The Trowie Mound Murders

by Marsali Taylor

  It was obvious, now I’d worked my way back there. He’d been there and listening while Magnie had talked about lights up at the trowie mound. He could easily get up there with the quad, going along the road to the end, then up over the hill. I frowned. It was a steep hill, and he was too light for the quad. Perhaps he’d overturned or had some other misanter. I tried to see the simple, the plausible, not letting myself think about a yacht slipping below the waves, then went back below and unearthed the phone book from where it was acting as insulation below Rat’s sleeping box. Johnston … Johnston.

  It was Kirsten who answered. I was sorry to dash the hope in her voice.

  ‘Kirsten, it’s Cass. I had a sudden thought. Magnie and I were talking about him seeing lights up at the trowie mound, you know, the chambered cairn up the Hill of Heodale, the hill at the back of the Nicolson cottage, and Alex was listening. I wonder if he might have gone up there to investigate?’

  She grasped at the suggestion. ‘He might. It’s the sort of thing he’d do. I’ll phone Olaf straight away and tell him to look there.’

  ‘I’ll go round by sea,’ I said, ‘and look from that side.’

  This is my ship, Cass … I tried Gavin’s number, but either he was in a ‘no signal’ area or he’d switched his phone off. I tried to compress my message. ‘Gavin, it’s Cass. There’s a boy gone missing. I think he’s gone up to the trowie mound. I’m going round by sea.’ I sent Anders a text: ‘Taken RIB to old cottage.’ He’d know what I meant.

  I’d refuelled the RIB before putting her away. I put my fleece and lifejacket back on, clipped the kill-cord round my leg and set off at planing speed. In less than ten minutes I was turning the corner into the Rona; ten more, and I was out in the Atlantic, heading straight for the red cliffs below the trowie mound.

  I didn’t know it then, but Alex’s body had already been found.

  6

  What’s forborne sood aye be forsworn.

  (Old Shetland proverb: what’s been warned against should be kept clear of.)

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was seven o’clock now, and the wind had fallen away completely, leaving the water clear and still, a pale silvery blue stretching to the Atlantic horizon. The sun made the cliffs translucent fire-orange, but this hill was in shadow, the cottage crouching dark behind its sheltering arm of hill.

  The tide was flowing. I put a kedge out astern, paddled the RIB in, sploshed ashore with a running line, then hauled the boat back out. I paused, looking over the cottage, then took a deep breath and walked slowly around it, starting at the nearest side. It was ill luck to go round against the sun in Shetland. The window panes were dark, but clean; someone had washed the salt of the winter storms off them since spring. Even without staring I could see that the house wasn’t deserted. The curtains at the windows were clean, the floor of the living room carpeted, a rug by the fireplace and another by a little chest of drawers, but there was an odd space in the middle, as if the room had been used as a bedroom, and the bed had been taken away. An armchair was pushed back from the fireplace as if someone had just risen. I scanned it without turning my head, and walked on. The porch roof was in good condition, the blue paint on the door only slightly cracked. The Yale lock was gleamingly new. I remembered Brian’s hand clenched on an old lock, his black brows twisted together, and Jeemie’s voice: Robbie o’ the Knowe let his mouth open a bit wide – Brian hadn’t bothered asking for his keys back; he’d changed the locks to stop Cerys’ games.

  The drainage ditch around the cottage gave off a smell of damp moss, and I could hear water trickling in the bottom of it. The roof was edged with moss too, as if the rain sat at the skews and worked its way into the attic. A blackbird shrilled his alarm call from the twisted sycamore at the back of the house.

  It was darker around the back. I remembered the flash of spyglasses I had seen, and didn’t like the thought. Suppose the somebody who’d pushed the armchair back had crept out of the house to wait for me as I turned the last corner? I froze and listened. No, there was nothing but the wavelets tapping the stones of the shore, the rustle of wings as the blackbird changed branch to watch me better. I walked on. The tarred roof came down to a foot above my head, and the rough walls were bulged under their patchy coat of whitewash. The back extension had plastic curtains and a modern gutter running down into the earth. I came slowly round the second corner and stopped dead, breath-held, at the dark bulk looming in front of me, but it was only a pile of wood, cut branches from the sycamore and dismembered palettes. It smelt faintly of mildew, as if the lowest planks had been there a long time. I slid around it and on to the last corner.

  The kitchen window had a net curtain across it, a cast-off of Barbara’s, I guessed, for it was in the same style, with a pattern of large flowers bordering an upwards curve. A cup and plate were upended on the stainless steel draining board. There were two chairs at the bare wooden table. I came back to the shoreline and paused to examine the track leading to the end of the road, a smudged line worn by generations of feet trudging to school, to the shop, to a neighbour’s house. In winter it would be a guttery pick-your-way; now, it was an earth trail between blue pincushion scabious and the first bog orchids, pyramids of blush-pink petals above brown-spotted leaves. You’d get a pick-up along it, and someone had, for there was a clearly worn double set of tyre tracks ending in a turning place.

  On the beach below, someone had had a bonfire. I’d been right about the missing bed. Here were the black remains of mattress springs, a wooden frame, even a corner of what looked like a black satin sheet. I grimaced. Cerys’ taste, I supposed. Flung on the remains was a broken metal tripod, twisted as if someone strong had wrenched it apart. So Cerys had been videoing her games too. Yuck. And Anders? It is not a good place …

  I was searching for a missing child. I looked at the path again, but there were no tyre tracks that suggested Alex had been here. I let out a relieved breath that I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. I didn’t like this place. All the instincts that kept me back from rocky shores or mist-filled bays were kicking in now: go back, stay well clear.

  I headed up the hill of Heodale. My feet scrunched among the heather stems, releasing their honey scent. The grass was starred with yellow tormentil like miniature Tudor roses. Above me, the cairn crouched like a waiting trow on the hill’s top, the front of it grass-greened and bright in the sun, the back a dark shadow. I could hear a boat engine in the distance, but it was too close in to the cliff for me to see who it was.

  I paused at the top to get my breath back. I was standing in the flattened space overlooking the water, looking out just as the Neolithic people who built this must have done. The sun was still well up in the sky, but turning from gold to whisky-amber, and the water was tinted like a prospector’s stream. The three shelves of Foula, seventeen miles away to the south-west, lay clear on the horizon, sharp-edged, with the isle filled in a misty grey. Where I was looking, due west, was the Vikings’ road to Greenland and North America. We’d been returning from my first Atlantic crossing when Alain had died. It had taken me ten years to come to terms with the knowledge that I’d killed him. I remembered Anders: Would it be easier if your scar was inside?

  I shoved the thought away. Looking down from above, the cliff wasn’t as sheer as it looked from the sea. There was a series of narrow ledges slanting down it, like a zig-zag ladder; I’d have taken a bet that the Shetland Climbing Club would have wanted to try it. Brian wouldn’t let them near the place …

  I began strolling around the stone and grass mound. There was no sign of the quad here either, and no movement on the green hill, no sound of roaring, bumping engine. Whatever Alex was up to, he wasn’t here now.

  A dozen steps on, and I knew he’d been here. On the far side of the mound there was a trampled tyre mark where the grass had fallen away to expose the soft peat. I knelt down beside it. Yes, it was a quad mark sure enough, with the tyres wider than a motorbike’s. A metre away was a torn-out bit o
f heather where the other wheels had gripped harder to compensate for the sudden loss of traction. I ran my fingers over the indentation in the clinging mould. I didn’t need police training to see how recent this was. He’d heard us talking and brooded over the trowie mound during the sailing, then headed up the minute he’d changed.

  When I came around to the front again, I stopped. Somebody else had been here recently. I’d come straight up the steepest part of the hill, but there was a sheep path leading down the gentler way down to the cottage, and beside it, just below the mound itself, there was a clear footprint. It wasn’t the man’s rubber boots that I’d seen below, but a smaller, neater foot, wearing trainers. I put my own foot beside it and considered the two outlines. It was just bigger than my size 5: a small woman or a child. Furthermore, the prints weren’t from any old trainers, but from ones which had been designed to grip. The die-cut running the whole length of the sole, and the second one round the ball of the foot, stood proud in the damp peat mould. A sailor had come up here, a child or a female sailor not much taller than I. I grimaced at that. Most people were taller than me. Sandra had been around five foot four, and Madge had been taller again, nearer five foot six. I’d guess these neat feet were Sandra’s, rather than Madge’s, because I’d expect someone plump to have broader feet, but that didn’t necessarily follow.

  That meant Sandra and Peter had been here, and had gone again. Alex had been here, and gone again. Gavin needed to know about this. I took my mobile out, and got him this time. He sounded tired, with an undercurrent of distress running below the soft ‘s’ he gave my name. ‘Cass, where are you?’

  ‘At the trowie mound. Alex has been here – there are quad prints.’

  ‘We’ve found the boy,’ he said. His tone made it an elegy. ‘He seems to have come off the road just at Mavis Grind and gone down onto the beach. The quad turned over on him.’

  The breath left me as if I’d been punched. I couldn’t manage a word.

  ‘Are you still there, Cass? Get yourself home.’

  I put the phone away and came back to the platform. As I moved away from the wall of stones facing the sea, the sun picked out a vertical crack between two slabs. I froze, looking at it. A long, deep fissure ran down from the hanging heather, as if this stone could be moved, and there, on the other side of the great stone, another dark line, like the crack each side of a doorway. Those Neolithic people had had to get into the mound to lay the bones of their dead inside, and of course the doorway would be here, looking out over their territory. I thought of the Tomb of the Eagles, in Orkney, built high above the bay. You entered that one via a low passage, half underground. Why shouldn’t this cairn be the same?

  Now I’d spotted the doorway I looked more closely at the heather above it. It wasn’t growing between the stones here, as it was on the rest of the tomb, but hanging down from above the horizontal stone above, the stone which I could see now as a lintel. The stone with the crack each side was a massive plug, and for me to be able to see that so clearly it had to have been moved, and recently.

  I kept looking at it, and ran my fingers down each edge. Was there a slight dent, a sharper chipped edge, just here, in the centre of one side, exactly where I’d have placed a crowbar to get it open? Perhaps, perhaps. If something this size had been prised out, it would fall just by where I was standing. I looked down and saw the indentation’s curve highlit by the setting sun. The edges of it were still slightly rough, and at the far side a yellow tormentil flower was crushed over on itself, the heraldic rose petals just beginning to brown at the edges.

  They must have followed me up from the cottage, coming quickly over the brow of the hill while I was at the far side of the mound touching Alex’s tracks, then played hide and seek around the mound itself. They would have listened while I talked to Gavin. I heard feet shifting on my right, and turned to see a shape looming over me, an upraised arm. My head exploded in a splintering of stars which dissolved into darkness. With the last rags of consciousness I felt myself falling and stretched out my hands to save myself, only to feel them rag-limp as I went down onto the grass-lined platform. My cheek landed on cold moss. I felt my shoulder thud after it, then there was darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I wasn’t dead, but they were shoving me, ready to fling me overboard. The deck planks were wet with blood; it was smeared on my cheek and smelt sickly in my nostrils. I couldn’t see their faces, although I was striving to open my eyes, and the no, no that I was trying to say was silent. They rolled me over, and I was falling, falling, then I was lying on Marielle ’s deck, the cold fibreglass under my back, except that it was covered with grit, I hadn’t had time to sweep the decks, and it wasn’t Alain but Anders who was lying beside me, one arm across my breasts, and he was kissing me, his neat beard rough on my cheek. In the dream I wanted him to go on, but not now, my head hurt too much, and I was trying to tell him that, turning my head away from him even as my body was arching against his. The scrape and thud of the great stone being eased into place echoed dully round me …

  I awoke then. My cheek lay on grit that smelt of things left to rot, long forgotten. It was my own arm that lay awkwardly doubled across me, fingers brushing the earth. I reached a little further and felt the hard grains below my fingers. My body was aching and cold. Worst of all, the darkness pressed around me. I hadn’t realised that I was afraid of the dark. Even on the blackest night with the ship’s lanterns glimmering through shafts of rain, it was never truly dark at sea. Now I felt it as a presence, drawing closer to suck the breath from me. It lay over me like a shroud, and however much I strained my eyes, hoping for one friendly pinprick of daylight, there was no variation in its thickness. Pain-heavy eyelids open or shut, it made no difference. Above the darkness was the weight of stone and peat and heather. I could feel it pinning me down until the last breath was crushed out of me and my bones decayed with the others. How would my ghost communicate with the Neolithic ghosts of so many centuries ago? If I died here, would my spirit be shut up under the earth, unable to ask Alain’s forgiveness?

  My head throbbed, and I wanted to be sick. My body hurt all over, arms, legs, wrists, ankles, as if I’d been stretched on a rack. Whoever had flung me in here hadn’t bothered to handle me like a living person. They’d just rolled and dragged me inside the doorway and left me.

  They didn’t expect me to be a living person. It didn’t matter what you did to someone who was going to die of thirst in the next couple of days. Maybe they’d meant me to die sooner than that. It had been an efficient clout over the back of the head. I wanted to raise a hand to feel the bruise, but it was too much effort. I knew it hurt.

  I clenched my teeth. I wasn’t going to die. I’d just told Gavin I was here. The minute I heard noises from outside, I’d shout until they heard me. I said it out loud to myself, to break the silence that pressed in on me, and the weight of centuries that hung above me echoed it derisively: shout shout shout shout until the word died in the whimper of a caught throat. No noise would escape through this solid bubble of stone and earth. Had someone said that, as they’d dragged me? A voice in my head whispered like a memory: ‘It doesn’t matter. Nobody’d hear her through these walls.’ I couldn’t tell whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s; the words dropped into the silence and curled in my aching head. It doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter. Nobody’d hear her …

  I was nearer to panic then than I’d ever been in my life, nearer than when that tropical storm had swept the Caribbean and we’d stayed crouched on deck all night, making our anchors hold, nearer than when Alain had gone and I had to go on alone. I made myself relax on the cold ground and took ten long, counted breaths. They were going to hear me. I’d find a loose stone and bang with it. I’d yell as if I was hurling orders to the top of the mast in a force 10.

  I took ten more breaths. I wasn’t going to lie and wait for rescue either. I’d try to get out. If I couldn’t move the great stone from within, I’d find the entranc
e that Brian had used. I wasn’t much larger now than he had been then. If he could get in and out, so could I. If he’d filled the hole, I’d clear it.

  The first thing was to find out if I was injured. I eased my right arm from across my breast and laid it by my side. It felt stiff, but it wasn’t damaged. I lifted my other hand, slowly, and felt my head. There was a bonny bump and a crusting of blood, but the skull was intact, with no dangerous indentations. Sore but not fatal. I lifted my head and turned it gently from side to side. No neck injuries. Nothing else hurt as it would if it was broken. I stretched my arms out cautiously. My wrists hurt where I’d been hauled by them, but otherwise I didn’t seem to be injured. Legs, ditto. Your mistake, guys.

  I needed light. I felt for my mobile, but the pocket was empty. They wouldn’t risk me getting a signal in here. It didn’t matter. One useful function of my otherwise very basic Timex was that it could go luminous by pressing the winding-handle. Peerie Charlie was fascinated by it, and one of his shipboard treats was burrowing down into my bunk and seeing it light up – and on the thought, I took my hand away from the button. I didn’t need to know what time it was, and I’d see much better if I didn’t look at the green disc. It would be my torch to help me get out of here. It worked by stored light, so it wouldn’t last a huge number of flashes, perhaps eight, and they wouldn’t throw the light far, but if I used them carefully that might be enough.

  If you had a tricky manoeuvre to do on a boat, you thought it through first, because the sea didn’t give second chances. Now I knew I could control the darkness that pressed on me, I wasn’t afraid of it. I’d save my light until I was ready to use it. I groped upwards with one hand. There was nothing there to bump my head on. I inched both arms out, as if I was making a snow-angel, the way Inga and Martin and I had as children, and met only empty space to their furthest extent. Good. I eased myself up to a sitting position, ignoring all the protests from muscles that had lain in one position too long, then began to stretch and flex. I rubbed down my arms, massaging the wrists, then did the same to my legs and ankles. I focused on getting my body working for me again, leaving my subconscious to consider options and gather the evidence and memories I needed.