‘Did you report this to the officer of the watch?’ His gaze moved to Alain, who nodded.
‘I reminded Ms Lynch that her friend Magnie had also gone ashore, and he was the extra one.’
‘Except that he wasn’t,’ I said. ‘I checked with Petter later. He stayed aboard while Magnie went over. Ten trainees in each load, then seven.’
Captain Sigurd’s brows drew together, and his lips pursed. I sympathised. He’d get done for calling out the coastguard too soon, making a fuss about nothing and sullying the good name of the ship, but equally, if Laura turned out really to be missing, he’d be pilloried for calling it out too late. ‘So we may be missing two people. Well, we will conduct a preliminary search before taking further steps.’ He turned to Johanna. ‘Ms Rasmussen, can you go and ask the shuttlebus to wait for a moment.’ His gaze returned to Alain and me. ‘Do you both have mobile phone coverage?’
We hauled out our phones and checked them. Three bars.
‘Very well. Keep me informed of your progress.’
‘Sir,’ we said in unison, and went off to gather up our crew. I paused at Gavin’s shoulder on the way past. ‘We’re doing a quick look for Laura. Oliver’s worried about her not being back.’
He rose. ‘I’ll come with you. Can you make sure you and I do the area where we heard the shot?’
I nodded. ‘Should you mention it to the captain?’
‘I’ll talk to him.’ He headed to the captain, bending over his shoulder on the other side from Oliver. Gavin made a gesture indicating moving apart; the captain rose and followed him to the window, where they had a low-voiced conversation, then Gavin took out his mobile and turned his back on the room, shoulder hunched against all-comers like a journalist reporting a scoop.
Two people. I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Two people missing, and this was Shetland’s isle of the Finns. Was it going to be Eynhallow all over again? The land and sea search that found nothing …
Alain and I headed out to the carpark, where the dark blue shuttle bus was waiting for us. Our watch leaders and ABs were already aboard, along with Fireman Berg. ‘I may be of use,’ he said, ‘if you’re searching.’
‘You will,’ I agreed. I’d put him in a pair with Petter, leaving Gavin and I together.
We spent a moment sorting out who’d do where. Alain would do the western end of the island, and my team would take the east. I took out my OS map. ‘OK. This is just a preliminary search, over the hill. This jagged coastline, it would take a bigger team than us to search every geo, and a climbing team or the chopper to get her up if she’s fallen down.’ I didn’t add that the chances of her having survived such a fall were low; they knew that too. I looked at the two headlands, the Snap to the south, Strandibrough to the north, and turned the map to show my ABs. ‘Gavin and I will walk up this bit here, looking over the south headland.’ My calves gave a twinge of protest. ‘Johan and Mona, you get off at the Haa o’ Funzie with us and walk north, and Petter and Mr Berg, you get out at Everland and go up the hill from there.’ I turned to the driver. ‘Does that sound sense?’
She nodded. ‘Yea, lass. It’s no’ like searching a forest. If she’s there, you’ll soon spot her, especially if she was wearing a bright-coloured jacket.’
‘She wore blue,’ Mona said. ‘Powder blue. That should show up.’
The terrain was flat enough, sloping up to only 85 metres at the highest point, Baa Neap. I spread my map between my team. ‘If you two walk along to Baa Neap,’ I said, ‘and climb the hill, you should get a good view over the headland. Petter, Mr Berg, you go to Strand and walk along, then go up the further hill here, Kegga. You should see each other. Meet up in the middle, then cut back across to Everland to be picked up – watch this marshy bit. OK?’
They nodded.
I handed Petter the map. ‘Don’t try anything dangerous. No climbing down cliffs or anything like that, and keep well back from the edge.’
I’d just got my seat belt on when Gavin swung himself aboard and sat down beside me. ‘I’ve put Freya on a watching brief.’
With Alain’s eyes on me, I didn’t pull my usual face at the mention of Sergeant Freya Peterson, Gavin’s super-efficient sidekick. She was taller than me, which was a starter reason for disliking her, blonde, made-up with corporate glossiness and obviously heading for Chief Constable. ‘Is she here in Shetland?’
‘Between Police Scotland cases.’
‘Say hello from me when next you speak.’
‘I will.’
We sat in silence as the minibus jolted us along eastwards, past the phalaropes’ loch and on to the end of the road. The Haa o’ Funzie turned out to be a roofless building with a substantial shed in front of it and a new-build house next door. A traditional Shetland collection of cars, trailers, tractors and boats surrounded the buildings. The shuttle bus driver turned in their yard, and dropped us at the beach, a ridged bank of flat stones which shelved steeply down to the sea. There was a serious undertow, with the swell sucking and exploding over a rock in the middle of the bay, even on this calm day. The Out Skerries floated at the edge of the sea, with the tall light of Bound Skerry a grey pillar against the horizon. The cliffs we were about to go round jutted vertically from the sea; their green tops curved downwards, then the olive grass plummeted in a fifty-foot drop.
On the plus side, you could spot individual seagulls on the smooth grass. There was no powder-blue jacket. The smooth water of the bay showed no sign of anything floating, just a couple of buoys that marked lobster pots.
We waved Johan and Mona off, and walked back to the cattle grid. The green fields beside it were filled with peaceably grazing sheep, black and white cows on one side of the road, brown on the other, and a small herd of ponies. When we paused, they began to wander towards us, no doubt associating tourists with spare sandwiches or apple cores. Gavin watched them with interest. ‘That skewbald’s an odd throwback,’ he said, pointing out a red and white one at the side of the herd. ‘I was reading up about Fetlar, and apparently the landowner ran an Arab stallion on the island to improve the breed.’
‘I’m more concerned about their hooves and teeth,’ I said, watching warily as they approached.
His arm came up around me. ‘I’ll protect you. Look at her pretty dished face, and her slim legs. That’s pure Arab. I bet she’d fly her tail if we saw her trot.’
I noted the slim legs. ‘The fat belly’s pure Shetland.’
They came to within a couple of metres of us, then veered away again when they saw we weren’t offering anything edible. We walked up the landward side of the fence above the beach and cut upwards to where the wall began, pausing halfway to look across the geos at the cliff foot. There was nothing suspicious on the beaches, nor anything floating.
As we walked, I told Gavin what Carl had said about Laura not having a car. ‘Too easy to tamper with,’ he repeated, as I had. He thought a moment, then pulled out his phone. ‘Good signal … Freya? Yes. Can you call up the report on the Eastley parents’ death? … Round about New Year. Thanks. Speak to you later.’
We walked on in silence, feet soft on the grass.
‘If there was anything in the shot we heard,’ Gavin said, ‘this would be where the body was disposed of. What’s the tide up to?’
‘High water was half past eleven.’ I visualised the tidal atlas I’d been looking at only yesterday. ‘The tide swept downwards then. Two or three hours later it turns and comes back towards us.’
‘We heard the shot at 10.47.’
‘Slack tide.’ I checked my watch. ‘It’s had three hours of heading seawards. The coastguard have computer programs to calculate the speed of drift from a given point.’
‘Your captain doesn’t feel justified in calling them yet.’
We continued along the line of the cliffs, looking over. The lie of the land let us see most of the hill on this side, but the cliffs curved round in a series of steep geos, V-shaped clefts of rock. We did our best to lo
ok into every one, leaning up against the wall and craning our necks over. The vertical rock showed how deep the water was here. ‘If she’s dead,’ I said, and felt a shudder down my spine at the word, ‘there’s nothing we can do. The chopper would be better.’
Gavin nodded, and glanced at his watch. ‘Quarter past three.’
It felt as though we’d been walking for hours. ‘I’ll check in with the others.’ I rang Petter first, then Mona, and lastly Alain. There was no sign of Laura. Wearily, I prepared to keep walking. Gavin, I noticed, was more used to this than I, after a childhood crawling through the heather in search of stags.
We’d come at last to Gavin’s marker, closer to the point of the headland than I’d realised, when his phone rang. He put up a hand to stop me walking, and listened. ‘Yes … really? Interesting … I’ll explain when I see you.’
He pocketed the phone and looked at me. ‘The parents died in a car crash on a country road outside Edinburgh. It was a single-vehicle incident, and the eventual conclusion was mechanical failure. There was no sign of anything else, and the father hadn’t been drinking. No dead seagull who’d flown into the windscreen. The car went off the road, hit a stone wall, and went on fire. The mechanics couldn’t tell what the cause had been.’
‘But Laura gave up her car after it.’
‘Yes.’ He glanced at me. ‘I only had that one meeting with her, in the cafe. What was she like?’
I gave him a blank look. He amended the question. ‘Where would you put her, on board ship?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘It’s hard to say, because she was obviously still suffering from the shock of her parents’ death, so I wouldn’t be giving her a lot of responsibility.’
‘Officer?’
‘Oh, yes. She had the air of an organiser. It would have been her rather than Oliver who did all the bookings.’ I kept thinking. ‘Jenn’s job. All the paperwork for the trainees, and forms for each port.’
‘Not the sailing side?’
I shook my head, trying to tease out my feelings. ‘No. She felt too much of a loner. She was friendly, of course, and I think she’d work well in an office team, but I wouldn’t see her going out for a pint afterwards. Maybe it was because she was the director’s daughter. She got set apart from the start.’
Clever. Inner toughness. An organising brain. Someone who could see both detail and the wider picture; who could work out the implications. Someone who would know how carefully her parents drove, how well-serviced their car was.
‘She was doing pretty well at hnefatafl.’ Unless, of course, Alain had been letting her win. I remembered her anxious glance at Oliver. ‘I bet she was Oliver’s big sister, even though she was younger. When he got into trouble in his teens, she’d have fished him out.’ Loved him, looked after him, known his weaknesses … known, too, if he was any good at mechanics. If he’d know, for example, how to weaken a steering column or tamper with brakes.
‘Your dad’s friend said that in the will she’d been given money equivalent to his debts.’ Gavin paused for a moment, eyes on the blue sky. ‘Where would you put him on board?’
I had no difficulty with that one. ‘On a series of short, challenging tasks that let him think he was in charge, but under strict supervision that pretended it wasn’t looking. Bosun’s mate – no, nothing with a title that gave him a superior.’
He laughed and slipped his arm through mine. ‘There’s always a superior on board ship. What about me?’
I’d never thought about that, but the answer came straight to my lips. ‘Captain.’ It startled the breath out of me. ‘Once you’d learnt to sail,’ I managed to add, and focused on my feet for a bit. When I dared to look sideways at him, he was smiling. I brought the conversation back to reality. ‘This is a perfect place for throwing a body over. But wouldn’t you see marks, if someone had been dragged over the hill to the cliffs?’
‘Probably.’ He looked from his marker to its nearest piece of wall, twenty metres away. ‘They’d have to get her over the wall too. Are those missing stones?’
I turned my head to where he was pointing and saw a ragged place in the neat lines of stones that topped the wall. He got his spyglass out, peered intently and nodded to himself, then passed it to me. I swept along the upright stones until I came to it; several leaning against each other. I gave him the spyglass back. ‘What now?’
I could see he was dying to go and examine it properly, but holding himself in check. ‘If this is a crime scene, we mustn’t contaminate it.’
He caught my glance over the wall at the next section of cliffs and understood what I was thinking. ‘If she was shot and thrown over, then she’s not alive. This is as close a look as we can allow ourselves.’ His arms came around my waist. ‘Go limp.’
I obliged, and felt him heft me into the air until my waist was level with the top of the wall. Obligingly, I dangled my arms over the other side. ‘If you were to shove me right over now, I think I’d just roll into the water.’
Gavin nodded and set me on my feet again.
There was nothing floating in the glimmering water, or swirling in the undertow.
We came away from the edge then and went landwards, pausing at the loch of Funzie Ness to drink the peaty water from clasped hands, and taking a rest on the clifftop looking out over the Snap, a sea-worn hole in the cliff shaped like the eye of a needle, outlined with a seam of whiter rock. The curved bottom of the opening was filled with sea-rubble, too darkly shadowed by the bright water behind for me to make out details of what was lying there. Behind it, the cliffs were shallower, slanting down to the sea in grey diagonals.
‘There was a cave marked hereabouts,’ Gavin said, ‘but I don’t see any sign of something accessible. Come on. We’re past the worst now.’
He held out his hand to ease me up, and we walked onwards. Looking ahead, I could see that he was right; after we’d come past these last two geos, the dramatic clefted cliffs gave way to a smoother outline where we could just follow the curve of the land until we reached the camping böd.
We were trudging along in silence when Gavin’s phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket, glanced at it and answered. ‘Freya?’
I made a face at the burnished water.
‘OK. Yes, we’re just doing a preliminary walk around. There’s no sign.’
I thought preliminary was a bit dismissive of our efforts. It was an amateur search by professional standards, but I reckoned we hadn’t missed anything.
‘Oh? Interesting … yes … OK. Yes, worth asking. OK, speak to you later.’
He put the phone away. ‘The person who booked into the camping böd was an Anna Reynolds, from Edinburgh. She paid in advance, using PayPal.’
‘Edinburgh – like Oliver and Laura.’
‘The voters’ roll has her as the same age group, so she could well know them. Freya’s following that up, in so far as she can when we’ve no evidence of a crime having been committed. She didn’t cross over to Fetlar on the 11.30 ferry.’ He paused, gave a long look around the empty, glimmering sea, then slipped his hand into mine.
‘Nearly there. A good negative result: no injured person, no body, and best of all, only this last stretch of road before another cup of tea.’
We came along the fifty metres of hill towards the beach and the camping böd. We’d intended to go straight past it, when I saw the curtains in the window move – no, it wasn’t the curtain that had moved. A shadow had passed behind it. I let my knee sag and went down, ending up on the ground, then sat for a moment, holding my hands each side of my ankle, and making an It really hurts face. Gavin was down beside me instantly. ‘Turned it?’
‘We’re being watched from the cottage Daniel went into,’ I gasped, through gritted teeth. ‘Can you help me there?’
Gavin gave me an amused glance. ‘Sometimes you’re very like your mother.’
‘Absolutely no resemblance.’ I used his arm to heave myself back to my feet and limped forward.
‘Just k
eep remembering which ankle you sprained.’
‘Right.’ I made it clear to the shadowy watcher that I couldn’t possibly put any weight on it.
‘You’re overdoing it a little,’ Gavin said.
‘How do you know how much it hurts?’ I retorted, and hirpled through the gate, pausing to support myself artistically against the picnic table. A red hen passed me, fluffing its feathers out. Beside me, the window glinted my own reflection back, a small window with a dozen panes in rows of three and a scatter of shells on the sill. I felt the prickle of someone watching me from behind it. I straightened and limped the final two metres to the cottage door. I knocked first, then pushed the door open, Shetland-fashion, calling, ‘Is there anybody home?’
It was a spacious porch, lined with new wood, and with several bags of peats sitting in one corner. The door into the house was closed.
Nobody answered, but I had that feeling that someone was there, keeping quiet and hoping I’d go away. I limped further in and called again. There was a scurrying noise on the stairs, as if someone was running down them quickly, trying to pretend they’d been downstairs all the time, then the inner door opened.
It was Daniel. His surprise wasn’t convincing. ‘Cass! What’s happened to you?’
‘I turned my ankle.’ The wooden stairs ran straight up ahead of me, with a room on each side. The shadow I’d seen had been on the left, the sitting room. I limped in and plumped myself down on the wooden settee. ‘I thought this looked just the place to have a roll of bandage, to strap it up for the last bit of walk to the hall.’
‘Yeah.’ He turned round in the middle of the room in a helpless way. It was a bonny room, lined with the same bright wood as the porch, with basic chairs around the outside, and a black iron stove jutting out into the hearth.
I was in the wrong place for a first aid box. Gavin went into the kitchen, on the other side of the stair, and came back with a bandage. Daniel watched as I pulled my sock down and began winding a figure-of-eight round my foot.
Death on a Shetland Isle Page 16