by Lin Anderson
‘Then get down to the chopper station. Apparently there’s a brief window for them to get in and out again before the weather closes in.’
As he’d exited, he heard a good luck follow him.
McNab muttered a mixture of blasphemy and silent prayer as the ground swiftly approached. His annoyance at Cameron dissolved into admiration as a gust of wind hit the chopper and the pilot swiftly brought their descent back under control.
Then the door was open and he and his bag were ejected. Even as he dipped his head and began his run towards the shed, he heard the chopper rise behind him. When Cameron had indicated they would be in and out again before McNab had reached shelter, he’d been right.
McNab turned to watch the black and yellow bluebottle rise and head south-west, saying a silent thanks for his safe landing. The rain was falling in sheets, driving into his face as well as his back. Hitching his bag over his shoulder, he made his way towards the vehicle lights next to a small building, assuming it had come to pick him up.
As he approached, a figure stepped out of the jeep.
‘DS McNab?’ A hand was extended. ‘Derek Muir. Resident Ranger. DI Flett asked me to meet you. He sends his apologies. He’s stuck on the mainland.’ He gestured to McNab to get into the jeep.
‘I didn’t think they’d manage to land you,’ he said, engaging the gear and releasing the handbrake. ‘Couldn’t have been a fun journey.’
‘It wasn’t,’ McNab said.
‘Well, it’s going to get worse,’ the Ranger said. ‘The weather that is, not the journey. I’d rather be down here than up there.’
He swung out of the gate and onto a tarred road, the wind hitting the side of the car.
‘Where are we headed?’ McNab said.
‘Dr MacLeod and her assistant have taken the old Harkness cottage for the duration. It’s within walking distance of the deposition site.’
‘How’s it going up there?’
‘They had to give up when the weather came in, but I believe they’ve retrieved all the bones, except the skull of course.’
‘There’s no skull?’ McNab said in surprise.
‘There was a skull which the digger unearthed. It went missing the first night. We think local kids may have taken it.’
‘I didn’t think grave robbers would be a feature of Orkney,’ McNab said.
‘There are a great many graves and bones scattered over the islands. Most of them ancient of course. We used to unearth them when I was a kid. So I was probably a grave robber too. We’ll find the skull.’
The darkness outside was impenetrable, with an occasional glimpse of lighted habitation blinking at the passing jeep. In the headlights, the narrow road was a dark ribbon with a thin edging of white sand on either side.
‘The cottage is stocked up,’ Derek said. ‘So there should be enough food for three, but I can always get more from the shop, if you need it.’
‘Chrissy’s appetite hasn’t been diminished by grave digging?’
‘Not according to Dr MacLeod.’
McNab recalled his earlier conversation with Rhona and decided this was a perfect opportunity to bring up the subject of Jock Drever. ‘Dr MacLeod said as the Ranger you know all there is to know about Sanday.’
Derek cast him a swift glance. ‘I wouldn’t say all.’
‘What about former residents?’
‘How former?’
‘During wartime, when Lopness was a radar station,’ McNab said.
‘The island was overrun by army and navy personnel and contractors then. So I doubt if I could help. If it had been a local …’
‘The name was Drever, James Drever,’ McNab tried.
A moment’s silence followed, then the Ranger said, ‘A common family name hereabouts. Is that all you have?’
‘He may have been a Bevin Boy during the war.’
‘Then he’d be a good age now.’
‘He died recently in Glasgow,’ McNab said. ‘We’re trying to trace his family.’
Derek looked thoughtful. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can find out.’
As they turned a ninety-degree bend in the narrow road, McNab caught a sudden glimpse of something jutting out of the waves just offshore.
‘What’s that?’
‘The famous First World War German destroyer that broke free from a tow and went aground here,’ the Ranger said. ‘I take it you don’t know much about Sanday?’
‘Probably as much as you know about Glasgow,’ McNab joked.
‘Oh, I know Glasgow all right. My family moved there when I was nine.’
‘You don’t sound like it,’ McNab said, surprised.
‘I could if you wanted me to.’ Derek demonstrated this by going into a diatribe that could have graced any East End pub.
‘You were brought up in the East End?’
‘Let’s say I spent a few of my formative years there before my mother brought me back.’
McNab found he was enjoying himself, even if he had stepped off the edge of the world.
‘That’s the schoolhouse.’ The Ranger indicated a long stone building with tall windows as he pulled into a rougher track. ‘You’re along here.’
The rain had halted for the moment, although the wind still howled like a banshee. McNab felt its force on the side of the jeep. They crested, not a hill, merely an undulation in the ground, and turned right.
A sign immediately informed them not to go any further due to erosion, before the road became a sandy track with a raised grassed centre. Had they been in a car, the undercarriage would have had difficulty making it past this point. Then McNab saw the cottage. Two windows like bright eyes, a small porch with a front door, the roof comprising large flagstones.
‘Home sweet home,’ the Ranger said.
14
Samuel Flett had been born in the house he lived in now. A war baby, he’d made his appearance in the box bed next to the fire, the only child born to Ella and Geordie Flett. Sanday winters had almost done for him on a number of occasions. Perhaps 15 January 1952 had provided the most spectacular of these.
Then, it hadn’t been illness that had almost finished him off but a hurricane. Of unprecedented violence, it had hit the Orkneys, recording a wind velocity of 130 miles per hour at Costa Head on the mainland before the anemometer had stopped working. Experts believed that at the height of the storm the wind speed had been even higher.
The warning had come the previous evening when a strange aurora had spread across the sky. Sam had watched this sky dance from his favourite spot on the beach. His already vivid imagination had conjured up invading spacemen, the lights of their landing craft providing the show.
By midnight the barometer had stood at 28.7 inches and was falling steadily, much to his father’s concern. The hurricane had broken at 4.30 a.m. with a squall that had shaken even this solidly build stone cottage.
The wooden henhouses that covered the island at that time had no chance at all and neither did the hens, although Sam had sought to save his favourite one, nearly losing his life in the process.
Telephone wires were snapped as if with wire cutters, their whipping frenzied dance as dangerous as the flight of the shattered wood of outhouses and roof slates that could have sliced off a man’s head.
Into this melee the boy had attempted to run. The henhouse still stood with his favourite hen inside, but at the moment of his heroic rescue attempt, the hurricane had smashed the shed to pieces, throwing them at the rescuer.
Sam had no memory of what happened after that before waking up in the box bed hours later with his mother’s worried face bending over him. By rights he should have had a beating for disobedience, but his father felt the wind had already done that for him.
There had been other hurricanes after that. One the following year accompanied by a high tide had seen the sea from Otterswick flow across fields onto Cata Sand, but the physical damage hadn’t been as great.
Tonight, he concluded, would be rough, bu
t not on the scale of either of those two years.
Sam rose from the fireside and went to put on the kettle.
His disquiet, he knew, wasn’t because of the storm – of which he’d seen and heard many – but because of the discovery at the schoolhouse. As he brewed the tea, taking time to make it in the teapot which had been in the family for as long as he could remember, he allowed himself to contemplate what Derek had told him.
He’d known Derek Muir since the boy had returned from Glasgow with his mother nearly fifty years before. Back then, Derek had struggled to readjust to island life, having spent his childhood in the East End of Glasgow. His rough accent and attitude hadn’t made him many friends. He’d thought himself tough and superior and had played this out by starting playground fights. Eventually, his poor mother had sought Sam’s help. As a young teacher himself, with only a couple of years’ experience, Sam had nevertheless found a way to reach the tough kid Derek had been back then. Sam wasn’t even sure why what he’d said or done had worked, but Derek Muir was every inch a Sanday man now and knew more about the island and its inhabitants past and present than anyone, except perhaps himself.
Yet even Derek had no explanation for the discovery of the remains in what had been the grounds of the old primary school. He had come to see Sam at the museum as soon as the story of the unearthing by Hugh Clouston’s digger had become common knowledge.
Sam poured his mug of tea and added milk and sugar – too much sugar – the words that entered his head were of course those of his late wife, Jean, who was always trying to keep him healthy. Her hard work on that score had succeeded in keeping him alive into his seventieth year. Unfortunately, Jean hadn’t looked after herself as well as she had her husband and had departed this life two years before. Something he’d not yet got used to, and never would.
He stirred the mug and carried it back to his seat by the fire. Placing it on the hearth, he put another couple of pieces of peat on the blaze.
It wasn’t fashionable to burn peat any more. There were easier ways of warming your house nowadays. In his youth, Sanday, without its own peat banks, had had to rely on the neighbouring northern island of Rousay for fuel. In modern times, it would have been simpler to heat by electricity, powered by the island’s three giant windmills, or burn those little nuggets of smokeless fuel that everyone bought for their fire. But Sam liked the scent of peat in the house and the comfort of its glow in the fireplace. And Jean had preferred it too.
As he supped his tea, he contemplated the conversation he’d just had on the phone with Erling. The boy, as he still thought of him, although Erling was in his thirties now, had questioned Sam about the flowers in the attic. Sam had been as blunt with Erling as he had with the newcomer Mike Jones. The flowers, he’d told him, shouldn’t be disturbed. They were, after all, the representations of the souls of children who had died. Removing them would be like exhuming a body from sacred ground and putting it on display to the public.
Sam didn’t consider himself superstitious, but he did believe that the dead were as much a part of Sanday as the living, and their lives and deaths should be respected. And, he thought again, if you are going to make your home in an old building you should pay heed to what had already happened between those walls.
Mike Jones, as far as he was aware, had – like him – been a teacher and the place he’d chosen to make his home had housed hundreds of children in its time as a Sanday school. The very stones had rung with their voices, their fears, hopes and dreams.
Maybe they still did?
Some of those pupils had died young, their siblings too. That was why the flowers had been fashioned and left there, so that they might watch over those who came after – even Mike Jones.
Sam hadn’t said that to the man. His first reaction, he had to admit, had been disquiet. A disquiet which he hadn’t been able to fully explain, but definitely involved the certainty that nothing good would come of the flowers being disturbed. That’s why he’d urged Mike to put the flower back and not to touch the others.
You can leave the past behind, but it will never leave you.
And then had come news of the unearthing.
A coincidence of course. And yet?
Sam wished that Jean was still there with him. She might have set his mind at rest.
He glanced at the empty chair opposite.
‘You know what I’m worried about, don’t you?’ he said quietly.
He rose and went to the window. There were no lights now, not the way there had been back then. Yet the concrete-clad buildings still stood, resolute against whatever the wind might throw at them. According to his mother, the area around them had been alive with people. Incomers who had changed the island and its way of life forever.
Sam had been born in 1944 at the height of the war. During that time, the island had doubled in population, four hundred servicemen stationed there over the term of the hostilities. Before that, three hundred labourers, skilled workmen and technicians had arrived in 1940 to start work on the wireless station – a vital link in the radar and wireless system designed to warn troops stationed around Scapa Flow when enemy aircraft were approaching.
As a baby he’d known nothing of this, but as a boy he’d explored the empty concrete-clad buildings, and heard plenty of stories about those years. Before the war many Sanday folk had rarely strayed beyond the limits of their own parish with its local shops, school, kirk and chapel. During those years, everything had changed in that respect. Mechanical transport was suddenly in abundance and islanders outside the North End were transported to events at camp. There had, unsurprisingly, been quite a few marriages between islanders and service personnel, and plenty of liaisons, both admitted to and secretive. Babies had been born, like him, in the final days of the conflict, many more in the aftermath.
Then the airmen and soldiers had left, taking some of the island women with them.
The war years were past, but perhaps not the fallout from them.
His initial thought had been that the grave Hugh had uncovered would prove to be yet another manifestation of Orkney’s distant past, like the numerous brochs and standing stones that littered the islands. Sand was a great preserver of bones as he knew from his work at the museum.
Then Erling had revealed that the bones weren’t so old after all.
Sam addressed the empty seat on the other side of the fire. ‘The scientist, a woman who’s in charge of excavating the grave, told Erling that she’s lain there fifty years or more.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘A lassie, Jean, buried in the old playground. How could that be?’
Sam tried to imagine her reaction to the startling news, but wasn’t able to. That was the problem. As their time apart lengthened, her voice, once so easily recalled, had grown fainter.
His mood, disturbed by news of the magic flower and darkened by Erling’s call, had now reached rock bottom. The reason of course being that he thought he might know the answer to his own question.
The child shouldn’t be out on a night like this.
The face at the window had seemed at first like a pattern made by raindrops. His eyesight being what it now was, both distant images and those up close had assumed the quality of an old film. He needed new glasses, but chose to make do, because he didn’t like life to be too magnified. Then he could see the dust that had accumulated, the smeared marks he hadn’t cleaned.
He rose to open the door.
Her face and hair were wet. She wore a waterproof jacket but had chosen not to raise the hood. When he scolded her for that she just smiled. She removed the jacket, shook it and hung it on a hook next to the door, then took the seat opposite him.
‘Have you eaten?’ she said, in a verging-on-scolding tone.
‘I have.’
‘Have you eaten enough?’
He told her what he’d had, enlarging the portions somewhat.
She nodded as though satisfied. ‘Tea?’
The mug by the fire was lifted, rinsed, a
nd then he watched her go through the motions he had undertaken a short while before.
His tea delivered, she sat down again.
He had a question to ask her but wasn’t sure when and how to accomplish it. She normally did the talking. Telling him stories about school and walks on the beach. Tonight she sat silently staring into the fire. He wondered if the sound and fury of the wind attacking the roof was worrying her, then remembered she’d come calling despite the storm.
‘You shouldn’t have come out in this,’ he said.
‘I had things to do.’ She looked at him with her bright blue eyes.
He thought again how lucky he was to still be able to talk with the young. When he’d retired from the classroom, that’s what he knew he would miss the most – the everyday chat of the children.
But that hadn’t happened, because of the young girl before him.
He hadn’t taught her. Sam had retired well before she’d come to the school. They had met in a different way. She’d turned up at the heritage centre of her own free will. Declared she’d come with her mother to live on Sanday and wanted to know all about the island.
The intensity of her desire to discover the place he felt so strongly about had made them firm friends. That and the fact that she and her mother had become tenants of the neighbouring farmhouse. Coming from near Carlisle, they were more used to the mountains of the Lake District than the flat fertile fields of Sanday. But it seemed that two generations before, her family had been Orcadian, as evidenced by her mother’s choice of name for her daughter, Inga.
‘What things?’ Sam said, returning to the conversation.
‘I’ve been looking for the skull,’ she told him.
15
McNab hadn’t slept a wink and, glancing at his mobile, realized there wasn’t much time left to do so. The settee was at least six inches shorter than required, but that hadn’t been the main impediment to sleep. He was used to dreich weather, Glasgow endured plenty of that. But in the city he was enclosed by other flats and surrounded by tall buildings. Despite the three-foot-thick walls on this one-storey cottage, he’d never felt so exposed to the elements.