by Louise Welsh
‘Why didn’t you move when you heard the bike? You could have killed us.’
Stevie took her helmet off. ‘Breda? Is there something wrong?’
‘Evie’s gone.’ The woman’s voice was close to a wail. ‘I thought I heard something, so I went into the nursery to check on her. She wasn’t there. Someone’s stolen my baby.’
Stevie got off the bike, went to Breda and put her arms around her. The woman had rushed from her house without bothering to put on a coat and she was trembling with cold and shock. Stevie took off her leather jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
‘She won’t have gone far. Little Evie’s an adventurous little girl. She must have woken up and gone exploring. We’ll find her.’
Breda shook her head. ‘Evie’s too small to get out of her cot by herself. She wouldn’t manage to open the front door, it’s too heavy.’
‘Children surprise you.’ Alan Bold spoke as if he knew what he was talking about. ‘They’re growing and learning all the time. One day they can’t reach something, the next they can. I’ll get a search party together.’
Breda ignored him. ‘The front door was open. Someone came in and took her.’
Survivors who had chosen to live in town tended to cluster together. Most of Stromness was unoccupied, but for a few streets where people lived side by side. Alan Bold was already banging on the door of the nearest house. A rusty halo surrounded the full moon. A bitter chill had crept over the island and it would be frosty tomorrow. Stevie took Breda by the shoulders.
‘Go indoors and put on something warm. Alan’s right, we’ll find her, but we need as many people in the search party as possible. That includes you.’
Alan Bold was on the doorstep of the next house, talking to Breda’s neighbour, Grant. Grant reached back into the hallway, grabbed a coat and scarf and stepped into the night. He squeezed Breda’s shoulder as he passed. ‘She won’t have gone far.’ He headed out to alert others. The search party would quickly grow.
Breda gulped back her sobs. ‘What if Evie comes back and I’m not here?’
Stevie said, ‘We’ll ask Poor Alice to wait in your house.’ A thought struck her. ‘We should give your place a thorough search, in case she’s hiding there.’
‘I already looked.’ Breda’s voice was fractured by sobs.
Doors were opening, people emerging from their houses. Some brought oil lamps with them and their glow added a festive air at odds with the anxious voices straining against the chill night.
Alan Bold was uncharacteristically decisive, dividing people into groups and issuing instructions on where to search. He paused, on his way to organise another cluster of neighbours. ‘Stevie’s right. Kids hide in places that would never occur to us. You need to go through your house from top to bottom.’
Breda snapped, ‘What would you know about it? You don’t have any children,’ but she hurried indoors.
Stevie followed her, leaving a wounded-looking Bold to organise the search. Willow would have to wait.
Fourteen
Connor was standing in Bjarne and Candice’s kitchen, drinking a glass of water. ‘Cool gun, Magnus. Can I have a look?’
‘No.’ Magnus tucked the Glock safe inside his jacket pocket. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I help Bjarne with the milking. That’s where I was going when I found Shug. He’ll be finished by now, but my mum told me to come back and tell him why I didn’t show up. He’s promised her some beef to salt when he slaughters his next beast and she didn’t want to get on his bad side.’ If Connor thought there was something incongruous about Magnus walking through Bjarne and Candice’s farmhouse with a candle in one hand and a gun in the other, he did not show it. ‘How’s Shuggie?’
‘Recovering.’
‘My mum’s always saying that boys have thick heads.’ Connor nodded towards the interior of the house. ‘What kind of mood is the big man in?’
Magnus set the candle he had taken from the bedroom windowsill on the table. It gave a Christmas glow to the room. Candice had lit it before she died, her life snuffed out before the flame.
‘Peaceful. I’d leave him alone for the moment.’
Connor’s face creased in a frown. ‘But my mum …’
‘I told Bjarne how you helped Shuggie. He knows you had a good reason for not showing up.’
Connor grinned. ‘I wasn’t looking forward to telling him.’
‘Now you don’t have to.’ Magnus tried to return Connor’s smile. ‘Did you see anyone else out there?’
‘Only Rebel. Did Les lend him to you?’
‘He owed me a favour.’ Chances of returning the horse undetected were narrowing. Connor roamed the settlements of the main island, dispensing news and gossip with an absence of guile or judgement. Magnus said, ‘It’s dark outside. You’d best head home. I’ll walk with you to the road.’
‘I don’t mind the dark.’ Connor pulled out a chair and sat at the table, at ease in Candi and Bjarne’s kitchen. ‘My mum says there’s nothing to fear, not like in the old days, before the Sweats killed all the bad folk.’
Connor’s foster mother was one of the religious people who believed the Sweats had been sent by God.
‘All the same, Candice and Bjarne are going to their bed and it’s time for us to head to ours.’
Connor’s chin set in a stubborn jut. ‘Candi usually gives me a slice of cake for the road.’
Magnus glanced around the kitchen, but everything had been tidied away. There was no cake in sight and he did not have the stomach to search the rows of kitchen cabinets and explore Candice’s neatly stacked provisions: the dried pulses and pickled veg, the jams and preserves, set against a future that would never come. He said, ‘It’s not so long since you had rhubarb pie.’ It was surreal, bickering with an eleven-year-old boy about cake, while Candice’s and Bjarne’s corpses cooled in the rooms beyond. For a moment it seemed that Connor might argue his case, but he got to his feet.
‘Magnus, remember you said I could ask you for anything and you’d give it to me?’
‘Yes?’ Magnus blew out the candle. He placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder and steered him out of the kitchen, into the chilly darkness of the yard.
‘Can I have your gun please?’
‘No.’
The boy looked up at him. ‘I knew you’d say that.’
‘So why did you ask?’
Connor shrugged. ‘No harm in asking. Magnus?’ His voice rang through the dim, deserted yard.
‘Keep your voice down, Connor. Candice and Bjarne are in bed.’
‘Okay,’ the boy whispered. ‘I just wanted to ask, did you shoot Rocky and Satan because Bjarne beat Shuggie up?’
Rocky and Satan were Bjarne’s dogs. Magnus glanced towards their bodies, dark shapes on the edge of the farmyard and wondered if the boy really believed he might have killed the creatures.
‘I’d never punish an animal for something its owner had done.’ Magnus put his hands on Connor’s shoulders. He turned the boy to face him and crouched level with him. ‘How did you know that Bjarne had beaten up Shuggie?’
‘I know more than people give me credit for. I’ve got a good pair of eyes in my head. They see things.’
‘What did you see tonight?’
‘I saw you and your gun in Candi and Bjarne’s kitchen.’
It had not occurred to Magnus that he might be blamed for the killings, but now he saw how it would look. He took the gun from his pocket and placed it in the boy’s hand.
‘Is the gun hot or cold?’
‘Cold.’
‘That’s because it hasn’t been fired in a long while. What does it smell of?’
Connor raised the Glock to his nose and gave a cautious sniff. ‘Nothing – metal maybe, but metal doesn’t really smell.’
‘If I’d fired that gun you’d be able to tell. I brought it with me because I wanted to protect myself from Bjarne, but he and Candi were in bed so I went away without speaking to them.’
‘You said you’d spoken to Bjarne and told him why I’d missed milking. You said he was peaceful.’
The boy was staring at the gun as if it was a holy relic. Magnus took it from him and returned it to his pocket.
‘That was a wee white lie to get us out of there.’
‘How do you know they’re in bed?’
It was hard to tell in the gloom of the yard, but Magnus thought that Connor’s expression had an unfamiliar, sly cast to it. He said, ‘Where else would they be at this time of night?’
‘I don’t know.’
He shrugged free of Magnus and walked to his bicycle, propped against the same post that Rebel’s reins were tied to. The horse snickered. The boy rubbed its nose, mounted his bike and started to freewheel towards the gate.
Magnus shouted after him, ‘Have you seen Willow?’
Connor looked back over his shoulder. ‘She’s at your house.’ His bicycle tyres crunched against the gravel and then were absorbed into the unquiet hush of the night.
Fifteen
It looked as if Breda had looted every toy on the Orkney Islands. Three large playpens stuffed with primary-coloured plastic dominated Evie’s nursery. The floor was strewn with an untidy mess of dolls, cuddly creatures, cars and plastic animals. A four-storey dolls’ house lurked Gothically in a corner, half obscured by a pedal car that had crashed into the building’s facade, sending dolls and furniture flying. It was against the ethos of the islands. Manufactured goods, considered disposable before the Sweats, had become irreplaceable and were meant to be used with care. Stevie picked up a headless Barbie, stripped down to dolly nakedness. The doll’s breasts were large and ridiculous, her hips non-existent. Stevie tossed it back onto the floor.
‘Is there a particular toy that she’s fond of? A teddy bear or something she doesn’t like to be parted from?’ A train set snaked around the room, its carriages derailed by a smiling, fluffy elephant. Stevie disliked the nursery’s mismatch of scale and objects. It made her think of the Sweats, the implosion of order. ‘If it’s missing, we’ll know there’s a good chance she’s wandered off.’
Evie’s cot was standing in the middle of the nursery, amongst the debris of toys. Breda went to it, rifled the bedding and held up a disreputable-looking monkey. Stevie thought she could remember the child dragging the ugly creature around.
‘Evie won’t go anywhere without Charlie.’ Breda was crying again.
‘She might still be in the house somewhere.’
‘I told you. She’s too little to get out of her cot by herself. Look how high the sides are. She couldn’t climb over them without hurting herself.’
Stevie tried to conjure an image of little Evie in her mind. The cot’s sides were high, but Alan Bold was right, the girl was growing. As the youngest child on the islands, born on the wash of a wave of deaths, Evie was spoilt, and wilful. All the children were. They were the only hope for the future and the grown-ups had deified them.
Stevie said, ‘No one would take her.’ She resolved to write up a list of suspects. It was possible that some woman, desperate for a baby, might have stolen into the nursery and spirited her off. ‘You start upstairs, I’ll look down here.’
Breda turned away. Stevie heard her footsteps climbing the stairs and then her voice, calling for her child. Furniture shifted overhead. The shouts of the search party had been getting fainter, moving ever further from Breda’s door, Evie’s name travelling through the air on soft echoes. Now there was a rupture in the rhythm of the calls.
‘Thank God.’ Stevie went into the hallway, ready to step out and greet whoever had found the child. Breda had heard the shouts too. She stood on the landing, her expression fearful. Stevie met her eyes and smiled. ‘I told you she couldn’t have got far.’
She opened the front door. The night smelled of lamp oil and burning torches. Alan Bold was running up the street, his arms empty. He stopped when he saw her. Even in the dim light she could see that his eyes were wild. Stevie’s hand went to her mouth. She closed the door behind her and stepped into the street, so Breda would not hear what Alan Bold was about to say. Her deputy was panting, trying to catch his breath. Stevie said, ‘Is she …?’
He shook his head. ‘Other kids are missing.’
Sixteen
Magnus knew the house was empty as soon as he walked through his back door. The air inside was cold and still as undrawn breaths. He lit a lantern and ran up the stairs to the boy’s room. The door was open, the bedclothes mussed, the bed empty.
‘Shug?’ His shout was a puff of fog in the chilly room. ‘Shuggie?’ Magnus crossed the landing, his shadow large against the wall. He checked his own bedroom, the bathroom and then ran downstairs. The rarely used lounge was empty. So was the office where he kept his father’s farm journals and the financial accounts from before. When accounts were things that could be marked in black or red, one side of the ledger or the other. ‘Shug?’
The boy had vanished. Magnus’s legs were trembling. He set the lantern on the kitchen table and sat down, trying to think. Bjarne had many enemies, but Magnus did not know anyone with a grudge big enough to want to murder him. He groaned and put his head in his hands, remembering that a few short hours ago he had taken the Glock from its hiding place and set out, ready to kill the big man.
Bjarne had lived his life in a way that invited violence, but Candice was different. She had been beautiful when she arrived on the islands. Life and her choice of man had snuffed the spark out of her. It was hard to imagine someone taking the time to kill her. Magnus closed his eyes, trying to see the murder scenes again; Candice curled on her side in the master bedroom, Bjarne sitting in his chair in the sitting room. If Bjarne had been killed first, the sound of the shot would surely have woken Candice. Magnus tried to remember if there had been any pills on the bedside table, sleeping tablets that might have pulled the woman so far under, she would not have woken. He had been in shock, but he was pretty sure he would have noticed them, had they been there.
It was impossible to imagine Bjarne remaining in his chair while a shot rang out in the room above. Had there been two killers, two gunshots, timed closely enough to deny the couple any warning?
Magnus knuckled his skull, trying to think. Shug had been safe at home in bed when the killings had happened, Willow at the farm. The girl had been in trouble with her foster parents. He pictured her in the yard, pointing the gun at Bjarne while Shuggie staggered to safety. It was easily imagined, but killing Candice as she slept? Standing behind Bjarne’s chair and blowing the top of his head off as he sat reading a book on how to manage his anger? Those images were harder to conjure.
Magnus got to his feet. If Connor had not discovered him in Bjarne and Candice’s kitchen with a gun in his hand, he might have been tempted to keep the news of the killings to himself. He could have taken to his bed, pulled the covers over his head and let the bodies be discovered by someone with no motive for murder. As things were, he had to report them.
Magnus took a dry scarf from the back of the door and swapped it for the damp one around his neck. Stevie Flint had a way of picking on a detail and worrying at it until whatever problem she was working on unravelled. Magnus was too tired to be a match for her. He would cycle over to Alan Bold’s house. The deputy was more likely to take his statement at face value and perhaps Magnus would meet Shug on the way.
He had been trying not to think too much about his son, but a wave of anxiety washed over him. The blows to the boy’s head had been savage, the beating Bjarne had given him harsh. Shug was in no state to go adventuring with Willow tonight.
Magnus took a bottle of whisky from the kitchen cupboard and poured himself a dram to help keep the night air out. He knocked it back and then poured himself a second, drinking it like the medicine it was.
He muttered, ‘Candice didn’t deserve to die, but I’m glad someone killed you, you violent cunt.’
It was bad luck to speak ill of the dead. Footsteps crunched on the gra
vel outside the kitchen window. Magnus took the lantern and went quickly to the door.
‘Shug?’ It was dark outside, the moon behind some cloud. ‘Shuggie, is that you?’
His whisky breath clouded the air. He raised the lantern and saw a figure on a horse.
‘It’s me.’ Brendan Banks did not have his customary banjo slung over his back. ‘Little Evie’s missing. There’s a search party.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since her mother went into her room and found her gone.’
There was no reason to assume the events of the night were connected, but Magnus had a bad feeling in his belly. He grabbed his cap from the hook by the front door and shoved it on his head. Rebel was still standing where he had left him. The horse pawed the earth, impatient to be fed. Magnus clapped the beast’s neck. ‘Sorry, boy, there’s more work for you tonight.’
Brendan said, ‘Did Les say you could borrow his pride and joy?’
‘There wasn’t time to ask.’
‘You must have been in a hell of a hurry then. I wouldn’t like to be in your boots.’
Magnus pulled himself onto the horse. ‘You’ve no idea how true that is, Brendan.’ He gripped Rebel’s flanks with his heels and shucked the reins, setting them on their way. ‘No idea.’
Seventeen
The search was too ramshackle to be comprehensive. The island was too big and too dark, the search party too small. Stevie wrote a list of every household with children and began dispatching riders to check that they were okay. There were less than a dozen families, but the radius where they had settled was wide. It would be a while before she knew whether the children were safe at home, sleeping in their beds.
So far, in addition to Evie, three were confirmed missing. The other children were two girls and a boy, all in their early teens. They were survivors of the Sweats, fostered by adults who had kept travelling north, until somehow they had landed on the Orkneys.
Stevie had watched the foster parents closely as they related the details of their evening, up until they found their children gone. They had each looked worried, but they were not distressed in the way that Breda was. Perhaps it was simply that their children were older and more able to look after themselves or maybe they feared something else. It was a strange coincidence, a missing toddler and three absent teenagers. It made her uneasy.