The Trowie Mound Murders

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘Awww,’ Charlie said, with exactly Inga’s intonation. ‘I touch.’

  ‘Not these ones,’ I said. ‘Let’s see if we can stroke the riding ponies.’

  We ducked under the fence and went along the front of the line of ponies who’d competed in the riding classes. The girl who’d raced in for polish was there, giving water to a pair of black Shetlands. Both were the traditional style, with a great froosh of mane between the ears, hiding half of the faces, and falling on both sides of the strong neck. The black coats shone as if she’d used the polish on them, and both had long tails that rippled to just above ground level.

  ‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘May Charlie stroke one of your ponies?’

  ‘This one,’ she said. ‘Hiya, Charlie! You ken me, I’m Janette. I’m in Vaila’s class at the school. Would you like to sit on the pony?’

  Charlie nodded, eyes wide.

  ‘Gie him a pat first,’ Janette said. She squatted down beside Charlie. ‘He’s that gentle. See.’ She leaned forward, took a hold of the headcollar and gave the pony a kiss at the end of its black nose. The pony took it without a blink, then stretched its head forward and snorted at Charlie. His hand jerked in mine, but he stood his ground as the pony nosed at his T-shirt, then shook its head and snorted again. Janette kept her grip on its chin. ‘Now you give him a stroke. See how soft his nose is.’

  Charlie edged his hand forward, just touched the velvet nose and snatched it back, then touched again. ‘He soft.’

  ‘He’s really soft,’ Janette agreed. ‘Shall I sit you on his back?’ She swung him up, and kept an arm around him, so that she was taking his weight. Charlie held on tight to her shoulders. Gradually she coaxed him into sitting alone, with a chunk of mane held tightly in both hands. ‘See, the pony doesn’t want you to fall. He’s standing still as still.’

  To me, the pony had more of an air of ‘not another one’ than positive benevolence, but who was I to argue? You didn’t find ponies on board a tall ship. Janette swung Charlie down again.

  ‘Say “thank you” to the pony,’ she said.

  ‘Ta,’ Charlie repeated.

  ‘And to Janette,’ I added.

  ‘Thank you.’ Charlie waved and towed me off at speed again. Pony time was obviously over. ‘Ice cream.’

  He was heading straight for the Mr Whippy van, parked just opposite the barbecue. My stomach felt like it might be lunch-time, but my purse was in my jacket, draped over the chair behind our stall, and just because it felt like ice-cream time to me didn’t mean it was that time for toddlers.

  ‘Let’s ask Mam first,’ I said.

  I was just leading him back towards the marquee when Charlie jumped and waved. ‘Daddy!’

  It was big Charlie, sandwiched between his two daughters. Peerie Charlie had got his colouring from his dad: Big Charlie had the same curly fair hair and light skin, weathered to a reddish tan this far on in the summer. It was strange how the boy favoured his father, the girls their mother, yet now I came to think of it, that was the Shetland way. Viking look-alike men weren’t that uncommon, particularly in Yell, where there were a lot of tall, square-built men with reddish-fair hair, but you rarely saw that Scandinavian look of radiantly fair women. A lot of Shetland women were small and dark, with blue eyes, the Pictish look they’d inherited from their long-back fore-mothers, who’d been taken as Viking concubines when the raiders had arrived.

  Big Charlie had been in charge of the other echo-sounding boat. I gave a glance down at the pier. Yes, he’d moored up there too, among the other fishing boats. They found a body on board the yacht … As he turned to me, the forced cheerfulness he’d been using with the lasses evaporated. His skin was grey under the tan, and his mouth was turned down, as if he was feeling sick. ‘Cass. Inspector Macrae asked me to look for you. He tried to phone you, but there’s no signal up here.’ He bent down to swing Peerie Charlie up onto his shoulders. ‘Now, then peerie-breeks, have you seen the horses?’

  ‘I sat horse,’ Charlie affirmed. ‘I hands tight.’ He clenched his fists to show his sisters. ‘Now I ice-cream.’

  ‘Better ask Mam,’ Charlie said. He swung his son down again, and handed him to the lasses, then fished a fiver out of his pocket. ‘Check with Mam, lasses, then take him off for an ice-cream.’ He waited till they were out of earshot, then spoke softly. ‘Yon police officer asked me to ask you, Cass, if you’d get a chance to go down to the pier. We found the yacht – you saw that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I had my diving gear, so I went down.’ His face tightened. ‘There was the body in the cabin. I put a line around him –’

  ‘Him?’ I cut in. Peter –

  Charlie nodded. ‘Once we’d got him onboard I had a bit of an inspection with the flashlight.’ He looked quickly around him, as if checking he wouldn’t be overheard. ‘Whoever sunk that yacht did it deliberately.’

  ‘Could you tell how?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘One of the toilet pipes was sawn through, just past the seacock.’

  ‘That’d sink her, right enough.’ The seacocks were the fittings over the holes in the side of the boat: cooling water for the engine, sink and cockpit drains, and toilet water in and out. They didn’t fail regularly, but if they did then you were in trouble, because you had a three-centimetre hole in the bottom of the boat. Every boat carried plugs for each seacock, just in case.

  ‘The seacock was open – it was one of those lever ones, you could see it was open. The pipe just past it, one of those green plastic hose ones, the toilet intake, it was sawn right through, as if someone had taken a hacksaw to it, then opened the cock.’

  ‘No sign of anyone trying to plug the leak?’

  He shook his head. ‘A bonny yacht, for someone to scuttle like that.’ He glanced around him again, face grim. ‘They’ve got the bodies in a white van down there, the one from the yacht, and one the chopper picked up this morning. The Inspector wanted you to name them for him, if you could, before they take them to Lerwick.’

  ‘I’ll go right now,’ I said.

  8

  He’s da main string o’ da fiddle.

  (Old Shetland saying: he’s the most important person in an enterprise.)

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Gavin must have seen me coming, down the green slope of hill, against the grain when everyone was climbing up it, for when I got down to the beach he was waiting there for me. He was wearing a blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow to show brown, muscled arms; his kilt hung square above grey-green socks. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and fell in at my shoulder.

  ‘Is it really that late?’ I said. I glanced at the sun, and the short shadows; not far off one o’clock. A look at my scratched watch confirmed it, ten past one. No wonder I was hungry. I wished I’d eaten before I came down. I might not fancy food, after.

  ‘We got a body in the yacht,’ Gavin said softly, ‘and another was found floating at sea, just where you’d expect it to be if it was thrown over the cliffs last night.’

  ‘The Coastguard has a computer programme,’ I said. ‘You put in where the object was lost, factor in the tides, the wind and the size of the object, and it tells you where you can start looking.’

  ‘The programme was bang on. The helicopter found her this morning, and the lifeboat picked her up, just about the time we found the yacht, so I told them to bring her to Voe.’

  ‘Madge,’ I said. ‘The woman on the motorboat. And Peter on the yacht. So where’s Sandra?’

  Gavin spread his hands in a ‘don’t know’ gesture. ‘There’s no sign of the motorboat. It was moored up at the cottage while you were being rescued, I saw it below us, but when the lifeboat came back it was gone. We’ve put an alert out.’

  ‘But why should Sandra be taking David and Madge’s boat?’

  ‘The yacht was scuttled. The diver had a look around. He said there was a broken pipe in one of the seacocks.’

  ‘He told me,’ I said. ‘Even a broken pipe’d only sink her i
f the person on board wasn’t able to stop the leak. They’d have had plugs aboard, or a broom handle with a towel wrapped around, anything would do. You should be able to get the boat home.’

  ‘If you were alive to sail it,’ Gavin agreed.

  ‘Was he alive?’

  Gavin shook his head. ‘Forensics will have to confirm it, but he was lying below, in the cabin, and there was no sign of locked hatches to trap him there. I think he was dead when the yacht was sunk.’

  We’d come to the road now, and the background of music from the Pierhead had become a boom, boom, from chest-height speakers placed one each end of the pub front. The tables were busy with folk enjoying a pint and chips. Gavin led me past them and round into the car park. The white van was backed up to within a half-door width of the shed opposite, so that the back doors could be opened just enough to look in without anyone else being able to see inside. A policeman in uniform was waiting beside it, just to make sure everyone around knew what this was.

  ‘This isn’t going to be very bonny,’ Gavin said. His voice was matter-of-fact, a warning, not sympathy.

  I nodded. My hands had clenched at my side; I forced the fingers to uncurl.

  ‘The man we picked up last night is already in Lerwick. You don’t need to see him again. You’d already identified him as the man calling himself David Morse, who you saw falling dead, and as there aren’t likely to be two moustached men falling off cliffs into the sea, we’re taking it that that’s who he is. We’ve got prints and a photo, so if he had any kind of record we’ll soon get his real name.’

  He opened the van door until it touched the wall behind, and motioned me into its space. Inside the van were two long parcels in black plastic, like dolphins washed up on a metal shore. The heads were at this end. I took a deep breath, bracing myself. One body had had a night at sea, with the salt water swelling the skin. The other had had three nights down on the bottom, among the crabs and lobsters.

  Gavin came into the alcove of the van door and wall beside me. I could feel the warmth coming off him, through his blue shirt. He opened the other door, so that we stood in a triangle of metal, close as lovers. I could hear his breathing, the rustle of his shirt-sleeves as he leant forward to unzip the first bag. ‘This is the one from the yacht.’

  I closed my eyes for a second, summoning up my courage, then opened them again. Gavin had opened the bag down as far as the waist, but tucked one corner back over the head. I was looking at a man’s torso, clad in a jumper which had been baggy, but which was now moulded to the contours of the body, a body blown out by gases so that the gansey was stretched tight. Fishermen’s wives used to knit their men’s initials into the square underarm gusset of their navy ganseys; they wanted to be able to identify their own. This jumper was knitted in eye-hurting stripes of dazzling colour, darkened by the water, but when it was dry it would be neon yellow, pink, lime green. I put my foot down about the Phil hat, didn’t I, pet?

  Gavin’s eyes were intent on my face. ‘You recognise it?’

  I swallowed. ‘Peter Wearmouth had a jumper like this.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Gavin said. His hand moved to the triangle of black plastic which covered the head.

  It was more unpleasant than I could have imagined. The underwater creatures had been busy. The face was a blur of ragged, whitish flesh, with pale bone sticking through along where the cheeks had once been, and around the eye-sockets. A piece of bony cartilage marked where the nose had jutted out. One eyeball lay in its socket, complete, but squashed out of shape; the other was a trail of colourless tubes. I saw more than I wanted to in that brief glimpse before my eyes found his hair, a ragged cap of silver, water-darkened to grey, and plastered in lines across the bony scalp. It was barely a face, yet I recognised the proportions. I nodded, feeling too sick to dare open my mouth.

  ‘Can you tell who it is?’

  I clenched my teeth and took a deep breath. ‘Peter. It’s Peter Wearmouth. I can’t recognise the face, but the look is right, the hair and the proportions.’ Nausea welled up; I turned away, battling for control, and didn’t turn back until I heard him zip the bag again. He spoke gently.

  ‘Can you bear another one?’

  I nodded.

  I watched his hands ease the zip down the black plastic. What was underneath was black too, the black jacket and trousers I’d seen spinning in an endless cartwheel. It was only when he’d taken the zip to waist level and withdrawn his brown, sure hands that I looked upwards at the head, expecting to see Madge’s crab-orange hair and plump face.

  The face was plump enough, swollen by the water, and completely colourless. It was more horrible than the other. That had hardly been a face at all, but something from a special effects studio. This was a dead person, with all that had made her alive wiped away to leave cold clay, the mouth slackened, the expression gone. In a way she was harder to recognise, now that what had made her human was gone. The staring eyes were grey-green beneath the fair brows, and blank as the eyes of a fish on a slab. Then I looked again at the hair. It was fair as the neat brows, cut in a long bob. I didn’t understand how she had come to be with David on that cliff above my head, but I knew her. I nodded, and turned away again until Gavin had covered her once more.

  He shut the further door, and took my arm to lead me into the sunshine. I was grateful for the warmth that fell like a caress on my bare arms. I stood, clutching it to me, as Gavin nodded to the policeman. ‘Off you go now.’

  His hand came up under my elbow again. He led me forward along the pier to Khalida. ‘Let me make you a cup of drinking chocolate.’

  I sat down in my own cockpit, shivering. Cat scrambled forward into my lap, a purring circle of warmth. Even this light wind was cold on my cheek, and the slatted seat was hard under me. I heard Gavin below, the familiar sounds of water being pumped into the kettle, the flare of the gas, the chink of mugs being taken from their compartments, the spoon rattling in the cocoa jar. I hugged Cat to me, and leant my head against Rat’s warm curve, and shuddered until the kettle whistled, and Gavin came out of the cabin and put a mug into my hand. ‘Don’t try to talk, just drink this.’

  He’d put extra sugar in it, and a slug of Khalida’s emergency whisky. My teeth chattered on the rim of the mug as I drank, but it heartened me. When I’d finished, I set the mug in its holder on the cabin step and looked at Gavin. His grey eyes were steady on me, assessing, heartening. ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ I said, ‘but that woman, the one who fell from the cliff last night, who was there with David Morse, that was Sandra Wearmouth.’

  Gavin came out of the cabin and sat down opposite me. He glanced over his shoulder. There was nobody near us, and the incessant beat from the speakers outside the Pierhead drowned our soft speech. Facing each other like this, our knees were almost touching across Khalida’s narrow cockpit: my navy cargo trousers, the green and white wool of his kilt. The light purr of wind was just enough to ruffle his russet hair. His grey eyes fixed mine steadily.

  ‘Talk to me, Cass. What sense are you making of it?’

  It was all jumbled in my head. I went for the strand I could follow.

  ‘It must have been David Morse and Sandra Wearmouth who put me in the tomb,’ I said. ‘They were the two bodies found in the sea, the ones I saw falling, and before that they were talking about me having escaped – ergo, they put me there. They meant me to die in there. But … the mixed couples is confusing me. I thought David and Madge were the couriers, in their flash motorboat, and Peter was the policeman following them. But now it looks like David and Sandra were working together.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean your first premise wasn’t right too. Peter’s partner thought he’d gone off sailing, but why shouldn’t he be using his holiday to follow a hunch, just as I did?’

  ‘And if Sandra was the mole …?’

  Gavin nodded. ‘We will do it. It’s against all the rules, but you come home and you’re tired, but your brain’s ful
l of your current case, and you have absolute faith in your wife, your girlfriend, your brother, and so you tell them about it. Creator Lord, the trouble I’d be in if Kenny wasn’t reliable.’

  ‘So she told David and Madge what was going on, they thought Peter was getting a bit close, and decided to get rid of him.’

  ‘Someone local’s involved too, because of the use of the tomb. Granted, Shetland’s the ideal centre spot for delivery to the places the works have turned up, but surely there must be easier places to stash things away. I haven’t been up there yet. What did you see up there that made it a good hiding-spot?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be disturbed, for a start,’ I said. ‘Even here in Shetland, there’s no old cottage or byre so remote that somebody might not start poking around in it. A tourist caught in a shower of rain, kids playing – whereas no casual passer-by would be able to lift that stone.’

  ‘A cottage could be locked. Did you try the door of the one you mentioned, below the tomb?’

  ‘It was locked, but I don’t think that was anything to do with this. Brian Nicolson, the owner, well, he left a key with his best mate.’ I was annoyed to feel my cheeks going crimson. ‘I gather there were sex games going on, involving his wife, and he found out and changed the locks. That was on Thursday. The first time I went round, on Wednesday, I didn’t try the door, because I wasn’t sure there wasn’t somebody inside. Coming back down, I saw a flash from binoculars. It wasn’t David, he was off fishing, but it could have been Madge. There was no sign of her on the boat. Or I suppose it could have been Sandra.’ Threesomes … ‘The cottage was damp too. It had a ditch running round the outside, and there was moss on the roof, around the skylights, whereas that tomb was dry, and still – as near an air-conditioned underground store as you’d get, outside a museum.’

  Gavin made a face, unconvinced. ‘Is it overlooked by houses?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s unusual too. Nearly everyone can be seen by someone, so normally comings and goings would be noticed, and there’d certainly be comment if people were seen carrying paintings in and out from a boat. You can only see the trowie mound from the sea, or from the Ward of Muckle Roe – ‘ward’ means peak. That’s how Magnie saw the lights. He couldn’t sleep, and climbed the hill. Then there’s the mooring bouy below. They could have moored up, climbed to the mound, opened it using whatever leverage gear they used, taken out the artworks they wanted, and gone again, without anyone knowing they’d been there.’