The Trowie Mound Murders (18 page)

‘I think that's the bit I can't stand,' Cerys said frankly. ‘It's a spider's web, not a map. I have fun breaking the small town rules for these summer weeks, and winding Brian's mum up, but I couldn't live here. Thank God Brian's given the idea up.'

‘The small town rules help too,' I said. ‘Teenagers know them. They know that, whatever happens south, up here if you get caught shoplifting your name's in the papers, and everyone knows, and your mum's going to be so mortified.'

Another trio of children came in, deliberated over the exact colour of rubber to buy, and went on to the Gonfirth Kirk stall's toffee. Confusingly, here in Shetland, toffee was what the Scots would call tablet, squares of crunchy brown sugary stuff which were brilliant for instant energy. I remembered enjoying it myself on Voe Show day – the only time I was allowed it, as Maman insisted it would
détruire les dents.
It went like snow off a dyke at shows. The Gonfirth Kirk lady's cardboard boxful of little bags was half emptied already, and I'd need to hurry if I was going to buy some.

‘Our mam would've leathered me if I'd even thought of coming home with clothes I'd not paid for.' Cerys shook her head. ‘Times is changing. We had the good years, when there was money. Now everyone thinks they're entitled to it all, but the money's gone. Those riots, were you here then?'

I shook my head. I'd been in Bergen then, but I'd watched them on TV, a mob of teenagers indulging in an orgy of destruction and theft. I'd found it hard to believe what I was seeing, areas of London and Manchester turned into a no-go zone.

Cerys shook her head. ‘No, I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe Brian's right, in spite of the small-town gossip.' She rose to bag up a handful of assorted pencils and rubbers and notebooks for a middle-aged lady in a yoke jumper. ‘£3.50, please. Ta. If we were thinking of kids, we should come back here, where it's still peaceful. The old-fashioned lifestyle, with all the mod cons.' She settled herself back in her chair, gave a quick look around to make sure nobody was listening, then slanted a sideways look at me, malice gleaming from between the spider-leg eyelashes. ‘And you can still manage a bit of fun. What do you do when you want a man? Or are you into women?'

Her bluntness disconcerted me. ‘It hasn't been a problem,' I managed, after a two-breath pause. That wasn't entirely true, but most nights I crawled into my berth too knackered to worry about my non-existent sex-life.

She gave a smooth, shark smile. ‘You could do worse than Anders, now I've warmed him up a bit for you, got him over his inhibitions.'

There was no answer I could make to that, and I wasn't going to let this over-dressed Barbie doll wind me up. ‘A couple of beers would do for that,' I said.

‘Oh, we did better than beer.' Her eyes glinted, veiled by the glossy lashes. ‘Not that he knows it.' She rose as an old man came in wanting Christmas cards, served him with a candy-sweet smile, then sat down again. ‘You can never tell how well a man's going to perform with a camera on him, so you slip him an enhancer in a beer beforehand.'

This wasn't at all the sort of conversation I was comfortable with, but I wasn't going to show her that. Cool Cass … furthermore, the idea of her slipping Anders some sort of Viagra without his knowledge enraged me. ‘Underhand,' I said, as contemptuously as I could.

Her eyes flashed angrily; the sugar-pink lips thinned. ‘You'd prefer him to make a fool of himself by shooting too soon, or not being able to get it up at all?' Her tone suddenly went intimate. ‘I know which he'd prefer. We had a good night.'

I smiled sweetly. ‘Nice to hear about people enjoying themselves.'

Her eyes went to her watch again. ‘So which do you prefer?'

I gave her a blank look, as if I'd forgotten the question.

‘Men or women?'

‘Men,' I conceded. I didn't add my personal view that a good sail was generally more satisfying. The knot of children that had gone straight for the toffee had finished rearranging everything on the Cat Protection Stall; it was our turn now. I stood up and smiled at them.

‘Hiya, Cass,' one said. It took a moment to recognise her, out of her black and pale-blue wetsuit. The dark eyes gave her away as Inga's middle child, Dawn. ‘Did you ken they've found a yacht near Linga? Dad's boat is one of the ones that was looking this morning.'

‘They've found a
body
,' emphasised one of the boys. I knew him by the hat: Shaun, an expert in the art of dry capsizing, but not so good at remembering technicalities like sail trim.

‘On the yacht?'

‘Yeah, it said on SIBC, at eleven o'clock.'

SIBC was the local 24-hour radio station, with a news bulletin on the hour. I waved them out and sat down, thinking about that one. A body on the yacht. Peter? Sandra? I felt like I'd been rammed in the belly.

‘How'd you feel about two at once?' Cerys' voice was as businesslike as if she was asking if I took milk in my coffee. ‘I could set you up with, say, Anders and someone dark.' She paused and looked me over, as if it was a serious proposition. ‘No, you're dark. Another blond man. How long's your hair, when it's loose?'

Darkness and light … for a moment, I was too flabbergasted to answer. She continued as if I'd already agreed. ‘One on one, you see, nobody's interested. They can do that for themselves. But if you're not into women, it has to be a threesome.'

I wasn't going to lose my temper. ‘I think it's a revolting idea,' I said, ‘and I'm not interested.'

Another slanted look. ‘Sometimes people who aren't getting any sex are glad of an offer. Anders was.' She gave her watch another glance. ‘Think about it, anyway. I'd need to get back to Kirsten. Will you be okay on your own?'

‘I'll be fine,' I said.

I didn't follow immediately. She'd given me too much to think about.
It has to be a threesome
 … was that why Anders had been so shame-faced? And who had been the other woman? I heard his voice from yesterday:
His mother is called Kirsten?
Kirsten and Cerys, friends married to friends. Dark hair and fair, darkness and light. Kirsten, who was under Olaf's thumb; Olaf, who'd been a swaggering bully at school. I had a memory of him boasting about magazines he'd read, though even he hadn't risked bringing them to school. And the way he'd been eyeing me up, when he'd come to the boating club; had he been wondering how I'd take an offer like this? Had he set Cerys onto me, or did she go fishing for herself? Olaf was the ‘he' Anders had mentioned, filming the threesome.
I do not want you mixing with these people … the cottage is not a good place for you to go.
Now I'd begun, it was obvious what the relationship between Olaf and Cerys was. They were brash enough, both of them, to be lovers, in spite of being married to someone else. Maybe once he got bored of illicit sex with his best mate's wife, he'd got his own wife to join in, his mistress's pal, Kirsten, who'd gone up for a blessing, but refused communion, as if she'd done something so wrong that she couldn't take communion until she'd been to confession.

I thought of Brian, in his gaudy shirt, with his rifle to hand, and that suppressed air of rage.
Robbie o'; the Knowe'd let his mouth open a bit wide … 
and so Brian had found out what everyone else in the place knew, that his wife and best friend were carrying on in his own house. He'd left Olaf with a key, to keep an eye on things while he was south. He'd gone there and found the bed with the black satin sheets and the video tripod. In a rage, he'd burned and smashed. He'd changed the locks so that there'd be no more of it. He couldn't confront Olaf now, not after Alex's death. There'd obviously not been a reckoning with Cerys yet either, with his mother in the same house – but there would be, I was sure of that.

Suddenly I wondered what Norman's part in all this was. What had Magnie said?
The mothers arena keen on their lasses going anywhere near him … he goes along to the old Nicolson house.
Was Norman, young as he was, taking advantage of the kingsize bed and the video? Or was he part of his father's sleaze empire too? He was nearly sixteen; at nearly sixteen, I was working out how to run away from France, earning money and stashing it in an account Maman didn't know about, booking myself on board a tall ship that would bring me back to Scotland, where sixteen was an adult, and nobody could force me to go back to school in Poitiers, where I'd been a fish out of water, the selkie-wife having to pretend interest in the latest music and fashions. Norman liked knowing what was going on; he'd have found out about his father and Cerys soon enough, and could well have set to turning their set-up to his advantage. They did the threesomes, he invited the young lasses. I wasn't going to under-estimate a precocious teenager.

It was horrid, all of it.

Chapter Twenty

I was just brooding on the nastiness of modern life when there was a scuffle at the door, and Peerie Charlie charged in, gold curls flying, with the air of being propelled by his scarlet trainers. ‘Dass, I seed ditten.'

He was dressed today in shorts and a lime-green T-shirt with a T-Rex on it, all slavering jaws, and the sort of thing I'd have thought would have given any toddler nightmares.

‘I hope you don't mind,' Inga said. ‘We came to the marquee earlier, and there was no sign of you, but we saw
Khalida
at the pier, so we drove down to see if that was where you were, and of course Charlie had to say hello to your kitten.'

Charlie held up a finger. ‘I gentle. One.'

‘It rather liked him,' Inga said.

Charlie did an imitation of a purr. ‘I stuck in cat flap,' he said. He raised one elbow to show me a graze.

‘Ouch,' I said, wondering if I'd heard right. ‘What were you doing in the cat flap?'

‘I stuck,' Charlie said.

‘Did I hear that right?' I asked Inga.

She rolled her eyes. ‘It was a notion of the lasses. Some TV programme had said burglars south were putting toddlers through cat flaps to open the door, and Dawn said it wouldn't work, and Vaila said it would, so they tried it with Charlie.' She grinned. ‘It didn't work.'

I made a face. ‘You wouldn't believe parents would do that with their own children, would you?'

‘It didn't have to be theirs,' Inga said. ‘Remember Oliver Twist, that bit where Bill Sykes took him to go burgling?'

‘You're reading Dickens?' I said incredulously.

‘Don't be daft. Miss Morrison showed us the film, in S1, as an end-of-term treat.'

I searched backwards in my memory. ‘The boy who wanted more and lots of singing.'

‘That's the one.'

Charlie had moved on to investigating the plastic boats on the stall. ‘Mine,' he said, holding one up.

‘You have one the same,' Inga said. ‘In your bath. That's not your one, that's Cass's. You can choose a different one.' She sat down on Cerys' chair, her cheery smile dissolving. ‘I was just over to see Kirsten. We both play in the netball team, and Alex was in Dawn's class. It's just awful.'

‘How is she?' It felt a stupid question; what could you expect?

Inga shook her head, mouth twisting. ‘Is that coffee?' She reached into the box and found a mug, added coffee powder, water, and milk. ‘Oh, God. She's – she's distraught. It's not just Alex –' She shook her head again. ‘I don't mean ‘just' Alex. That's enough to send any mother crazy. I don't know how she can bear it. Just the thought of it makes me want never to let any of mine out of my sight ever again.' Now she was crying too, with a quick look to make sure Charlie was intent on trying the boats out on the floor. ‘It's so awful. He was such a fine bairn.' Charlie looked up then stood up, toddler muscles shoving him straight up from a squatting position. He came over to give Inga a hug. ‘Mummy not cry.' He gave her a kiss. ‘I make it better.'

 Inga brushed the tears away with one hand. ‘Thank you, Charlie. I'm better now.' He went back to playing with his boats, but I could see he was keeping an eye on her. Inga knew it too; she calmed her voice. ‘Poor, poor Kirsten. They've got her under sedation, but she was talking wildly, about it being God's punishment on her, and she kept trying to get up. I had to coax her into lying down again.'

‘Was she involved in the goings-on at the cottage?'

Inga shot me a sharp look. ‘Is this all something to do with your missing yacht?'

‘I think it's all linked somehow, but I can't see how.'

‘Don't you mess about with it. Leave it to your DI – what's his name, Macrae? It's his job.' She gave me a sudden fierce look. ‘You haven't been messing about already, have you?'

I shook my head. ‘Hand on heart, no,' I promised. ‘I looked for the missing yacht folk, but that didn't lead to Alex's death.'

Her jaw sagged open. She gave me a steady look from her seal-dark eyes, then took a long drink of coffee. ‘I hadn't thought of that. It was an accident – wasn't it? Alex.' Her voice was beginning to rise; she took a deep breath, and softened it. ‘You're not saying that someone did that to him. Oh, God, poor Kirsten –'

It was Gavin's ship. I didn't know what I could say, and not say, and what harm saying the wrong thing might do. I shook my head. ‘I don't know what the police are thinking.'

‘He talks to you though, doesn't he, the Inspector from south? You had him out in the rescue boat yesterday.'

‘Was it really only yesterday?' I asked. ‘It feels like years ago.'

‘And what're you done to your hands?'

Charlie looked up at that, stood again, and came round to look, taking my hands one at a time and turning them over. ‘Sore,' he pronounced. ‘Poor Dass.' His voice oozed adult sympathy. ‘Diss it better.' He gave each hand a slobbery kiss.

‘Thanks, Charlie,' I said.

He took my hand. ‘Now we see horses. Dass, come.'

Inga gave me a look that warned me I'd get the third-degree later, when Charlie was out of earshot. ‘On you go,' she said. ‘Have a wander. I'll take over here for a bit. If you see either of the lasses, can you tell them this is where I am?'

‘I'll tell them,' I agreed, and stood up. Instantly I was towed towards the horse pens. The judging had finished; the small ponies were back in their pens, next to the sheep, and the big horses stood in a line in makeshift stalls. I steered Charlie towards the pens. I'd feel safer if there was a barrier between him and those plate-sized hooves. The grass we walked over had been cropped short by sheep in the weeks before the show. It was dry underfoot, with the occasional skein of wool entwined among the longer tussocks, but you had to watch out for drying lumps of sheep sharn.

Close to, the pens were made out of wooden pallets attached to upright posts with orange baler twine. Each pen was three pallets square, just big enough for three ponies or half a dozen sheep. Charlie clambered up the first pallet as if it was a ladder, and leaned over the top, staring. From below, a moorit ram with rust-coloured fleece and a magnificent pair of horns curling around his cheekbones glared back. Its eyes were yellow, with horizontal oval pupils. I grasped Charlie's T-shirt. Storms at sea were one thing, enraged Shetland rams quite another.

‘Beeeh,' Charlie said, and climbed back down. ‘Sheep. Beeeh. Not horse. Neigh.'

I steered him past a dozen more pens of sheep to where the horses began. ‘Here's a baby horse.' It was a red and white foal in the pen with its mother, its head no taller than Charlie's, its back still woolly, and its little tail waggling like clockwork. As soon as it saw Charlie's shoes peeping through the pallet, it came over to lip at the front of them.

‘No, baby horse,' Charlie said, shuffling from foot to foot. ‘Bad.'

‘Babies always put things in their mouths,' I said. ‘I expect you did too, when you were a baby.'

Charlie climbed down and put his face to the gap between the planks, then jumped back as the foal blew at him. For a moment he was uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, then he laughed and blew back. The foal jumped sideways on stiff legs. The mare, who'd been focusing on her haynet, lifted her head. I picked Charlie up, ignoring the protests from my shoulder muscles. ‘Look, these ones are sleeping.'

There were two mares and two foals together in the next pen, and both foals were stretched out flat, totally relaxed, miniature hooves pawing on air, eyes closed. One was black, one black and white. The one nearest us had impossibly long eyelashes. As we stopped to look it opened one brown eye, looked at us drowsily, then closed it again.

‘Awww,' Charlie said, with exactly Inga's intonation. ‘I touch.'

‘Not these ones,' I said. ‘Let's see if we can stroke the riding ponies.'

We ducked under the fence and went along the front of the line of ponies who'd competed in the riding classes. The girl who'd raced in for polish was there, giving water to a pair of black Shetlands. Both were the traditional style, with a great froosh of mane between the ears, hiding half of the faces, and falling on both sides of the strong neck. The black coats shone as if she'd used the polish on them, and both had long tails that rippled to just above ground level.

‘Hiya,' I said. ‘May Charlie stroke one of your ponies?'

‘This one,' she said. ‘Hiya, Charlie! You ken me, I'm Janette. I'm in Vaila's class at the school. Would you like to sit on the pony?'

Charlie nodded, eyes wide.

‘Gie him a pat first,' Janette said. She squatted down beside Charlie. ‘He's that gentle. See.' She leaned forward, took a hold of the headcollar and gave the pony a kiss at the end of its black nose. The pony took it without a blink, then stretched its head forward and snorted at Charlie. His hand jerked in mine, but he stood his ground as the pony nosed at his T-shirt, then shook its head and snorted again. Janette kept her grip on its chin. ‘Now you give him a stroke. See how soft his nose is.'

Charlie edged his hand forward, just touched the velvet nose and snatched it back, then touched again. ‘He soft.'

‘He's really soft,' Janette agreed. ‘Shall I sit you on his back?' She swung him up, and kept an arm around him, so that she was taking his weight. Charlie held on tight to her shoulders. Gradually she coaxed him into sitting alone, with a chunk of mane held tightly in both hands. ‘See, the pony doesn't want you to fall. He's standing still as still.'

To me, the pony had more of an air of ‘not another one' than positive benevolence, but who was I to argue? You didn't find ponies on board a tall ship. Janette swung Charlie down again.

‘Say “thank you” to the pony,' she said.

‘Ta,' Charlie repeated.

‘And to Janette,' I added.

‘Thank you.' Charlie waved and towed me off at speed again. Pony time was obviously over. ‘Ice cream.'

He was heading straight for the Mr Whippy van, parked just opposite the barbecue. My stomach felt like it might be lunch-time, but my purse was in my jacket, draped over the chair behind our stall, and just because it felt like ice-cream time to me didn't mean it was that time for toddlers.

‘Let's ask Mam first,' I said.

I was just leading him back towards the marquee when Charlie jumped and waved. ‘Daddy!'

It was big Charlie, sandwiched between his two daughters. Peerie Charlie had got his colouring from his dad: Big Charlie had the same curly fair hair and light skin, weathered to a reddish tan this far on in the summer. It was strange how the boy favoured his father, the girls their mother, yet now I came to think of it, that was the Shetland way. Viking look-alike men weren't that uncommon, particularly in Yell, where there were a lot of tall, square-built men with reddish-fair hair, but you rarely saw that Scandinavian look of radiantly fair women. A lot of Shetland women were small and dark, with blue eyes, the Pictish look they'd inherited from their long-back fore-mothers, who'd been taken as Viking concubines when the raiders had arrived.

Big Charlie had been in charge of the other echo-sounding boat. I gave a glance down at the pier. Yes, he'd moored up there too, among the other fishing boats.
They found a body on board the yacht …
As he turned to me, the forced cheerfulness he'd been using with the lasses evaporated. His skin was grey under the tan, and his mouth was turned down, as if he was feeling sick. ‘Cass. Inspector Macrae asked me to look for you. He tried to phone you, but there's no signal up here.' He bent down to swing Peerie Charlie up onto his shoulders. ‘Now, then peerie-breeks, have you seen the horses?'

‘I sat horse,' Charlie affirmed. ‘I hands tight.' He clenched his fists to show his sisters. ‘Now I ice-cream.'

‘Better ask Mam,' Charlie said. He swung his son down again, and handed him to the lasses, then fished a fiver out of his pocket. ‘Check with Mam, lasses, then take him off for an ice-cream.' He waited till they were out of earshot, then spoke softly. ‘Yon police officer asked me to ask you, Cass, if you'd get a chance to go down to the pier. We found the yacht – you saw that.'

I nodded.

‘I had my diving gear, so I went down.' His face tightened. ‘There was the body in the cabin. I put a line around him –'

‘Him?' I cut in. Peter – 

Charlie nodded. ‘Once we'd got him onboard I had a bit of an inspection with the flashlight.' He looked quickly around him, as if checking he wouldn't be overheard. ‘Whoever sunk that yacht did it deliberately.'

‘Could you tell how?'

Charlie nodded. ‘One of the toilet pipes was sawn through, just past the seacock.'

‘That'd sink her, right enough.' The seacocks were the fittings over the holes in the side of the boat: cooling water for the engine, sink and cockpit drains, and toilet water in and out. They didn't fail regularly, but if they did then you were in trouble, because you had a three-centimetre hole in the bottom of the boat. Every boat carried plugs for each seacock, just in case.

 ‘The seacock was open – it was one of those lever ones, you could see it was open. The pipe just past it, one of those green plastic hose ones, the toilet intake, it was sawn right through, as if someone had taken a hacksaw to it, then opened the cock.'

‘No sign of anyone trying to plug the leak?'

He shook his head. ‘A bonny yacht, for someone to scuttle like that.' He glanced around him again, face grim. ‘They've got the bodies in a white van down there, the one from the yacht, and one the chopper picked up this morning. The Inspector wanted you to name them for him, if you could, before they take them to Lerwick.'

‘I'll go right now,' I said.