The Trowie Mound Murders Page 5

  Someone had been in her. I knew that the moment I opened the upper washboard; there was something in the air, not so definite as a perfume, and when I looked around everything was just that shade different – the angle of the log book on the table, the tilt of the green and yellow cushions, the hang of Anders and Rat’s curtain. Rat himself swarmed up out of his bolt-hole under the tool-shelf; that he’d taken refuge there was further confirmation that somebody, a sly unknown somebody, had been aboard and meddling about. I took careful stock. My bunk; yes, they’d not only checked in my bed, but they’d lifted the cushion to inspect the locker below as well. They’d had the pots and pans out, and even, I thought, given the engine space the once-over; the brass hooks that held the cover weren’t quite as I’d have left them. I couldn’t tell what they’d done forrard. My temper was rising, and if Madge or David had been about I’d have spoken my mind pretty bluntly. They had no right to come aboard without my permission, no right whatsoever to search my ship. If they were police, they could come back with a warrant.

  I wasn’t worried about anything being stolen; there was nothing to take. Then I had a nastier thought. Suppose that, rather than taking, they’d added something. There were a dozen places in Khalida where they could stow an illegal cargo – drugs, say, or even one of the paintings that David had talked about. All they had to do then was tip off the police, and we were in serious trouble.

  Searching Khalida was the last thing I felt like doing. I wanted a cup of tea in the sun, with Rat draped around my neck, in the peace of the marina, without a dozen kamikaze Picos circling me.

  I sighed, and braced myself. Khalida was, for these purposes, a mercifully small ship, and I knew every inch of her. Unless it was something really exotic, like diamonds painted to resemble fibreglass lumps stuck to her hull, it wouldn’t take long to make sure there was nothing planted aboard.

  It took three-quarters of an hour. I cleared every locker and re-stowed the contents, I shook out and re-folded my clothes and I shone a torch round every inch of the engine. I even took Rat’s paper nest apart, much to his disgust. The only thing I didn’t search was Anders’ forepeak. I’d leave that to him. Everywhere I’d gone there were signs, faint but unmistakeable, that someone else had been there first, but, as far as I could see, nothing had been taken, nothing left.

  I settled at last in Khalida’s cockpit with a cup of tea, watching the black-capped arctic terns swooping and diving for sand eels in the still water ten metres from me. The sheep-workers up above must have finished, for the dogs were being loaded into the pick-ups, and the last sheep were scampering in relief across the hill, calling their lambs and escorting them to the safety of the scattald. The pick-ups rattled over the cattle-grid, the quad roared off, and silence flowed back. The smell of flowering whitebeams drifted down from the garden above the marina, the terns chittered at each other, and the water washed gently up the boating club slip again.

  There was nothing added to Anders’ kit-bag, but for someone usually so laid-back, he was surprisingly annoyed about the search.

  ‘They have no right.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘And what were they searching for?’

  ‘The paintings they talked about. I think Magnus is right, they are police, and they think we are the robbers they are chasing for.’ He waved his fork in the air. ‘I do not know why they should think this, unless they have a description of the real robbers that we fit too.’

  ‘No description of us would fit anyone else: small, dark, half-French girl with scar, Norwegian man with pet rat.’

  ‘This is true.’

  ‘They’re suspicious of couples,’ I said. ‘They were checking out Peter and Sandra too, as if they know it’s a couple in a boat they’re looking for, but no more than that – no description of us would fit them too, the ages are way different.’

  ‘It is all very odd,’ Anders said. He went pink, then crimson, the kind of flush that begins at the root of the neck and swells up to the hairline, with the speed of a tide reaching a flat place. ‘Cass, I have been meaning to ask –’

  I waited, intrigued.

  ‘I was wondering what are the laws on, you know –’ he gave an uneasy glance over his shoulder ‘– on films of sex in this country.’

  I gaped at him. He’d never shown any particular signs of being a sex-movie addict, but what did I know? He had his own laptop, and could watch what he liked. ‘Blue-movie DVDs?’

  He forked a very large mouthful of stir-fry in and concentrated on chewing it, the blush rising again. He nodded, not looking at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I suppose if it’s Norwegian stuff that’s not been passed by the British censors they might not be happy.’

  He finished his forkful and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, shaking his head gloomily. I didn’t want to ask any more.

  It was a points-race evening. I didn’t take Khalida out for these – she was my home, not a trophy-winner – but I enjoyed crewing on one of the other boats, a new Starlight. The owner and most of the crew were Magnie’s generation, and I enjoyed the sociability of sitting on the foredeck chatting, interrupted by the occasional piece of jib-or spinnaker-wrestling. It felt like returning to my roots, listening to my granny and her mates in Dublin holidays, hearing all the gossip of what was going on in and around Brae – and where women got the blame of being gossips, I can’t say, for the men were equal to Granny Bridget any day. We worked through someone called John o’ Easthouse, who’d been caught drunk-driving, and a row between Bill and Maggie of the Hoyt, because she’d had a dram too many at their silver wedding: ‘You’d a thought he’d be used to it be noo,’ Jeemie said – and round to yesterday’s sheep-caa.

  ‘Robbie o’ the Knowe let his mouth open a bit wide while they were up on the hill,’ Jeemie said. ‘He was speaking about the goings on at the old Nicolson house, and Brian was standing right ahint him.’

  ‘Aye?’ Magnie said encouragingly.

  ‘He didna say ower muckle, but enough, I doot, that Brian might be taking a look at what’s going on there.’

  Of course, the old Nicolson house was the one below the Trowie Mound, where Brian had been brought up. I supposed he still owned it.

  ‘So what’s going on there?’ I asked. Magnie reddened, and Jeemie took a sudden interest in the set of the mainsail.

  ‘Dir a bit of meeting up going on,’ Magnie said. ‘Now don’t you ask any more, Cass, lass.’

  ‘Aye, Brian’ll maybe be asking for his keys back,’ Jeemie said. He gave a relieved glance at the bouy fifty yards ahead. ‘Now, folk, are you ready with that kite? Peter o’ Wast Point is on my stern, so see how slick you can make it.’

  I glanced behind. Renegade had her usual full complement of crew, including Olaf Johnston, back in the cockpit with a beer can in one hand, and Alex, perched on the foredeck. He waved. ‘Hi, Cass, we’re catching you.’

  I slid astern, ready to take the sheet and guy; Magnie lifted the pole up, and Jeemie leant forward to haul it up. I pulled the guy tight and fastened it off, then Magnie went to the mast and began hauling the crumpled spinnaker. It came up fast, billowing out, and I hauled the sheet, taming the sail to a beautiful curve. The boat surged forwards.

  ‘That’s good,’ Magnie called back from the foredeck, ‘Hold her at that.’ He sat down on the cabin roof. ‘How about your walking folk from the yacht, Cass, any sign of them?’

  ‘None,’ I called back, over the flapping of Renegade’s spinnaker. ‘But it’s early yet, and light all night. It’s a good walk to the trowie mound, too. They’ll turn up.’

  Renegade got her sheet in, so that the last words echoed over silence. I saw Alex’s head turn. He gave me a long look, then, when he saw me watching him, turned away again. I could see, though, that he had it noted; he’d tell Norman. I’d have liked to know why Norman was so very interested in the comings and goings at the marina.

  Chapter Five

  Wednesday 1 August

&nb
sp; Tide times for Brae:

  Low Water 02.56 0.4m

  High Water 09.19 2.0m

  Low Water 15.09 0.6m

  High Water 21.25 2.2m

  Moon waxing gibbous

  Peter and Sandra had mentioned camping, and although I hadn’t noticed a tent as they’d set off, one of their backpacks could have been a state-of-the-art fold-tiny. I kept glancing across at the boating club drive as the bairns sailed around me in the sunshine the following day, and when there was still no sign of them as Anders and I were sharing a post-work cup of tea, I was uneasy.

  ‘I know they’re responsible adults,’ I said, ‘but all the same, I’d have expected them either to be back by now, or to have called the boating club and asked if we could keep an eye on Genniveve. And what about their cat? It’s still aboard.’

  ‘If they are weekend sailors,’ Anders said, ‘they would not count it odd to leave her alone overnight. You are used to being in your boat every day.’

  ‘True,’ I conceded, ‘but it’s a strange berth.’

  ‘They tied her up very carefully, and Peter checked her over before they left. Maybe they are having fun hitch-hiking round Shetland, or have taken the chance of a night in a B&B. Somewhere,’ he added with the air of one dreaming of wonders, ‘with a cooked breakfast and hot showers, and a comfortable double bed.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But they left me with the definite impression they were just going for the day. How about you taking the car up along the road way, to see if there are any signs of them, and I’ll sail Khalida round to the old Nicolson house, anchor up, take the dinghy ashore, and climb up to the trowie mound?’

  Hearing myself say the words reminded me of Magnie, yesterday. He’d been talking about Norman – mothers didn’t like him near their lasses – and then he’d added, as if it were a clincher, He goes along to the old Nicolson house.

  Dir a bit o’ meeting going on … Brian’ll maybe be asking for his keys back. I said the last phrase aloud, and Anders jumped like a startled sheep.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s something Magnie said, yesterday, that Norman, the jet-skier, went along to the old Nicolson house, as if that told me all I should know about him. Alex and Graham started playing dodgems, so I didn’t ask what he meant.’

  Anders looked sideways at me. ‘You are too young, Cass. You are hopeless at seeing the world.’

  ‘What am I missing, then?’

  Anders went pink again. I watched with interest as the tide rose, and subsided. But he changed the subject. ‘I suppose it would not do any harm to look for them. But if we do not see them?’

  ‘Let’s look first,’ I said. I glanced out of the window at the tide, inching its way up the slip, and reached for the navy tidal atlas for Orkney and Shetland that lived above the chart table. Low water had been just after three, so it was now high water minus four, an hour to get out into the Atlantic, high water minus three, then plus two to put it back to high water Dover – I flicked through the pages and considered the arrows. The tide in the sweep of St Magnus Bay would be against me going, but not by much, a knot or so, and it’d help me coming home. With the wind still a southerly force 3, I could sail all the way.

  It was a bonny sail. Khalida tugged impatiently under my hand as I trimmed the mainsail, glad to be out on the water instead of being used as a houseboat. We surged steadily down the two-mile long voe and around the corner into the deeper Rona, the channel between the red cliffs of Muckle Roe and the island of Vementry with its World War I guns, twenty-foot barrels protecting St Magnus Bay, where the British fleet was anchored before the battle of Jutland. Beyond them was the Atlantic. Already Khalida was rising and falling to the larger swell. Gulls swooped and dived at the water just ahead of me. I hooked the autopilot chain over Khalida’s tiller, and got out the handline. It would be a shame to waste a shoal of mackerel. By the time we left the Rona I’d caught five medium-sized ones, glinting green and iridescent silver as they came up through the water, flapping tiger-striped in the bucket. We’d have grilled mackerel for supper. I was hungry now, though. I filleted two and put them under the grill. I’d eat one right away, and have the second in a roll up by the trowie mound, looking out over the bay.

  I sailed on around the corner. Papa Stour was out to my left; beyond it, the distant three-shelved smudge of Foula, and after that nothing but sea for two thousand miles. I turned right and headed up the coast, keeping a wary distance from the red cliffs with their gaping underhangs, like shark mouths. There was a white motorboat in the distance, a good two miles away, anchored just off where I was headed. I reached for the spyglasses, and focused. Yes, it was David and Madge’s boat, right enough, with its high, flared bow, and someone in a red Musto jacket messing about with a couple of rods in holders on the stern. There was no sign of Madge on the foredeck, but it was more exposed out in the Bay here, and too chilly for sunbathing. I watched for a bit longer, but there was no sign of movement from below. I wondered where they’d spent the night. There were pontoons at both Aith and Voe, as well as sheltered, isolated bays if you wanted a night under the stars, although they hadn’t struck me as night-under-the-stars people. They’d want their shore power to run all those gadgets.

  He stayed put until I was within five cables, then upped anchor and roared off, still with no sign of Madge. I wondered where she was, if she wasn’t on board.

  The trowie mound headland was much as I remembered it: a steep, green hill on three sides, with the pimple of the mound itself at the top. The fourth side, looking seaward, was a cliff, falling sheer to the sea in a glitter of pink granite. Our ancestors gave their dead the best view of their territory, so that the ‘old ones’ could keep watching over them. The green was good; Peter and Sandra’s red jackets would stand out like a lighthouse beam on a dark night if they were in trouble there. Curving behind the hill, the long voe of Mangaster ran into the land, and there were houses at the far end of it, but the crofts at this end had been abandoned in the fifties, as road transport took over from boats. Only one looked habitable still, the seaward one, ‘the Nicolson hoose’. It was tucked into its own little bay, with the isles of Egilsay and Cave protecting it from the Atlantic and hiding it from the houses on Muckle Roe; an isolated spot, too lonely even for me, although I reckoned that nowadays you could bring a pick-up along the walking track by the shore. There was a mooring bouy bobbing in the bay, bright orange, with a ring on the top. Presumably Brian had renewed it for visiting the cottage by boat. Dir a bit o’ meeting up going on …

  I shoved that thought away, and hauled the anchor chain up from its locker in the bow. The bouy probably would hold Khalida, but taking a chance on a strange mooring wasn’t seamanlike.

  I dropped anchor in three metres of water just off the cottage. It didn’t look as if it was used much. It had that dead look houses get, with windows black and empty, and the door shut as if it would never open again. The evening sun tinted the white walls, picked up the cracks in the window paint, and gave the cottage a long, sinister shadow. The strip of beach in front of it had boulders rolled to a line, to make a landing place, and I rowed my rubber dinghy in there, sploshed ashore, and made it fast.

  The cottage was of traditional Shetland pattern, just like Magnie’s, with the house, barn, and byre all in one line. There was a porch in the centre, with one square window on each side, and three skylights in the roof. Within, there would be a room on each side, with a steep stair in the middle leading up to two rooms above. I caught a glimpse of a double bed, with some kind of black metal tripod standing out against the white bedcover. There was no garden in front, just a rectangle of grey feather-headed grass sprinkled with coral-pink ragged-robin, then the beach, with the waves whispering among the pebbles. It was very still; only the waves sighing, the peep-peep of an oyster-catcher down at the water’s edge, and the murmur of the wind broke the silence.

  For all that, I had that nasty ‘being watched’ feeling as I walked past the cottage: a
prickling in my shoulder blades, and a wish to turn around. I wondered if it had a reputation for being haunted; I’d ask Magnie next time I saw him. He goes along to the old Nicolson house … Maybe they held those teenage Satanic rituals there, with all the daftness of Ouija boards and table-turning, and Norman dressing himself up as chief priest, or whatever devil worshippers called themselves.

  I tried to remember, as I trudged up the hill, when the house had last been used. Brian’s mother had been Barbara. Her face swam into my mind, a thin woman with sandy-coloured hair, a sour expression, and pouncing movements, like a curlew on the beach, stabbing its beak into the sand, and coming up with a worm. Now what had happened to Brian’s father? He’d gone off in some way, whether with another woman, or just left. I wasn’t sure if Barbara had turned sour after that, or if the sourness had driven him off. He’d been a fisherman. Maybe he just hadn’t liked living at the back of beyond. This had been her family home, she’d been brought up here, and I had a vague feeling her mother had been alive and living here too. Anyway, Barbara had lived here with Brian until he’d come to school, then she’d been offered a council house, because she couldn’t bring him to school by boat every day, and it was too far for a five-year-old to walk to the end of the track for the school bus. Brian had been – let me see, two, no, three years older than me. When he’d been in primary seven I’d been in primary four.

  They’d come back here in the holidays. I remembered that. It had been after school went back at the end of summer that Brian had come in boasting about the skulls he’d found in the trowie mound, and trying to scare us by thrusting the open-mouthed carrier bag at us. The grandmother had died twelve years ago, just before I’d left Shetland, in one of the rash of cancers that had afflicted people in Shetland after the first Gulf War, when the wind blew low-grade radiation to us.

  Twelve years. I paused and looked down at the house. It still had the traditional tarred roof, black and sticky, needing yearly re-painting, and this one certainly hadn’t been left for that long. Brian must be keeping the house up. There would probably be grants from the SIC for re-using an old house site, rather than opening up a new one. Maybe he planned to move back. I tried to think what had happened to him. An electrician was my impression, working south, on the Scottish mainland. Magnie would know.