The Body in the Bracken Read online

  ‘Oh,’ I said, recognising the description, ‘a njuggle.’

  ‘And what’s a nyeugle?’

  ‘A Shetland pony, all black, with a silver harness. It lived in burns, and scratched its back on the millwheel, or it would lead you through bogs until you were muddy and exhausted. What about these ministers?’

  ‘It was August, 1872, and they were on the yacht Leda when a creature came up beside them, a dark slatey brown, with a long humped body and a fin on the back of its neck. They had a very clear view of it for about an hour, until it was frightened off by a steam launch coming up behind them.’ He gathered up his reins up, and Ribe lifted one foot. ‘We’d better turn around – downwards is always harder going. Just let Luchag pick along, and shout if you feel insecure.’

  We did my passage plan that evening. I spread my pages of downward plan, my charts, tidal atlases, and pilot books out on the floor, then coaxed Cat out from under the chart and persuaded him to go and annoy Kenny’s ancient sheepdog, Luath, instead. I just had to reverse all the compass bearings of my route down and re-work my timings to fit tomorrow’s tides. It would be an easier journey, with the tricky Kyle Rhea and Kyle of Loch Alsh got through first, then just the long run up the west of Scotland. The second day, when I’d be more tired, was straight across the North Sea to Shetland, with no coasts to worry about, and only oil tankers to dodge (the fishing boats didn’t leave till the New Year), so I’d be able to cat-nap all the way. I was just heading my paper ‘Back to Shetland’ when Kenny looked over the top of his cattle studbook.

  ‘Cass, bairn, you’re behind the times. You should just be using Gavin’s iPad.’ He gave his brother a wicked smile. ‘He was watching your voyage down every step of the way.’

  Gavin reddened. ‘Potential voyage,’ he corrected. He brought out his iPad, tapped it a few times, and passed it over. There, on a chart on the screen, was my course here. I looked at the logo.

  ‘Navionics. It’s frighteningly easy to use.’ I scrolled up ‘route’ and tapped ‘return’. Immediately the waypoints reversed themselves. At the side of the screen was the really useful bit, compass bearing and distance from one waypoint to the next. I passed the iPad back to Gavin. ‘Can you check each of my paper bearings as I do it?’

  Kenny set his stud book down, and moved to the couch to look over his brother’s shoulder. ‘It looks very bonny, but would you actually use it to steer your course?’

  ‘People do,’ I said. ‘Literally – they create the route, like this, then tell the autopilot to steer it. That’s why it’s frighteningly easy. You could get yourself into such trouble. Look at this – a nice, neat dog-leg through Kyle Rhea and Kyle Akin, with nothing to say how dangerous they are at the wrong state of the tide.’

  Gavin looked up, smiling. ‘So what would a real sailor do?’

  ‘Distance. 270 nautical miles. Hours of journey at five knots. Hazards.’ I flourished the first page of my passage plan at them. ‘Starting with one unmarked and one marked rock in your own loch.’

  ‘Ellice shoal,’ Kenny said, and gave a grin at Gavin that said one of them had ended up on it.

  ‘Then helps – lights, towers, anything that’ll tell me where I am as I head north. Boltholes, places I can go if the weather turns nasty, and the exact page in the pilot book for each one. When things are going wrong isn’t the time to scrabble for information.’

  ‘So what are all these books you’re using?’

  I flourished each one. ‘Imray’s Yachtman’s Pilot to the Skye and the North-West of Scotland. That gives me all the lighthouses and anchorages, and advice about routes and tides. The Admiralty Tidal Streams Atlas tells me what the tide is doing every hour, direction and strength.’ I opened it to show him the charts with arrows. A faded photocopy fell out. ‘This is from a book that’s out of print, but it’s a clear guide to Kyle Rhea.’

  Kenny considered. ‘We’re at springs now.’ He leaned forward to the chart. ‘So you want to be at the end of the loch for the first of the west-going tide, five hours after high water.’

  ‘Four and a half hours after,’ I said. ‘The hour is from the half hours.’

  Gavin opened Safari. ‘Tides at Kyle of Lochalsh on Sunday. High Water at 03.58 or 16.14.’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘So it turns to go in the direction I want around half past eight. Two hours to the end of the loch, so ETD 06.30, and the tide with me.’ I wrote it down on my piece of paper. ‘Eyeball navigation to there. Okay, Gavin, Kyle Rhea to the Skye Bridge, how far does the machine reckon it is?’

  ‘Waypoints 5 to 9, 11.4 nautical miles.’

  I spun my dividers over the chart, and nodded. Kenny grinned. ‘You’re not trusting the machine at all, are you?’

  ‘Not an inch. Here, you try.’ I showed him how to lay the parallel ruler on the line I wanted to sail, then walk it to the compass rose on the chart, while Gavin checked the angle on the iPad, and by bedtime we’d worked out timings, tides and compass bearings for the whole journey, along with when I’d see each lighthouse and what its flashing pattern would be, all written clearly on three sides of A4, and stowed ready for cockpit use in a clear plastic wallet.

  ‘This navigation is easy once you know how,’ Kenny said, yawning.

  ‘I’ve still got to actually sail the course,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Ach, there’s no fear of you. We’ll be expecting that phone call to tell us you’ve made it home at 15.36 precisely.’

  A smoor of rain swept over us as Gavin walked me down to the jetty. ‘It’ll clear tomorrow, though,’ he predicted. ‘Are you game for walking up to the Bonnie Prince’s cave?’

  We’d talked one evening of a walk to the waterfall, then along to Prince Charlie’s cave. It was Gavin’s grandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather that had guided the Bonnie Prince to it, when the head of the loch had been stiff with red-coats camped all around the farm, and he’d been rewarded with one of the buttons from the Prince’s coat.

  ‘Our only heirloom,’ Gavin had said, when he’d worn it to the Halloween party I’d got volunteered for judging at, ‘and my heart’s in my mouth every time I wear my black kilt-jacket, for fear I haven’t sewn it on firmly enough. Mother would never forgive me if I lost it.’

  ‘A perfect last day walk,’ I agreed.

  Chapter Three

  Saturday 28th December

  Gavin knew his own loch. By mid-morning, the wind had fallen; the sun had come out in a glory of rainbows, and was picking up the silver twists of the burns cascading down the rust-red hills. The fretted sea had turned from sullen grey to polished pewter, and there were enough blue chinks in the sky to make a Dutchman’s trousers.

  We left Cat sleeping by the fire, took a picnic of scones and his mother’s freshly made crowdie, like cream-textured, salty cottage cheese, and scrunched off along the pebble shore.

  ‘The tourist side,’ Gavin murmured, nodding across at the gravel track running above the opposite shore. ‘Our going’s a bit harder.’ He picked his way up a network of narrow paths to the height of the headland, then down again until we came out at the boulders and were swinging along the shore, walking boots scrunching in time, breath smoking in the crisp air. The grass above the tideline was the yellow-green of newly gathered mermaid hair weed, the shore pebbles coloured like jewels: rose granite, milk quartz, green serpentine, mica-glinting gneiss. The fronds of kelp just breaking the surface at the sea edge of the wide river were crinkled with ice.

  We threaded through an oak wood with mossed boulders between the trees. I could hear the waterfall now, like a distant drum roll; then suddenly we came out to a polished basin brimming with black water, and turbulent with zebra ripples of current in the centre. The still edges had comma-shapes of coffee coloured foam swirling around the sanded-smooth rock. The distant drum roll became a throbbing roar.

  ‘The bottom of the falls,’ Gavin shouted in my ear, and gestured me upwards. A clamber upwards through heather stems, a twist in the path, and w
e were half way up the great cascade, falling the height of a tall ship’s mast from a twisted spout in the rock above us. The path was slippery with spray, but the rooted heather gave a grip underfoot, and the slender trees made good handholds. Half an hour of breathless climbing brought us to the top, beside the lochan that fed the river, with the cascade below us. We paused to unpack our picnic.

  ‘Though we’d better keep moving,’ Gavin said, glancing at the dark shadows on the hills. ‘Kenny said he’d pick us up from the Smugglers’ Bay half an hour before dusk. We can eat as we go.’

  He used the little dagger in his stocking to spread two scones each with crowdie, and we munched companionably as we sidestepped down to mid-hill level. The ice-hardened bracken crunched beneath our feet, and the air was cold and crisp. I was glad of my best sailing socks and gloves. Before us, a mile away on the hill, was the cave we were heading for, a dark mouth half-way up a rock face, with a thin ledge of heather as pathway.

  I was nervous about arriving there. Although we’d achieved a comfortable intimacy in these five days, the closest we’d been physically had been touching fingers as we hung up tree ornaments. At some point we were going to have to get closer. Part of me wanted to: I loved the way he moved, the economy of his hand gestures, the neat way his kilt pleats swirled as he turned. His brown hands were square in shape, hands made to work, yet delicate as a spider spinning a web when he was tying one of his tiny flies. At the same time I was terrified. Convention was closing over me like cold deep water. I could do swinging along the hill path like this, but there would be police functions, and he’d want children, and soon my unfettered life with Khalida’s sails bent on, ready to take me where the wind blew, would just be a memory. And the Bonnie Prince’s cave, with Gavin’s kingdom spread below us, would be a romantic place for a first kiss –

  We were half way there when Gavin wrinkled his nose. ‘A dead deer,’ he said. So much for romance. I was getting the faint scent of it too, a sweet decay overlying the sharp frost, when he stopped dead, with a shocked exclamation in Gaelic. His hand came up to hold me back. My feet halted obediently, but I couldn’t help looking forward.

  I saw the skull first. It was lying in a hollow of dried bracken, below a grey-lichened rock, with the sockets gazing straight at us below a mop of dark hair. The jaw was pushed sideways; the teeth grinned. Something that might have been an ear clung still to the dirty bone. The neat ribs, the spine and breastbone, lay in their pattern, tarnished with vestiges of black flesh. The shoulders were there, but the arms had been pulled away. There were foxes in these hills, and badgers, wildcats, ravens, golden eagles. One leg lay straight; the other kneecap was slightly raised above the dried-fern ground, as if sinews still held it to the thigh. That foot was a jumble of gnawed bones. The smell came from the tangle of dried intestines within the rib cage, like blackened seaweed on a beach.

  Bile rose in my throat. I took a couple of steps back, and choked the sickness down.

  Gavin retreated with me, and reverted to DI Macrae of the Inverness branch of Police Scotland. ‘Scene of Crime are going to be delighted with this.’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket and skewered it flat with bracken stems, a square signpost, then turned to give me a wry smile. ‘Is it you, or I, or just the combination of the two of us, that attracts murder?’

  ‘Murder?’ I managed to keep my voice steady.

  ‘A hillwalker who’d died of a heart-attack or exposure would still have his clothes on.’

  I looked at the exposed bones. There was no sign of torn cloth; only the dark, matted hair.

  ‘Besides,’ Gavin said, ‘this isn’t the tourist side of the loch. A very few go up the track from the back of the Lodge and along the ridge until they get to Arnisdale. Almost nobody comes rambling here.’ He took several photos with his mobile, not stepping any nearer to the body. ‘The last person here was the murderer. There may still be clues. It’s amazing what the SOCOs can find.’

  Sooner them than me. ‘Can you tell how long he – she’s – been there?’

  ‘After the 21st of July.’ Gavin’s tanned cheeks reddened. ‘I always climb up on the anniversary of the Prince being here. Late August, September, maybe. Forensics will narrow it down. But what was he doing up here?’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t carry on to the cave. It may be that was where he’d been, or was headed.’ He sighed. ‘Oh, I’m going to be popular. Every uniform in our force will be doing a sweep of this hill for two days, and finding nothing but bracken.’

  We fell back into step, heading diagonally downwards towards the bay. Above us, the handkerchief shone white against the auburn foliage. ‘Some student going off for a highland ramble, and not being specific about where he was headed?’

  ‘Don’t forget the missing clothes. Two or more students, with the others able to cover up the dead man’s absence, or tell a convincing story of a tragedy, like a drowning where the body wasn’t recovered. I don’t remember one of these from this area, and we’ve certainly not had a missing person reported from here.’

  ‘Why take the clothes? It can’t have been easy, undressing him.’

  ‘To speed up decomposition. To make identifying the body harder.’ He grimaced. ‘Teeth are only any good if you have a name. We’ll see what missing persons comes up with UK wide.’

  I thought about what clothes could tell, as we tramped downhill. Gavin’s kilt would narrow it down to a Macrae with that waist size and height. My T-shirt had been bought in Bergen, and my thermals, knitted gansey, and Musto jacket would mark me out as a sailor, so you could begin by circulating my description among Norwegian yachting folk: woman, thirty, 5’2”, long dark hair in a plait. I reckoned that would get my name within twenty-four hours.

  It was three o’clock by the time we reached the bay Gavin had called Smugglers’. The upper half of the clouds blushed in the last of the sun, the colours were filtered through an amber gel, and the varnished dinghy gleamed bright as a marmalade cat as Kenny curved it round towards us, cut the motor, and sculled it to the shore. Gavin broke into rapid, urgent Gaelic. Kenny followed Gavin’s hand; he nodded as he pin-pointed the white handkerchief, caught now by the last rays of sun on the mountain’s upper slopes, then asked a question, with a gesture of his own towards the cave. Gavin nodded, and added a sweeping movement of his hand and a short phrase which evidently meant ‘They’ll have to search the whole place’ for both brothers grimaced, suddenly looking alike: their private kingdom being trampled by interlopers. I knew how that felt. Gavin had had to search my Khalida, the first time we’d met, and I remembered still my stab of outrage as his space-suited minions had stepped over her guard-rails.

  The men left me on the boat to do a final rig-check before tomorrow’s voyage. By the time I got to the farm, Kenny had explained to their mother, while Gavin went from phone to computer, to download and send his photos, and finally came through to the sitting room, rubbing one hand through his hair. The curls he tried to cut away sprung back. ‘Cass, I’ve told them you must get away tomorrow, so they’re sending the local man from Kyle of Lochalsh to take your statement. I can’t do it, because we were together.’ He grimaced. ‘A round trip of a hundred and forty miles for him. Mother, I invited him to dinner.’

  When the local man arrived, just after six, he turned out to be from Orkney. ‘They try not to put us back to our own place,’ he explained in the familiar lilt, like a Welshman speaking Scots. ‘I’m trying to learn the Gaelic. A lot of the words are the same; the Western Isles folk are almost as Norse as the Northern Isles.’

  ‘The Minch used to be the Viking Corridor,’ I agreed. I’d sailed it in the replica longship Sea Stallion. ‘I’m sorry to drag you out tonight, but tomorrow and Monday are my weather window to get home.’

  ‘To Shetland, yea, yea. Gavin explained that. I’ll get your statement in a peedie minute.’

  It was a constrained last meal, with Sergeant Pearson an extra on one side of the table, and the staring eye-sockets of the skull still viv
id in my memory. Gavin’s mother had intended it as a special goodbye, with a steak pie of golden crispy pastry covering melt-in-your-mouth beef from their own animals, Brussels sprouts and potatoes from the garden, and a lemon meringue pudding which was almost enough to convert me to life ashore. We women cleared away the plates, then left Gavin and Kenny to wash and dry while the sergeant wrote down my statement in his black notebook.

  ‘I had a look on the computer at the station,’ he said, ‘and you’re right enough, Gavin, there’s nobody reported missing anywhere round here this summer, on hill or at sea.’

  ‘Aye,’ Gavin said. ‘But he may have been reported missing from his home area. We’ll be able to start looking once forensics give us a sex, height, and age. Will you be okay, Kenny, to lead the Scene of Crime folk up the hill?’

  Kenny nodded gloomily. ‘Will there be many of them?’

  ‘Two trips, at least, and an extra one back, with the body.’

  It was almost nine o’clock by the time Sergeant Pearson left for his long drive home. ‘It’s a good thing he has nobody waiting up for him,’ Gavin’s mother commented. ‘Cass, see what you would like for your journey. Here are fresh rolls, and ham, and I have portions of stew frozen, you would just need to heat it up and have bread with it.’

  She made a picnic of it, everything I’d need at hand for the first day, and wrapped the carton of stew in newspaper, so that it would defrost slowly and be ready for when I needed it. She had made me a whole crowdie too, and wrapped it with bubblewrap inside a cardboard box: ‘It will keep for a week, easy. This tub is fish for Cat.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I wouldn’t be expecting her to get up at six thirty. ‘Thank you for everything.’ I resorted to my native Shetland. ‘It’s been a most special Christmas.’

  She gave me a steady look from the grey eyes that were so like Gavin’s. ‘I hope you’ll be back, now you’ve found your way.’

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I was glad of Gavin coming into the kitchen. ‘Are you needing a porter, Cass? Creator Lord, will you have room aboard for all this?’