by Ian Cook
“Thanks so much for this, Sy. I’m beginning to feel normal again. Do you mind if I lie in for a bit tomorrow? I’m completely done in,” said Rebecca, as Syreeta showed her the spare room, quickly taking some of her own clothes off the bed.
“Of course not. Sleep as long as you like. I won’t wake you. Make yourself some breakfast.”
“Thanks, Sy. I’ve never felt so tired.”
Putting on a pair of pyjamas, Rebecca got ready for bed and sat down in front of the dressing-table mirror. She made a face as she unpinned her hair, so that it hung down over her shoulders.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she brushed her hair slowly and sensuously and found herself thinking about Jim Cavendish once again. He was good-looking, certainly, and he gave the impression of being very self-confident. Yet she sensed, without any real evidence, that beneath the professional veneer, there was a more sensitive soul waiting to be discovered. Then, to her shame, she realised that she had put any thoughts of Hamish completely to the back of her mind.
Setting down the brush, she went over to the window and opened it for fresh air. Closing the curtains again, she deliberately left the door slightly ajar, needing the sense of Syreeta’s presence. She gratefully climbed in between the sheets and, within minutes, drifted into a deep sleep.
Not long afterwards, the door creaked open, and Tom’s head appeared. He crept silently into the room and, without disturbing Rebecca, leapt on to the bottom of her bed, where he curled up.
A few hours later, in the dead of the night, there was a rustle of bird-wings. Then silence. Tom opened one eye and then the other. The curtains parted, and a large, fearsome-looking, mottled-brown hawk edged its way on to the windowsill, its yellow eyes staring at Rebecca. Tom raised his head and hissed loudly. The bird ignored the cat and continued to look at Rebecca, before moving back behind the curtains and disappearing. The slow, leisurely flap of wings as it took flight was almost indiscernible.
Rebecca turned over. Half asleep, she noticed Tom, who was settling down once more at the bottom of her bed. “Hello, Tom. Keeping an eye on me, then?” she said drowsily, as she turned over to go back to sleep again.
CHAPTER 13
It was just after eight o’clock when she woke up. Tom was now fast asleep in an armchair, but woke immediately and went to his empty food bowl. Rebecca got out of bed and followed him. “Doesn’t Syreeta feed you then?” she mocked. She found half a tin of cat food in the fridge, put the contents into Tom’s bowl and made herself a coffee.
After writing a thank you to Syreeta, mentioning her intention to seek out Jim Cavendish, she made another coffee and picked up her mobile.
It rang for a while before he answered. “Jim? It’s Rebecca Burns from the Metropolitan. We met in Carthage, remember? You said I could contact you. Can you talk?”
Jim Cavendish was leaning against the rail of a boat, looking at a grey sea. A fresh breeze was blowing in his face, and the engine noise made it difficult for him to hear.
“Hang on a minute,” he yelled, and made his way under cover at the back of the boat. “Okay, that’s better now,” he said. “Yes, of course I remember. Thanks for your voicemail – I was going to get back to you. How are you?”
“Things got a bit hairy after I left you, but I’m all right now,” she replied. “I’d like to talk to you – about people with red hair.”
“Listen, I’m on a boat near Orkney at the moment. I’m taking a bit of time off. I want to check out some stone circles before I go to Easter Island. Can’t it wait?”
“I really have to talk to you,” she persisted. “There’ve been some ritual murders going on – all over the place. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and now the South Pacific as well. And guess what? Some of the victims had red hair. Maybe they all did. The details are still coming in.”
“It could be just a coincidence,” he replied, without enthusiasm. “Whereabouts in the South Pacific?”
“Don’t know yet, but I can find out.” She waited a second before continuing. “But listen to this. The funny thing is, all the killings apparently happened in places connected to sun-worship.”
There was a silence as he took this in, so she continued, “I need to find out – why redheads? And what has it all got to do with sun-worship?”
“I don’t know what it all means,” Jim said.
“Perhaps we could meet up?”
“Sure. Of course, I’ll be pleased to see you…”
Rebecca made a snap decision. Jim didn’t get another word in.
“Then will you meet me at the Kirkwall airport, around lunchtime? I’m just off to Heathrow now. I’ll let you know what time I’m arriving.”
“What!” exclaimed Jim, but she had rung off. He took the phone away from his ear, looked at it and slowly put it back to his ear. “Okay,” he said to himself, and chuckled, shaking his head in disbelief.
Slipping his phone back into his rucksack, he went back on deck to watch the land getting closer.
CHAPTER 14
Feeling apprehensive that she may have been too bold in her approach, Rebecca had decided to meet Jim as one professional seeking help from another. In the event, she was relieved that he had seemed pleased to see her again, and had quickly offered to take her to the places he had intended to visit.
It rapidly became evident that Jim knew Orkney well, and his enthusiasm for the islands was catching. He explained that the Stone Age sites were world-famous, and new ones were constantly being found and excavated.
Orkney, he told her, consisted of fourteen large islands, which were linked by ferry, and many more smaller ones. The capital, Kirkwall, was on the largest island called Mainland. The Ring of Brodgar on Mainland would be their first port of call.
The monument dominated a hillside, from where it had overlooked Loch Harray for 5000 years; vast and impressive in its Neolithic splendour.
Of the sixty original standing stones, hewn from local sandstone, only twenty-seven remained, still arranged in a perfect circle of over one hundred yards wide. The stones themselves, several of them reaching twice the height of a tall man, stretched towards the sky, some like guillotine blades, others like triangular-topped lozenges. A wide ditch ran around the outside of the circle, broken by two entrance causeways, set diametrically opposite each other. Outside the ditch, about one hundred yards to the southeast, was one large solitary slab of rock, known as the Comet Stone.
The pale, northern, winter sunlight seemed to drain the colours of any brightness. The loch was a light blue, and the green grass around it contrasted with the dark brownish-green of the heather that grew wild inside the Ring. Even the pillar-box red of Jim’s hired car seemed to fade and blend with the landscape. The feeling of wide open sea and sky, the isolation and the remoteness of the place, seemed worlds away from Rebecca’s recent experiences. Only a bird wheeled in circles, high in the sky above them.
Rebecca and Jim crouched down to examine faint inscriptions carved into the stump of one of the stones. They resembled a child’s matchstick drawing of a tree without leaves.
She outlined the inscription with her finger. “What does it mean, Jim?”
“It’s a Norse tree rune. Graffiti, by the looks of it. Hang on, I’ll work it out – it’s quite easy to decipher.” He got out a pen and notebook and made some annotations. “It seems to be ‘Biorn’,” he pronounced. “It’s quite a common Scandinavian name. It must have been carved by a Norse invader.” He smirked. “Biorn again.”
Rebecca groaned. “And probably a redhead,” she said.
“It’s possible,” agreed Jim. “The Norsemen settled here. A lot of people around here have Norse blood running through their veins.” He stood up and looked around the Ring. “But this place was here long before the Norsemen. It was once the ceremonial centre of a huge Neolithic empire, and it was actually built before the Pyramids. Just down the road they are doing a dig, and they think they’ve found a temple complex. You can’t see much, though. It’s all been cov
ered up for the winter.”
“Getting back to the subject of redheads,” Rebecca said. “What do you think it is about us that makes people react the way they do?”
“Put it this way,” said Jim. “Redheads have always been different. They have always been either admired or disliked, ridiculed or persecuted, and occasionally sacrificed. But never ignored. Wasn’t Lord Byron a redhead, even if he oiled his hair to disguise the colour? ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’, people said. And you must know that painting in the Tate Gallery by Millais – Jesus painted as a red-haired boy, in his father’s workshop? Wasn’t Charles Dickens very sarcastic about that?”
“Yes, I know the one you mean. I’ve always loved the Pre-Raphaelite painters. There you are – they actually adored redheads. But I think Dickens called the Jesus in the painting a hideous, blubbering red-headed boy, or something like that.”
Jim looked impressed with her knowledge. “Well, all over the world, you hear tales about people with red hair. They’re always marked out as different from other people. Sometimes they’re even seen as evil.”
Rebecca chose not to react, keen for Jim to continue. “In India, there are red-haired demons called rakshasas. Japan has its red-haired demon, too, called Aka-oni.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about it, Jim.”
He smiled. “Sorry. I’m hardly being diplomatic. But if you study solar religions around the world, as I do, it’s strange, but you find the subject keeps coming up.”
Rebecca made a few notes. Then she noticed another group of stones glinting in the sunlight in the distance.
“What are those over there?”
“They’re the Standing Stones of Stenness,” Jim replied. “That circle is known as the Temple of the Moon, while this one here is the Temple of the Sun. Some people think the whole complex might have been one massive observatory. Then again, if you listen to the New Age nutters, they are supposed to be centres of earth forces. Ley lines, electromagnetic fields – that sort of thing. Shall we go and have a look at Stenness?”
They wandered back to the car, breathing in the tranquillity of the scene. It only took a couple of minutes to drive over the causeway, leading to the Standing Stones of Stenness.
Rebecca noticed a man standing in front of one of the Stones and felt a twinge of disappointment that she and Jim would not be alone. But, as they approached, he walked away to inspect a large stone slab, embedded in the ground.
The four immense remaining megaliths towered over Rebecca and Jim, jutting up towards the blue sky, as if trying to connect heaven and earth.
“There used to be at least eleven of them in a circle,” explained Jim, as Rebecca took a photo. “The really interesting one has gone now. It was called the Odin Stone.”
“As in Odin, the Norse god?”
“That’s right. Sometimes called Woden or Wotan. In Northern Europe, Wotan was known as a storm god. The Christians made him synonymous with the Devil. There are even places named after him in Orkney – like Odiness on the island of Stronsay. Oddly enough, there’s a ruined kirk on Norstray, where there are six deep grooves in one of the building stones. They’re known as the Devil’s Clawmarks – but they’re just the result of rain erosion, of course.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Sorry. I must come across as a boring academic.”
“Oh, no, no. I’m really interested.”
He pointed towards the north. “The Odin Stone used to stand outside the circle over there, but some idiot farmer knocked it down in the nineteenth century.”
“Unbelievable,” said Rebecca, shaking her head.
“Well, that’s not all,” said Jim. “The same farmer then smashed up some of the other Stones and used them for building. The locals were pretty mad, though. For a lot of people here, Odin’s Stone had a special magical significance.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Originally, it could have been an ancestor stone. It was there long before the Norsemen arrived. We know that it had a large hole in it. Hearsay is that on the night of a full moon, the bones of an ancestor were passed through the hole. That was supposed to bring the ancestor back to life. You often come across that sort of thing in primitive societies.” He laughed. “Lucky we weren’t here at the time of the Beltane festival. They might have burnt you alive in a wicker cage.” Rebecca raised her eyebrows. “Being a nice young girl, I mean,” he said. “Nasty pagan fertility ceremony.”
“Sounds like you are trying to wind me up,” said Rebecca.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling. “But Orkney is like that, full of superstitions and ghost stories. It’s all very nice when the sun is shining, like now, but imagine this place in the dead of winter, with the mist swirling around. Still, Odin’s Stone did have some nicer associations.”
“Pleased to hear it.”
“Around New Year, they used to hold a five day party where young people could meet. Every year, at least four or five couples used to slip away and plight their troth. The girl used to pray here to Woden. Then they’d go to the Ring of Brodgar, and the boy would kneel in front of the girl and pray. Finally, they’d come back here and grasp each other’s right hand through the hole – which meant they were well and truly hitched.”
“It sounds quite romantic.”
“Yes. It was called ‘Romancing the Stone’, and it was really and truly binding. You’d have the whole of society down on you, if you tried to get out of it. Same with any other oath, if it was made here by shaking right hands through the hole and reciting Odin’s Oath.”
“What’s Odin’s Oath?”
“Well, no one’s quite sure any more. The actual words were lost long ago.”
Looking around, Rebecca was the first to spot a thin, waving dotted line coming towards them, high in the sky from the northern horizon. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than a black thread being drawn by a celestial hand. As the vanguard of the dark line approached directly overhead, she pointed it out to Jim. But as he gazed upwards through squinted eyes, the front of the line suddenly came to a stop, as if it were coming up against an invisible wall in the sky. Birds veered away in all directions. A dense black ball formed as the birds grouped together, and it slowly grew in size as the line continued forward and melted into it. Even as they watched, the ball became a dark cloud, only to change shape, condensing and expanding like a demented amoeba. Inside it, black specks whirled around, trapped in their own mini-constellations.
Then, without any clear signal, a line of birds left the cloud and started to turn back northwards. The cloud thinned, like a ball of wool being unravelled, until it had completely disappeared.
“Starlings,” said a voice from behind Jim and Rebecca. “Migrating down from the north of Scandinavia and Russia, to spend the rest of the winter here.”
They turned round to see a fresh-faced, middle-aged man standing there, shielding his eyes with his hand as he gazed at the, now empty, northern horizon. Rebecca immediately noticed his light coloured red hair.
“What were they doing? Why did they suddenly stop and go back?” she asked. “It’s as if they lost their sense of direction.”
The man pointed to the bird still hovering in the distance, over the Ring of Brodgar. “There’s the real reason. Looks like a sea-eagle to me, a visitor most likely. The starlings must have taken fright. Funny, though – never seen anything like that before. Amazing.” He watched the bird for a while longer and then turned, smiling, to Jim and Rebecca. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you, but that was a very unusual sight. I fish these parts, and it’s very rare that you see a sea-eagle around here, I can tell you.”
Jim looked again at the bird. “Yes, I guess we’re very lucky,” he said. “The effect it had on those starlings was distinctly odd, though. I’m wondering whether something else made them change direction.” He looked at his watch. “Perhaps you’ll know?” he asked the man. “When can we get over to the Brough of Birsay next?”
“If you go right now, you’ll make it fine. The tide will be out for the next couple of hours.”
“Thanks,” said Jim, and he turned to Rebecca. “The Brough of Birsay is a small island not too far from here. We could have a quick look at a really interesting symbol stone there – before we get the plane back. The Norsemen had a settlement on it, but the Picts were there before that. A really excellent job has been done with the excavations there.”
The man’s eyes lit up. “Archaeology’s my hobby. I help out on the digs whenever I can. Like the one just up the road at Brodgar. All this on our doorstep, and no one really knows what our prehistoric ancestors were up to.”
Jim nodded in agreement.
“If you’re interested in archaeology, you should come up to Norstray where I live,” continued the man. “There’s a whole unexcavated, prehistoric burial site there.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about that,” said Jim enthusiastically, “but I’ve never been there.”
“Well,” the man said, “if you ever get to Norstray, just ask for Sandy Lewis, and I’ll show you around. Everybody knows me there. And if I’m not around, ask for my brother, Jock. He probably knows more about Norstray than me.”
“I might just take you up on that,” said Jim.
The man swung a bag over his shoulder. “I’d better get going as well. Jock’s been fixing my boat. It’ll be done now.” He strode off towards the exit gate. “Enjoy Birsay,” he called back.
“Let’s go, Rebecca,” said Jim. “The last time I tried to cross over this causeway, the tide was in and I couldn’t make it. We should be lucky this time, if we get a move on.”
Rebecca followed him, stumbling over the tussocks of grass. Reaching the exit gate first, Jim realised that she was not keeping up with his fast pace. He stopped to wait for her to catch up and held open the gate for her to pass through in front of him.
CHAPTER 15
Rebecca and Jim walked together to the parked car.