The second one was stranger, and involved another quarrel between Marion, her husband Swene, and Edmund Halcrow, over shifting a ‘knot’ in Andro Brown’s peat back. On her husband’s advice, Marion transformed herself into a pellack quhaill and overturned Edmund’s boat while he was at the fishing. He and four others were drowned, and when the bodies were found, Marion and Swene were sent for. When Marion laid her hand on the body, blood gushed from its hands and fingers – a sure sign, apparently, that she’d caused his death.
‘Very Shakespearean,’ the librarian commented, coming over to see how I was doing. ‘Romeo says something about that when he’s in the tomb with Tybalt that he killed.’
My education had let me miss out on Shakespeare. ‘Do you think they really believed that she’d done all this – putting sickness from people to cows and back, and changing into a whale?
‘A porpoise,’ he said. ‘A pellack whale. They believed it enough to burn her for it. She and her husband were executed on the Hill of Berry, in Scalloway, in 1645.’
I looked back at the place where she’d cursed Andro for calling her a witch. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything here about calling up the Devil, or meeting in covens.’
‘Keep reading.’ He pointed to the last paragraph. ‘She was seen walking from Breckon to Hildeswick, accompanied by the Devil, disguised as two corbies.’
‘Corbies? Crows?’
‘Ravens. The hooded crows are just craas.’ He considered the short entry, then went back to the shelves, and came back with a buttercup yellow book. A Source Book of Scottish Witches, it was called, and someone had kindly written a list of all the Shetland ones at the front. There weren’t very many of them, an appropriate baker’s dozen, but the book didn’t give any actual information, just a reference where you could find more. ‘Dal.,’ the helpful librarian said. ‘That’s Dalyell, he’s online.’ He fired up a computer for me, and found a scan-in of an ancient tome, with writing where the shorter letters linked up to the taller, and an erudition of footnotes on each page. ‘The source book will give you the page numbers.’
I got to work. Each of the witches had several page references, and there was more folklore here. I found the knotted thread, called a ‘wrestling thread’, but here it seemed to be a cure, to be given in ‘the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with the words “Bone to bone, synew to synew, and flesh to flesh and blood to blood”, which would make any man or beast haill.’ However another account reckoned ‘casting knots’ was supposed to control the elements. From what the hooded crows had said, my knotted cord had been a warning. A Katherine Jonesdochter had wished her husband’s infirmities might be transferred to a stranger, and grasped the hand of the intended sufferer, who became sick while her husband got well … the sickness transfer thing again. I remembered Annette reaching out a hand to stroke Cat. He looks a very healthy peerie cat, she’d said. I understood now that strange look she’d given me, part defiance, part apology. Dan had been sick, and the three crows had claimed it as their work. She was going to transfer the sickness to Cat, except that he wouldn’t let her lay hands on him … so, my brain went on, she’d agreed to pay them instead. The £100 she’d taken out that day, which Sergeant Peterson couldn’t account for by purchases in Lerwick, had been intended for them. Had been given to them? Except that I was sure ‘he’ had done the ritual without them, and Annette had been home all evening. That would be something for Gavin to follow up. Whatever it takes … I was going to have to swallow my pride and phone him.
Sickness, curses, none of these seemed any help to my situation. The only double trials were Marion and her husband, and a mother and daughter couple fifty years later. There was no suggestion in any of these records of pacts with the Devil, or covens, or gathering at midnight on the witches’ sabbath. Whatever records the shadowy leader had consulted, it wasn’t these. I gathered up the books and went back to the archivist’s desk.
‘Where might I find something on covens?’
He gave me a doubtful look. ‘I trust you’re not thinking of starting one up.’ It wasn’t quite a joke. I shook my head, and glanced around. Nobody was listening to us.
‘I want to stop one,’ I said softly. ‘I need to know what they do. No, I need to know what other people think they might do, someone who’s researched them a bit.’
‘You could try Isobel Gowdie.’ His fingers rattled over the keys. ‘Here, yes, tried for witchcraft 1662 … the library has a book on her.’ He picked up a pencil and scribbled the title and author. ‘It sounds like this will include her confessions. They’re startling stuff. Here, I’ll phone them.’ He had the number in his head, and in half a dozen words established that yes, they had the book, yes, it was in, and I could go along now, it would be at the front desk for me.
‘Thanks.’
He wished me good luck, and I headed off to the Shetland Library, up King Harald Street, and past the playpark where the galley was burnt each Up Helly Aa. Today it was full of shouting children, and toddlers being swung by a parent. Opposite it, in the the flower park, the last coral astilbe plumes mingled with purple poppies and sharp-petalled dahlias. The scent of the climbing roses spilled over the wall. I climbed up King Erik Street to the war memorial and the Town Hall, where I could see the stained-glass figures from Shetland’s past in reverse: James III and his reluctant-looking bride facing away from each other (tradition had it they’d installed the two windows the wrong way round), the Maid of Norway, St Magnus and St Olaf, Floki with his raven on his shoulder. The old library was opposite, a sixties cube used for admin. now, and the books were in St Ringan’s Church, refurbished with a ramp for wheelchairs. Inside, it wasn’t as hushed as the archives had been, with a nurseryful of toddlers gathered around one of the librarians for story time, and a cluster of teenagers on a computer. I filled in a form, got my ticket, and took the book upstairs, to where a stained-glass Madonna presided over several squashy couches. I loved this window, because of the Madonna’s individual face; I was sure it was the artist’s wife holding her first child. I bagged a corner couch and contemplated my doom. The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, it was called, by Emma Wilby, a stout paperback heavy enough to make a serviceable anchor, with a picture of stormy clouds on the cover. A quick look at random showed the prose was academic. I braced my shoulders and launched in.
If I was looking for malevolvence, it was here in spades. There were four confessions, given roughly a fortnight apart, and attested to by various local worthies – a long list of them, headed by the minister, the sheriff, the lairds. The list ended with a statement that the confession had been ‘without any compulsitoris.’ I took that with a pinch of salt. Isobel’s words were given as she’d said them, and I’d have had difficulty deciphering them if it hadn’t been for my school friend Dodie, now working on the Yell ferry, who spoke exactly as she did. I imagined him reading out to me, and worked my way through each, taking notes, then paused to consider it all.
It was a weird mixture. The picture of these high-up and presumably intelligent people listening with serious faces to this garbage was testimony to their belief in the Devil. If they hadn’t – and, as the author pointed out, there were places where you would hear the ring of the omitted questions ‘Where did you meet the Devil? What did he look like?’ – they could never have taken this seriously. Jaunts to fairyland, meetings with the elf king and queen, flying on a docken straw … and in among it all, the black malevolence of shooting elf-arrows at the ‘Laird of Parkis’ bairns’, and making a clay model of the Laird himself, and roasting it at the fire. She claimed to have killed several people, but only admitted to regretting one. There was none of the messing around with animals that Marion Perdone had been accused of. She and her coven went for people.
The account of the coven had me thinking. She’d met with the Devil on the road between ‘the town of Drumdearin and the headis’ and covenanted with him. They’d met again at the church, and she’d put one hand on her head and the other on the so
le of her foot, and sworn everything in between to the Devil’s service. He’d bitten her on the shoulder, then he’d twisted the bite in his hand ‘till the blood spurted out’, and he’d sprinkled it over her in baptism. Then there’d been an orgy, with the Devil going at it ‘like a stallion among mares’. There had been thirteen in the coven, with the ‘Maiden’ sitting at the Devil’s side.
It could have been the Devil, of course. But reading it, I began to think how someone of imposing stature, someone quick-witted, with a presence, maybe someone with knowledge of hypnotism, a conjurer, a charlatan, could have had a lot of fun imposing on a group of simple village women. People were more sophisticated now, of course, but they also had more time to spare, because they weren’t working every moment of their lives just to make food for their bellies, clothes for their backs. They had time to get bored, and the restlessness to seek something new. I reckoned you could sell this coven idea to daft teenagers as a laugh, something to do on a dull Sunday evening … and then you could appear among them, looking very imposing in your devil suit, and whether they believed that was what you were, or whether they went along with it and took you as high priest for their high jinks, either way, you could have fun manipulating them, if that’s the way you got your kicks. Post-hypnotic suggestion could account for the wild rides over the countryside, or creeping inside people’s houses as they lay sleeping.
I flipped on through the book, rubbing my stabbing temple. This author seemed to take the confessions as evidence of a Scottish shamanistic tradition, where women (generally, though some men were mentioned too) took dreams as messages from another world, and through sharing them came to believe they attended these covens as an out-of-body experience while in a trance state. But I didn’t see the three crows reading the whole book. They’d have ploughed their way through the confessions and found the recipes for witchery: beating a wet rag to raise the wind, knotting threads, making a clay model of an enemy and roasting it before a fire. I could see the three of them on their knees together, hair loose around their faces, chanting Isobel’s charms ‘in the Devil’s name’, and glorying in the theatricality of their mischief.
I closed the book, returned it to the desk, and headed back out into the sunlight. The Town Hall clock said it was almost five. I wanted to get back to Khalida, to safety. I felt exposed here in Lerwick, as if that old woman leaning on her stick, or that pair of young lasses walking past the playpark, phones glued to their lugs, were liable to turn on me and mutter a curse that would bring me to my knees on the pavement in front of them. Superstitious rubbish, all of it. I passed the park and came into church. I sat quietly in the back pew, with the greens and blues of our ‘oily’ window falling on my shoulder, and contemplated the carved high altar in its curve of gold wall. If God was real, so was the Devil, but I didn’t believe in him stalking the streets of Scalloway. Just as God had no hands but ours to do good, so the Devil had no hands but ours to do evil. It was human hands which had bound Nate with rope and thrown him over the sea wall to die. Curses, though … if prayers to God could do good – and I believed that they could – then did it follow that prayers to the Devil could do harm? I wasn’t sure I was prepared to follow logic that far.
I shouldered my bag again and headed out onto the north road. Either way I’d have to head through houses, but the north road got me into the country quicker, rather than the long walk through Sound, with the rows of council-estate houses on one side, and Nob Hill on the other. I’d just come out of the old North Road onto the new one when a police car passed me, indicated, and drew up. Gavin got out. He was formally dressed this afternoon, in his red kilt, with a claymore pin glinting among the folds of cloth. His voice was as remote as his dress. ‘Can we give you a lift to Scalloway?’
Damn it, I wasn’t going to apologise or explain, especially not with Sergeant Peterson sitting there, mermaid-indifferent, with her hands at ten to two on the steering wheel. ‘Thank you,’ I said. He opened the front door for me, gestured me inside, then got into the back himself. ‘Hi,’ I said, across the front seat. The car was spotless. Even the dashboard was dust-free. Sergeant Peterson’s doing, I’d have betted.
She gave a nod. ‘Ms Lynch.’
‘An afternoon in town?’ Gavin asked, leaning forward to my shoulder.
I caught the sense of him, a clean smell, Imperial Leather soap, no aftershave. It didn’t take a DI to see I hadn’t been doing a weekly shop, and he knew I wasn’t the window-gazing type. Whatever it takes … I offered an olive branch. ‘I’ve been looking up witches.’ Sergeant Peterson made a snorting sound. ‘Great minds thinking alike?’ I asked.
‘I spent most of the morning on Wiki,’ she agreed, ‘working through Nate’s files.’
‘Did you find Isobel Gowdie?’
‘Along with Margaret Aiken and Janet Wishart and several hundred others. It just shows how stupid people were in the past, that they believed such rubbish.’ She shot a look backwards at Gavin, indicated for the Scalloway turnoff, and retracted that sweeping statement. ‘But I suppose people now are believing it too.’
‘I don’t know if they do really believe it,’ I said. ‘Don’t you need to believe in God before you can get all excited about the Devil? Or are they just having fun spreading rumours and feeling a shiver down their spines, like watching a scary film?’
‘I think they didn’t believe it,’ Sergeant Peterson said, ‘and now they’re afraid it might be true. Scratch any human being and the cave dweller’s just under the surface, scared of the dark and propitiating any evil spirits going.’
‘When people believe in nothing,’ Gavin said, a half-metre behind my ear, ‘then they’ll believe in anything.’ It sounded like a quote.
‘Oscar Wilde?’ I guessed.
‘G. K. Chesterton.’ His voice had warmed a touch. ‘To be exact, his Father Brown said, ‘The first effect of not believing in God is that you lose your common sense.’
I considered that for a moment. ‘It’s against modern thought,’ I said at last.
‘Definitely,’ Gavin agreed. ‘Go on then, tell us about Isobel Goudie.’
‘Nate had quite a lot about her. Tried as a witch in Auldearn, 1662,’ Sergeant Peterson said briskly. I shot her a sideways glance. Gavin had been talking to me, but she had only this short while to impress him. We saw a lot of that on board ship, guests arriving for a week, picking this holiday’s flirtation, and moving in fast. It was an occupational hazard of being a crew member, particularly if you had gold braid on the shoulder of your jumper. Even I’d suffered from it, in spite of my scarred cheek. ‘Gave a detailed confession of witchcraft, including coven activities, spell rhymes, harming the Laird’s children, and going on night rides with the Devil. There’s no record of whether she was eventually executed.’
‘That’s the one,’ I agreed. The car swept down the curve into Scalloway. The water below the castle was summer blue, the reflection ruffled to a brown block. When it was built, it had stood at the water’s edge. In the 1850s, the fishermen of Scalloway had used the stones of two ruined brochs to create the pier where now the ice plant sat, and the salmon-processing factory. Shetland’s prosperity depended as much on fish now as it had then. The witch with the strange name, Jonka, her husband had been lost at the fishing …
We came round the roundabout and along the street front. Monday tea-time shopper heads turned as it passed. I could see them recognising me, and turning to each other, could almost hear the whispers: ‘Do you think she’s under arrest?’ ‘No, she’s ower thick wi’ that policeman in the kilt. She’ll be telling him aathing sho hears ida village.’ My name would be mud in college tomorrow.
‘So?’ Gavin said, ignoring them. I gave him a blank look over my shoulder. He was smiling, an enigmatic curve of his lips. ‘What did you find out?’
I reverted to five-year-old mode. ‘Just the same as Sergeant Peterson.’
‘The same sources,’ he agreed. His voice hardened to a note I’d not heard since the longship
murder. ‘What was your take on it, Ms Lynch?’
War had been declared. The car slowed along the sea front and stopped at the marina. His hand was resting on the door button. I wasn’t going to entertain Sergeant Peterson with an undignified struggle. ‘I thought that it would be easy to impersonate the Devil at a coven meeting, especially with modern theatrical effects. I thought some unscrupulous person could have a good deal of fun with naive women out for a thrill.’
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