A Handful of Ash Read online

  ‘I’ll want to talk to the parents first, so we can leave them in peace, and I’ll organise my team, then I’ll come along to your Khalida. Shall I bring a chip supper?’

  I sighed. ‘There’s no Frankie’s here.’ Awards declared Frankie’s, in Brae, one of Britain’s best fish and chip shops, as well as the most northerly, and I wasn’t disagreeing. No Frankie’s was one of the down sides of moving to Scalloway. ‘There’s a good Chinese, though – at least, it smells good. Lemon chicken, for preference.’

  There was a bing-bong in his background, followed by an automated voice. Gavin ignored it. ‘Lemon chicken. Rice or noodles?’

  ‘Egg fried rice. Cat’ll like that.’

  ‘Chopsticks or knife and fork?’

  ‘We have both aboard.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you later.’

  I laid the phone down, and went back to the insides of engines. I’d only got as far as the cylinder head (via fuel tank, primary filter, fuel lead, secondary filter and injector, elementary stuff) when the phone went again. It was Kate. ‘Cass, I was wondering if you wanted to come over. I know it’s a bit cold –’

  ‘It wasn’t that,’ I protested. ‘I didn’t think you’d want a stranger around today. Kate, I’m so sorry.’ I couldn’t think of words. ‘So very sorry.’

  ‘It was you who found her, they said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come over, Cass, please come over. I don’t know what to do here. Let’s go out into the garden, and you can tell me about it, and then maybe I’ll believe –’

  My throat tightened. ‘I’ll be right over.’

  It was Peter who opened the door and motioned me in. ‘Kate’s just – ’ He made a kitchenwards gesture.

  He’d grown old overnight. His brisk walk had turned to a sleepwalking daander, feet placed unevenly as if the floor had grown unsteady under him, and his head was bowed over, bending his back like an old man’s. There were black circles under his eyes, and his fair hair was uncombed. He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror and paused, peering, as if he knew something wasn’t right, but couldn’t make out what. Then he lifted one hand and smoothed the fair hair back. Finally he turned to look at me. His eyes were blazing in the greyness of his face. ‘Cass.’ His voice had sharpened; the words tumbled out, with an impatient edge to them, as if they were taking him from what he really wanted to say. ‘Kate’s in the kitchen.’ He gestured again. ‘I’m just going out.’ His hand fumbled among the coats, as if he was searching by touch for his own waxed Barbour. His cap lay on the hall table, one of those leather ones with the fur ear flaps standing up. He crammed it on his head, and whistled for the dogs. I heard a thud from the sitting room, the patter of paws, and Dan and Candy came flurrying along the hall and sat at his feet, waiting. Dan was allowed to run free as far as the main street, but Candy had to have her lead. Peter’s fingers fumbled the familiar catch, then he frowned, put his free hand in his pocket, and drew out a bunch of keys. He looked at them for a moment as if he’d never seen them before. As he weighed them in his hand, the rage within him exploded. He raised his head to look at me. ‘That boy.’ His voice was venomous. ‘I’ll see he gets brought to book for this if it’s the last thing I ever do.’ He gave a sharp nod and hurried out of the front door.

  Kate came along the passage just as the door slammed behind him. She too had aged. Her whole face had shrunk away; there were black shadows under her eyes, and her chestnut hair was too glossy against the white of her cheeks.

  We went out, and down to the bottom of the garden. Above us, the fissures between the clouds became creamy-grey, then pale blue. By eleven, the sun had come out. There was no warmth in it, full in the wind like this, but in our sheltered corner it sparked lines of yellow along the green whitebeam leaves. We worked in silence; I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t want to seem to be forcing confidences. We filled one barrow, then a second.

  ‘She went out,’ Kate said abruptly. I glanced at her, then focused on my hands, clearing the brown umbrella leaves and frothed seed pods of lady’s mantle. ‘About ten o’clock. I didn’t know she’d gone; I was in my studio.’ She made a vague gesture towards the wooden hut at the side of the house. ‘Peter heard her go. He said it was about ten. Just before he took the dogs out. Candy was raring to go, but Dan wasn’t quite right, so he didn’t go as far as he usually does, but even so he was away a good half hour, and she still wasn’t back when he came in. Well, he wanted to go and find her. We quarrelled about that. He was furious, he just wanted to go up there and march her home, and I said he couldn’t do that, she was too old – and then the police car came, and the officer said – she said –’

  Up where? I wanted to ask. Who? – but I couldn’t. She began tearing one leaf into segments, separating it neatly along the vein, re-living every parent’s nightmare. Already the sky was darkening again. ‘Then they began asking about money – what money she should have in her purse, as if a random thug would kill someone for money, here.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Cass, you saw her.’ It was the question she’d been psyching herself up to ask.

  ‘She’d fallen in a heap,’ I said. ‘She didn’t look as if she’d been in pain, or frightened. I couldn’t see any sign of injury. She just looked as if she’d fainted.’

  ‘They said that since you’d identified her, there was no hurry for us to go over – they said they’d get us for the formal ID later, once they’d taken her away from there.’ Her voice went bleak. ‘I wanted to see her. To hold her. I couldn’t believe it.’

  Above us, the sky closed over, and the rain began, great cold drops flung at us like bullets. I stood up, and slipped my hand under her elbow. ‘Time for a cup of tea.’

  She unfolded upwards, stiff as an old woman. I took my hand away, and followed her up the path to the house. She put the kettle on the hob with shaking hands, and looked around the kitchen as if she’d never seen it before, as if she didn’t know where to find mugs, the pot, tea, milk.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  She slid into a chair and huddled in silence as I joined tea, pot, and water. I poured her mugful, added two spoonfuls of sugar, and set it in front of her. Her hands came up to clutch it as if she needed the warmth. ‘Who would do such a thing, here? Who?’

  I couldn’t give an answer to that.

  Do you ever feel as if you’ve lived before? ‘I don’t suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘that she’d got entangled with something mystical?’

  Her head came round sharply, mouth turned down, eyes dismayed. ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘It was something she said about past lives. It sounded like she was thinking about reincarnation.’

  ‘Ohhh.’ She let out a long breath, relieved, then caught herself up and talked almost at random, hands clenching and unclenching on the handle of her mug. ‘One of those New Age groups, you mean, with people seeing space ships, and being channelled from Iris Reticulata, and thinking the pyramids are an alien powerhouse, all that rubbish?’ Generations of squires who’d bossed their Church of England vicars rang scornfully in her voice. ‘But surely she’s too intelligent for that. Her place at Edinburgh is to study science.’

  ‘I don’t know if intelligence has anything to do with it,’ I said. ‘Conan-Doyle was tricked by those ridiculous fairy pictures, because he wanted to believe. And look at those awful Victorian ghost photos. You wonder how they can ever have taken anyone in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to think of her getting mixed up with something like that,’ Kate said. Her voice was bitter. ‘Someone enticing her to get involved with it.’

  ‘I’m not sure if it was that,’ I said. ‘I think it was the past lives thing – you know, reincarnation, memories of being someone else.’

  ‘An Egyptian princess, or a medieval lady,’ Kate scoffed. ‘Always one of the higher-ups, you notice, never the third under scullery-maid. Annette wouldn’t – she wouldn’t have –’ Her eyes filled with tears, then she turned away from m
e and began to sob and shudder, gasping for breath.

  I sat beside her, watching the rain drops fling themselves at the window, and making soothing noises that the rattle of the rain drowned out, until at last she blew her nose again, and stood up. ‘Well, you’ll need to get off to college now. Can’t have you missing lobster-breeding, or the correct inflation of life rafts, or whatever it is today.’ Her voice was restored to normal, though I could hear the effort it took to keep it that way. She reached for my envelope, but I put up a hand, palm forward, to stop her.

  ‘We hardly got anything done today. I’ll earn it next time.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Kate said. ‘Tomorrow would be great.’ Her voice was steady now. She even managed to smile. Englishwomen didn’t break down.

  ‘Great. Usual time,’ I agreed. I hoped my voice made it clear I’d forgotten her tears already. ‘Come on, Cat.’

  I’d just left the gate when a police car drew up behind me. Sergeant Peterson came out of one side, and Gavin out of the other. He was brisk and alert-looking, russet head high, looking around him with his sea-grey eyes. He wore his green kilt, with the plain leather sporran, and his green tweed jacket. I paused, but he just nodded his head in recognition, and knocked on the wooden kitchen door. Poor Kate …

  The wind buffeted my hat as I went back to the boat, and the waves rumbled at the low tide mark. Do you ever feel as if you’ve lived before? Christianity didn’t believe in it, but Buddhism did. You worked your way slowly up the wheel of life, going up if you did well in one life, going down if you did badly. It explained those sudden flashes of déjà vu, and the way some people seemed to have always good luck, and others bad. Karma. There’d been some interesting cases, with children too young to have read about it talking of their former lives. It didn’t feel showy enough for Nate, but I wondered if quiet, serious James Leask, the boy Annette had met up with at the Scalloway Hotel, would be interested in stories of reincarnation. Yes, he might be. I could see him working his way through the Fortean Times magazine, then going through the internet references to make his mind up on this classic poltergeist case, or that UFO sighting. Once he’d decided he did believe it, he wouldn’t be shaken; but I’d never heard it mentioned at college, and believing you can live more than one life would be a good stick for his classmates to beat him with.

  The winds tugged at the pontoon, sending little ripples slapping against the plastic floats. I tightened the halyards again, then went below. The cabin was blissfully warm, and the soup smelled wonderful. I fished the bones out and cut the flesh off, gave some to Cat with the rest of his plaice, and put the rest in a bowl. I’d add some to my soup each day. Then I ladled out some of the broth and sat at my little table, blowing on each spoonful before eating. The flesh was delicious, and the lentils, peas, and rice had turned into a filling sludge at the bottom. It wasn’t quite up to the standards of the soup at Nesting Up Helly Aa, so thick you could stand your spoon up in it, but it was pretty close. I finished off with a mug of tea, washed and dried my bowl, then pulled on my gloves and jacket again. I had a class to go to.

  Chapter Five

  The yellowed clouds were building to the west; the wind snatched my hair from under my hood and whipped it against my cheeks. There was the tin smell of snow in the air. We had practical this afternoon, so I put Cat straight to Nate. I could see he’d heard: his face was drawn, and he greeted me with a grave nod. ‘You’ve heard about Annette. It doesn’t seem real.’

  ‘I found her,’ I said, ‘in the Spanish closs.’

  ‘What happened? Was it a heart attack?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know any more.’

  ‘But it was you that found her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It doesn’t seem real,’ Nate repeated. ‘We all feel it. Most of the students were at school with her.’

  There was a subdued feel about the class that afternoon. I didn’t imagine the sideways look I got from Jeemie, usually the loudest person in a class, with a jolly laugh that could well drive a future wife to braining him with the nearest blunt instrument. Today, instead of making his way over to share this morning’s Facebook joke, he kept apart from me, as if my finding the body might contaminate him, and the rest of them bent over their engines in strained silence.

  ‘My’ engine was in the far corner. I unscrewed the bolts that held the injector in, and eased it out of its chamber. Khalida’s engine was about as similar to this Yanmar as a Shetland pony is to a racehorse, but the fuel line was laid in the same way, with the rocket-shaped injector at the end, and as I worked I could see my friend Anders at my shoulder, and hear his voice: If you have to force it, you are doing it wrong. Pause, move your spanner and try again, gently.

  I missed Anders. He’d been a casual friend when I’d brought him over to Shetland as engineer for the replica Viking ship being used as a film set. We’d lived together aboard Khalida from March until August; shared meals and swapped stories of our days – him in the engineering firm of Malakoff in Lerwick, me doing week-long courses for beginner sailors up at my home town of Brae. He’d comforted me when I’d had nightmares after being shut in a horrible Neolithic tomb. When he’d been gored by a bull, his mother had jumped at the opportunity to whisk him away from my contaminating influence and back to Bergen, where she could feed him proper meals and introduce him to a nice Norwegian girl. That had been the last time I’d seen him: handing over Rat in Bergen under his mother’s hostile eye. It still felt odd to wriggle into my berth without a last ‘Good night’ to and from the forepeak, to get up into an empty boat in the morning. He’d kissed me before he left Shetland … but I wasn’t going to think about that. He was younger than me, and stunningly handsome, and I was a footloose skipper with a scar across her cheek. He was a Lutheran too, a regular churchgoer, and I was Catholic; that would be bound to cause trouble. Besides, there was Gavin Macrae … I wondered if a psychiatrist would say I was fostering this dual attraction in my subconscious so that I didn’t have to commit to either of them. I shrugged that one away. Anders was in Bergen, and Gavin was here.

  It was at that moment my phone bleeped. Speak of angels. It was a text from Anders: Read Shet news wht r u mxd up in? Doc said ystrdy shouldr officly healed + can rtn to work. Shl I try Malakoff?

  He would be so suitable, Anders. We could take Khalida off to the Caribbean together, then go on to Australia … but I couldn’t say ‘Yes, come’ unless I was sure that was what I wanted.

  I grimaced at the phone. It would be three o’clock in Norway, time to stop for a hot chocolate. He’d be sitting with his pals in his dad’s yard in Bildøy, in his green overalls, with Rat on his shoulder and his mug in his hand, handle outwards. For a moment I missed him so much that it hurt – but Gavin was here, talking to Kate. I’d see him later. Each of them deserved a whole heart.

  I sighed and pressed ‘reply’. Nothing to do with me I just found body. Glad u better. Taking college engine apart over and out. Over and out was our shorthand for ‘I’m about to go up the mast, so won’t be answering the phone for a bit.’ I couldn’t think about Anders just now.

  The nut stuck. Pause, move your spanner, try again. It still wouldn’t move. I could hear Anders’ voice murmuring over my shoulder. Tighten it, just a little, then try. That trick worked, and I was just easing it round when a shadow fell over it. It was Kevin, a quiet, sandy-haired guy who always arrived late. Being last today had landed him with me as a partner.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  He gave a nervous bob of the head and sidled round to the front of the engine. ‘Aye aye, Cass. What’re we doing the day?’

  Our lecturer had told us last Thursday that today would be the fuel system, and our homework had been to look at the diagrams. I nodded at the injector. ‘The fuel system.’

  He looked blankly at my line of nuts, washers and piping. ‘What’s all that?’

  ‘The fuel line from the secondary filter to the injector.’ I fitted it back together and screwed it in its place. �
��There, you take it apart.’

  I watched him as Anders had watched me, and heard myself using his words: ‘If you have to force it, it’s threaded wrong. Move your spanner and try again.’ Kevin’s hands were trembling so that the spanner was slipping on the nuts, and now I looked at him, he was paler than usual, his freckles standing out against the skin. ‘Are you okay?’

  He shrugged the question away, then hesitated, hands stilling on the spanner. He gave me a sideways look, then finished unscrewing the nut. He lifted it out and began to ease the fuel pipe upwards. ‘It’s Nan. Me great-granny.’

  I waited in silence.

  ‘She’s ninety-three, but not doiting yet.’

  Doiting was the Shetlan for losing your memory.

  ‘She lives in the upstairs o’ the big black and white house up on Castle Street. She has home helps and all that, and two days at the Walter Gray.’ The Walter and Joan Gray Eventide Home was Scalloway’s church-run care centre, just opposite the slip where the wartime Norwegians had repaired their boats. Walter Gray had been a radio operator in Canada; he’d received the telegram to say that the murderer Crippen and his mistress, Le Neve, were on their way across the Atlantic, pursued by Inspector Dew, and he’d been one of the first to know the Titanic had sunk, through a telegram from the Carparthia. Shetlanders get everywhere.

  ‘And on the other days,’ Kevin said, ‘I go up in me lunch break to make her some soup for her dinner, and speak about what’s all doing.’

  I nodded. That explained why he was so often late for class.

  ‘For all she’s ninety-three, and her eyesight maybe no so good as it was, she’s no doiting,’ he repeated. ‘We have some fine chats, me and Nan.’ He lifted the fuel pipe out and laid it beside the nuts, then began unscrewing the injector. ‘But the day, she was awful upset. She’d had this bad dream – well, I thought it was a dream, then I remembered –’ His hands stilled on the nut. He gave that sideways bob of the head again. ‘It was you that found the body, wasn’t it?’