop. The girl, she had an unhappy, withdrawn look, that pale skin and smudged eyes. The boy teased her, and Maria did not stop him, just said, “Oh, Rachel, stop complaining,” and gave the boy a five-pound note.’

  ‘I think they grew up like that,’ I said. ‘How about Lawrence Ratter? He’d be about my age.’

  ‘Ratter, Ratter – oh, he is exactly your age. He was born in the same week as you were. In those days, you stayed in hospital for a week with your first baby, and so his mother and I were in hospital together. Now, what was her name? Joyce. Her father was an elder of the kirk in Scalloway. He disapproved of me, as a foreigner and a Catholic. Her husband, John, he worked in the bank at the end of the Street, is that the Royal Bank?’

  Peter’s bank. Not that there was anything in that; everyone knew everyone in Shetland. Perhaps, though, that was how Peter had found out who Annette was entangled with; John Ratter would have heard any gossip going, and might have felt it his duty to pass it on to her father.

  ‘Joyce was imaginative. She wrote short stories for the New Shetlander, but she had to do it under a different name, because her father-in-law disapproved. Has the son inherited that imagination?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I visualised Lawrence’s wistful look as I’d told him tales of tropical seas. ‘He asked me, in college, about my voyages.’

  ‘That could be difficult. To have imagination, and be made to give it up for a respectable career. What does your police inspector do with his imagination?’

  ‘Goes fishing. Lawrence seems to have turned into his grandfather’s boy. He was at the Hallowe’en party, and disapproving of everything. One last family: James Leask. He’s a crofter family, on Trondra, I think.’

  ‘Leask.’ She shook her head. ‘What age is the child?’

  ‘Twenty, the same as Annette.’

  ‘So young. It is very sad. Her poor parents.’ Then she shook her head. ‘I do not know this boy. There are too many Leasks, and we would not have known the people from out of town.’

  I put Cat’s basket aboard, then headed back along to Kate and Peter’s house. Sunday afternoon was a good time to call, and I wanted to see when I’d be needed next week. We’d have our work cut out to finish all the undergrowth slashing for Bonfire Night. Their gate was the only one free of the egg-and-shell mess; even in their rioting, the teenagers had respected their grief.

  I pulled my hood over my hair and strode briskly up the path, Cat bounding ahead of me with his tail fluffed out. The kitchen door was closed, but there was a light in Kate’s workshop. I hesitated a moment, for I hadn’t been there yet, and didn’t want to invade her sanctuary. There wasn’t a doorbell or knocker. I scuffled my feet, then called ‘Hello.’

  There was no reply. The door had four clear panes of glass in the upper half, as if it had once been the door between a kitchen and a back porch, so when I came up to it I was looking right at her, sitting with her back to me. This was a side of Kate I hadn’t seen, so absorbed in her work that the world dissolved. Her chestnut head was bent over her easel. Beside her, an anglepoise lamp lit up a bird’s skull. Her brown hand moved across the page with savage intensity, scoring the sharp line of beak, then became tender as a mother’s, smoothing the charcoal curve of the delicate cranium with the side of one thumb.

  Boannie pictures o’ flowers, in bright colours, Magnie had said. Three paintings hung above her, and there was a monkshood flower in a jar, gentian-bright, but it was the intricacy of colourless bone that absorbed her now. If she had blotted out her own ache with her work, I didn’t want to haul her back into the reality of loss. Just as I started to back away, Cat pushed past me, stood on his hind legs, and shoved the door open. He swarmed forwards as he made the gap. I took a long stride backwards, so that she wouldn’t know I’d been spying, and called again, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Cass? I’ll be out in a moment.’ Her voice sounded fuzzy, as if she’d been woken from a deep sleep. The chair legs scraped back. ‘Cat, hello. No cats in here.’ She came out with him tucked under one arm, and closed the door firmly behind her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you working. I just wanted to check when you wanted me this week, with bonfire night on Saturday.’

  Her smile took an effort. ‘And the bottom of the garden still to clear. Come and get a cup of tea and we’ll see what hours you can manage.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to stop your work,’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s time for an afternoon cuppa. I’ve gone stiff.’ She flexed her shoulders, and gestured me towards the house. ‘We had the police round all morning.’ I should have thought of that. I was about to say something when she continued. ‘Not the one who came yesterday, in the kilt, with the eyes that look as if he’s sorry you’re telling lies.’

  I remembered that grave, regretful look from when I’d been a suspect myself. ‘Did he get the fish-flies out?’

  ‘Fish-flies? Oh, yes, he did that too. Got a battered tin box out of his sporran, and began tying a trout fly. Extraordinarily distracting.’ She paused to stamp her shoes on the kitchen mat. ‘Particularly to Peter – they launched straight into a discussion of something called a Greenwell’s Glory, which Peter liked, but the inspector didn’t.’ She pushed open the kitchen door, and motioned me inside. I was taken aback to find Peter there, in the act of filling the kettle. He turned and smiled.

  ‘Kate telling you about the Highland DI? Clever chap – well, you’ll have met him. We got to talking about flies, not at all appropriate in the circumstances, but I suppose he meant to put me at my ease.’

  He did it deliberately, he’d admitted to me, to stop a suspect thinking of his next lie: Nobody watches their words when they’re watching my finger.

  ‘The next thing I knew,’ Kate concluded, ‘he was showing Peter a different one, a Silver Invicta, he called it, which sounds just like a bike, an old-fashioned Raleigh the way they were when I was a child, with upright handlebars –’

  This fast rattle of information was no more the real Kate than the numbed, incoherent phrases of Friday. Although they must be relieved knowing Annette’s death wasn’t murder, although they must be telling themselves Nate’s death was nothing to do with them, this new casualty must have upset them. Peter flicked Kate a quelling glance as he handed her the fil
led kettle. She put it on the hot-plate, then gave a would-be casual laugh. ‘Anyway, he said this Silver Invicta gave better results under what sounded a very precise set of conditions – a rainy evening the second Tuesday after a full moon, or something like that. He wasn’t at all my idea of a hot-shot detective. I was just beginning to write him off as a country bumpkin when he flashed a look from those extraordinary eyes, and I suddenly felt as if I had no secrets left in the world.’

  She paused for breath. I was annoyed to find my lips were curving into a stupid Mona Lisa smirk, just talking about him. Get a grip, Cass. I wiped the smile off, and fetched the mugs from the tree. ‘Are you having tea, Peter?’

  He nodded. I put the mugs down on the table, and warmed the pot, then occupied myself putting the tea in it, and fetching milk from the fridge.

  Peter interposed quietly. ‘Did you hear them too?’

  I gave him a blank look. I’d suddenly lost the thread of this conversation. A police officer who wasn’t Gavin had come to tell them about Nate – ‘Hear who?’

  ‘The teenagers. Of course –’ his voice went sarcastic ‘– they maybe didn’t bother coming as far as Port Arthur. It’s a longer walk than any of them are used to, with parents running them everywhere.’

  Memory stabbed at Kate, I saw it in her eyes, of the days when she too had taxied Annette, and Peter had lectured her for it, but she pushed it away, although her fingers clenched on the kettle handle, and the stream of water from spout to teapot wavered. She rattled determinedly on. ‘The eggs, it was our local sergeant, asking about the eggs. Did you see the mess?’

  Enlightenment dawned. ‘Eggs everywhere,’ I agreed. If Gavin hadn’t told them of Nate’s death, then I ought not to queer his pitch. ‘They must have had boxes and boxes.’

  ‘Such a waste,’ Kate said, ‘when there are people starving. They didn’t come to us, which was good of them, but they ran riot everywhere else.’

  ‘The sergeant thought I might have seen something, while I walked the dogs,’ Peter said. ‘The householders are furious, apparently. He wants to call on a few houses, you know, give the ringleaders an official ticking-off.’

  Clever, I thought, and plausible. ‘And did you see them?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’d just got out of the gate when I saw a group of them, ducking and dodging in and out of the houses, in dead silence. Rather sinister.’

  ‘You were quite wild about it when you came in,’ Kate said. She stirred the tea, pulled the cosy over the pot and poured at last. ‘One of them threw an egg at him, Cass – missed, fortunately, otherwise he’d probably have got himself had up for tanning the brat’s bottom.’

  ‘I set the dogs after them, but they ran up the street by the Eventide Home,’ Peter said. ‘Then I realised when I got to the youth club that there was one of their infernal discos on.’ He snorted into his tea. ‘Assumed they were escapees from that. You know how they find ways to climb in and out of toilet windows, and mill around all over the street.’

  The Meat Company was just along from Burn Beach, and the youth club ran behind it, parallel to the shore, with the entrance at the far side of the block from the beach. There was a car park in front of the YC, where the youngsters would no doubt have been milling around, with a sea wall to hide bottles of alcohol in. They would have spread further along that way, towards Kate and Peter’s house, but the car park by the beach would have been deserted, and in darkness. The echoing shrieks of the disco-goers could well have masked the sound of Nate being overcome. Anyone looking out from a window on New Street – someone who’d not closed window and curtains against the thump, thump of contemporary music – would have taken any seeming argument for disco behaviour, unless they’d seen the moment of him being thrown into the water. I wondered how strong local feeling was against rumours of witchcraft, if a group of teenagers at a disco might indeed have made someone they believed to be a witch undergo the ordeal by drowning.

  ‘Were there many of them?’

  ‘Half a dozen.’ His cheeks reddened. ‘But by the mess when I went out this morning, it was the whole teenage population of Scalloway, egging each other on.’ He smiled suddenly, a real smile. ‘Forgive the pun. Swelled by cousins from other places, no doubt, all thinking it a great spree, and forgetting the damage they make has to be cleared up by other people.’

  ‘Teenagers never think of that,’ Kate said. Her face went bleak as she remembered that there would be no pile of towels on bathroom or bedroom floor, no clustering of mugs on window sills, not ever again.

  ‘I’m surprised there weren’t more householders out chasing them,’ I said.

  ‘They hadn’t started the damage then,’ Peter said. ‘Just lobbed that one egg at me. I saw another two or three smashed on a door along the main street, but other than that it was all quiet. I was later than usual. We’d been watching TV. It was getting on for eleven.’

  ‘I suppose the real rampage was later still, after the disco closed,’ I suggested, and he nodded.

  ‘I haven’t been out to look,’ Kate said.

  ‘Eggs everywhere,’ I said. ‘On cars, and walls, and the pavement. But the disco must have ended at, oh, one in the morning? Wouldn’t you think their parents would be starting to round them up, out that late?’

  One in the morning, summer time. High tide would have been around eight o’clock the previous evening. If Nate’d gone over the low wall of Burn Beach any time before, say, eleven o’clock, the ebbing tide would have taken the body away. He had to have died after that.

  Kate shook her head. ‘We never did, with Annette.’ She said the name determinedly. ‘We knew she was safe enough, here in Shetland, coming home with her friends. We wouldn’t have worried. Those parents didn’t –’

  ‘Until they saw the state of their cars,’ Peter said. ‘Tom Hawkins, up Ladysmith Drive, he was so furious he could hardly speak. A spread of egg all over the bonnet, cooked on by the sun. But I’m afraid I didn’t recognise any of them. I told the sergeant so. Except –’ He frowned.

  ‘Except …?’ I prompted, when he remained silent.

  ‘I passed one person, later, going round the end of New Street, just at the Castle. Said goodnight, of course, the way you do, and got a grunt back.’

  ‘And you thought you recognised him?’ I said.

  ‘Well, not to say recognised.’ He lifted his mug, drank several mouthfuls. ‘But I thought it was that James Leask.’ His voice was suddenly venomous. ‘The crofter’s boy with ambitions to be a sea captain.’

  Dark came unexpectedly early. It was just after four as I strode back to the marina, collar turned up against the rain, yet the sky had already begun to dim, and in half an hour I’d need to light the lamps aboard Khalida. Lights lit before five … winter felt just around the corner.

  I was just unlocking the marina gate when I heard my name being hissed from the shelter of the boating club back door. I froze, peering into the shadows. ‘Who’s that?’

  A small, black-jacketed figure eased itself off the wall. ‘Me, Cass.’

  ‘Shaela? Lass, you’ll be starved, waiting around there. Come on board.’

  She was wet through. I ushered her on board Khalida and passed her a towel to dry the rats’ tails of hair that clung to her forehead and cheeks. I made us a cup of drinking chocolate each and waited till she’d stopped shuddering to sit down opposite her. ‘Shaela, lass, what on earth’s going on?’

  ‘I canna bide long,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’d better tell me quickly,’ I said, and passed over the tub containing the last few ginger nuts.

  ‘You’ll think I’m daft,’ she said. ‘Seeing things.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said, and told her the story of my blind-eyed mer-horse off Fiji. I took my time over it, and when I’d finished her near-panic was diverted into round-eyed wonder. ‘Really truly?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die. I ken he’s no’ in the nature books, because I looked, but I saw him all the same.’ The brass lamp cast comfo
rting gold shadows across the cabin. ‘Now you.’

  ‘I wasna meant to be out,’ she began, ‘but I kent the older ones were planning a real fun, so I put clothes rolled up in my bed, and a lump o’ jumper on the pillow, and pulled the covers up, then I crept out.’

  A child after my own heart. ‘Down to the disco?’

  She nodded. ‘It was an over-sixteens, and they had one of the youth leaders on the door, and she kent all our ages, so there was no way I’d get in, but I didn’t want to miss the fun, so I just hung around, waiting. It was brawly cold, so I’d walk along one way for a bit, then back, then the other way.’ She shivered. ‘It wasn’t as much fun as I’d thought it would be. One way was all streetlights, and I felt that exposed, as if all the neighbours were watching, ready to phone Mam and report me, but the other side was dark, all creepy shadows, and that made me feel worse.’ Her dark lashes came down over her eyes; her mouth quivered. ‘And it was while I was at the dark side that I saw … it.’

  I waited encouragingly, my heart beating faster.

  ‘It was wi’ Nate,’ Shaela said. ‘I heard these two men coming, and I hid in behind the skip, in case they were, you know, dodgy. Then I heared Nate speaking. I couldna hear the words, but I recognised his voice, so I kent it was all right, and I was joost coming out from behind the skip when I saw the other one.’ She glanced around her and leaned towards me. her voice lowered. ‘Nate was talking to a demon.’

  ‘What did it look like?’ I asked.

  ‘It had a horrible, sneery face, an eyes that glowed red, an a smooth skull wi’ peerie horns, an a hump on its back, and a tail, no just a piece o’ string hanging, it was like it was alive by itself, it waved about, and I had this awful feeling it was like an antenna, sensing things, and when it swung towards me I was that feared it was going to tell the demon I was there.’ Her face was white, remembering. ‘I shrunk right back behind the skip. I couldna understand why Nate should want to talk to such a horrible creature, then I thought maybe he didna want to, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to help.’ Her mouth turned down. ‘But I was over scared o’ it.’ Her eyes met mine, beseechingly. ‘Was I being an awful coward, Cass? I wish now I’d jumped out and said something, or just run for home and told Mam, whatever the trouble. Maybe Nate would still have been alive.’