Ghosts of the Vikings

by Marsali Taylor

Keith shook his head. ‘Oh, it was kent locally, but no’ outwith the isles, and I took particular care no’ to let Radio Shetland or the paper ken. They only found out because the boys talked about my find as having set them to look.’

  ‘Fournier has links here,’ I said. ‘He used to work at Sullom Voe, with Dad. He could well know someone who kept him updated with local news.’

  Keith nodded to Gavin. ‘This Fournier sounds worth keeping an eye on.’

  ‘He went off to the mainland to fetch Per Rolvsson, the musical director, back from the hospital.’

  ‘So his bags won’t have been searched. Well, now we have this cause for suspicion, that strengthens our hand. I’ll get Freya to talk to him.’

  ‘Except,’ I said, ‘if Adrien is stealing antiques for his father, why would he need Fournier as a go-between?’

  Keith shook his head, and didn’t try to answer that one. ‘So, are you patrolling here again tonight?’

  I nodded, glancing at Gavin.

  ‘Tell you what, lass,’ Keith said. ‘It’ll be a cold night for the pair of you to be out on the hill. How about I keep an eye open, and phone if I see anything I don’t like the look of? That way, you can get the start of a night’s sleep, at least.’

  ‘It feels a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse is gone,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite that, lass,’ Keith said. ‘Dinna forget there was that four that came in the car, them as are biding up at Baltasound. They’re no’ to ken the prize is gone. I’ll maybe see you later, then.’

  By seven o’clock, the wind was living up to the forecast. I kept reminding myself that I’d tied Khalida down within an inch of her life, but I still felt as though I’d abandoned her. On top of that it was years since I’d been ashore in a storm, and I’d forgotten how noisy it was. The wind rummelled down the chimney, rattled the windows, tramped over the roof. The beams creaked as if a giant was walking above our heads.

  I was in the kitchen when the catering lady arrived, with several boxes. ‘Lamb shanks in an orange and red wine sauce,’ she said, and decanted them into two casserole dishes. ‘Give them half an hour to heat through. I’ve done a big plate of starter salad with goat’s cheese, and a fruit salad.’ She took two tubs of what I took to be ice cream out of one box.

  ‘Craafit,’ I read.

  ‘Fetlar Craafit ice cream,’ the lady said. ‘It’s home-made and wonderful. I’ve brought a tub of strawberry and a tub of salted caramel. I’ll put it in the freezer. Don’t forget it now!’

  ‘I won’t,’ I promised.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself mentally for watching everyone else eating it. Lent had felt longer than usual this year. She paused and looked at me sideways.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard, now, about those plates.’

  I shook my head. ‘It won’t be before Monday, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘I heard that the poor lass didn’t make it. The man that supplies my seafood, you maybe ken him, Keith Sandison, o’ Sandison Seafoods, he was phoning me.’

  Keith again. I knew that on a small island like Unst you tended to keep running across the same people, but he felt just a bit too ever-present. ‘I met him, yea.’

  ‘Well, Keith’d heard that aabody was up in the night, and he was a bit concerned. He doesna want his seafood to get a bad name. There’s been aa this coverage on the TV too.’

  I stared at her. ‘About her death?’ Right enough, Fournier had mentioned that he and Per were going to talk to the BBC.

  ‘Oh, yea. Well, it seems she was een o’ the presenters o’ The Voice, and so there’s been a lock about that, an’ her career, an’ clips o’ her singing. I dinna watch the telly much, but I saw it on the news. They interviewed the police, in Lerwick, but he just said “No comment”, and “Investigations are ongoing” and that sort o’ thing. They had a helicopter shot o’ Belmont House too, and an interview wi’ Vincent. He said she’d had a severe allergic reaction. He looked right good, no nervous at aa, as if he’d had plenty o’ practice. The other man, the Norwegian, he didna say much.’

  ‘We were lucky the ferries stopped running when they did, or they’d all have been up here.’

  ‘Yea, it’s an ill wind ...’ She set out a couple of little bowls of salad dressing and washed her hands. ‘There, that’s me. Enjoy your meal, now.’

  I set the table, nipped out to the pavilion to change into my pretty dress, and then came back and rang the brass gong on the mantelpiece. Maman and Dad came down first. Maman was in full dress, with her best pearl drops dangling against her creamy skin, and Dad matched her, in his suit. Charles slipped in behind them, then Fournier, in a charcoal grey affair which had probably cost as much as a new mainsail, with Adrien behind him, red-eyed and silent. Bryony came down on Per’s arm, dressed in her pink evening dress, but looking fragile, and jumping when anyone spoke to her. Gavin came in last, in his scarlet kilt, and with his horsehair sporran instead of the leather one.

  I’d done my best to space the chairs out, with this smaller party, but even so the place where Kamilla had sparkled shouted her absence. Maman sat at the head of the table again, with Dad on one side and Adrien on the other; Gavin and I were beside Adrien, with me nearest the door, to be handy for waiting. Fournier returned to his seat at the table-foot, and Per, Bryony and Charles were opposite us. Behind them, the dusk had come early, the black clouds veiling the last of the light. The wind slammed at the window. Maman rose, undid the bead circles, and drew the curtains against it. ‘There, that is enough of this Shetland weather for tonight. Dermot, will you pour the wine?’

  It was an uneasy meal. Gavin and I weren’t the only ones watching; it felt like we were all watching each other. Kamilla’s ghost presided over us. Dad poured the wine, I brought out the dishes and we passed them to each other, remarking politely on the goat’s cheese, the salad; it was all too formal. Per coaxed Bryony to eat, but barely touched his own lamb shank and creamy potato. Adrien finished his impatiently, then crumbled his bread into the gravy. Dad and Fournier talked business, Dad’s connection with the projected North Isles wind farm. It felt indecent to be so hungry. I ate my shank as unobtrusively as I could, gave myself a second helping of mash, and resolved to heat up one of the leftover ones for supper.

  It was calculating leftovers that reminded me. ‘What happened to Caleb?’ I looked across at the closed curtains. ‘He won’t get back now.’

  ‘Oh, he is staying in Lerwick,’ Per said. ‘He’ll take up one of the rooms we had reserved for tonight.’ He looked across at Fournier. ‘I have warned him not to talk to the press.’

  Fournier nodded. ‘Good. There are enough rumours flying around. I’ve already had a call from the seafood bloke, asking me to make a statement exonerating him. I told him I’d already told the BBC that she appeared to have an allergy, and couldn’t say more. He’d have to wait for the medical findings.’

  ‘Waiting, waiting!’ Adrien shoved his plate away from him. ‘We need to do something.’ His face suddenly focused, his pupils contracting to pinpoints. ‘Where is the picture of Kamilla’s brother? I could –’

  ‘No!’ Maman cut in, the goddess laying down her orders. ‘No, Adrien. We will have none of your spiritualism here. I forbid it.’

  Adrien flushed and leaned forward, gesturing with one hand. ‘He was trying to contact her.’

  ‘No,’ Maman repeated. ‘His death was a great shock to Kamilla, she never recovered properly from it. Perhaps someone was playing tricks, I do not know.’ Her gaze swept across Bryony, around the table. Her dark eyes sparked with wrath. ‘But this I do know. Their souls are together now, reunited, and their earthly bodies sleep in peace.’

  Adrien jutted his lip mutinously. ‘I may do what I wish, Eugénie.’

  Maman straightened her back until she was ten feet tall. ‘You will not try to contact the dead in this house.’ Her hand slammed down on the table, making the cutlery jangle. ‘No.’

  For a long moment, their eyes locked
: Maman, set and commanding, Adrien angry as a spoiled child. It was his eyes that fell first. He pushed his chair so hard that it fell back against the sideboard behind, and stormed out past us. The door slammed behind him. There was a long silence.

  ‘Anyway,’ Bryony said at last, with a touch of petty triumph, ‘he can’t have the photo, because the police took it, with all Kamilla’s other baggage.’

  Per looked up quickly. ‘The police?’ He looked across at Maman. ‘I saw, of course, that Kamilla’s things had been tidied away, but I thought perhaps you had done it.’

  Maman shook her head. ‘Of course, that you were not here. No, the police came. They were looking for missing jewellery, taken from the dig over the hill. They looked through everything, and then they offered to return her belongings to her family.’

  Per was silent for a moment, frowning. ‘That’s very helpful of them.’ He sounded suspicious, and his eyes looked as if he was calculating something. ‘I am not sure our police in Norway would be so obliging, to return suitcases to another country.’

  I didn’t like the way his suspicions were moving. ‘What did happen to Kamilla’s brother?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘Oh, it was a sad story, but from many years ago, when she was a child,’ Maman said. ‘It was some kind of accident. I do not remember me what exactly.’

  ‘He was run over,’ Bryony said. ‘Right in front of her eyes, by a driver who didn’t stop.’

  I winced away from the picture. ‘How awful!’

  ‘It was awful,’ Per said. He looked straight across at me, and spoke heavily, as if he too had lost a child to the road. ‘She told me of it. It was evening, a beautiful golden evening, and their mother had permitted that they play on the road for that last half hour before bedtime. It was a village they lived in, and there was not much traffic, so they were not looking out, and they were just on the wrong side of a bend that narrowed the road between two old houses – you know the sort, in Austria, with the upper fronts almost touching above the road. Coming into them would have been like a tunnel to the driver, and then he came around the bend at the end of the houses and out into the sun, shining straight into his eyes. I do not know if he was going too fast, or if it was just that, the dark and then the sun, so that he could not see them, but he hit the little boy and flung him clear. He did not stop, but drove straight on. He was never caught.’

  He stopped there, looking at me as if he expected an answer, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. He’d made me see it: the little girl playing in the sunlight, and the car coming at them suddenly; the girl grabbing for her brother to pull him clear, but too late; seeing him snatched from her hands and flung to the other side of the road by the metal monster that didn’t stop. ‘Was the little boy killed straight away?’

  Bryony took up the story. ‘He said her name. She ran across the road and tried to pick him up, and he said her name, then a gush of blood came out of his mouth.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘She was only eleven, and when they took him away from her, she wouldn’t believe he was dead, because he’d spoken to her.’ She paused and took a sip of wine, then finished, ‘She never believed he was dead.’

  Loneliness, Maman had said. I imagined the little girl cradling her dead brother, and for a moment I could almost see Kamilla’s face opposite me, sparkling in the candlelight. I rose, and began stacking plates to chase her image away. Gavin rose, and opened the door for me. I went past him with the loaded tray, and stopped dead. Behind me, looking over my shoulder, Gavin gave me a gentle nudge forward, so that he could close the door behind us. ‘Say nothing,’ he breathed in my ear.

  Maman had been given a bouquet, one of those bagged arrangements with white roses, carnations, sprays of babies’ tears, and curled ferns, which she’d put on the sea-chest in the hall. Now one of the roses in the centre of the arrangement was splashed with crimson, like spots of blood.

  Petals o’ velvet,

  Da colour o’ blud,

  Proctectd bi’ thorns,

  The symbol o’ love.

  ... a rose

  Saturday, 28th March (continued)

  Tide Times at Mid Yell, UT

  Low Water23.49, 1.3m

  Sunset18.33

  Moonset03.04

  Waxing quarter moon

  Nae teeth to bite, yet I’ll gnaw tae da bane,

  Me face ever wi’ dee, when du’s aa alane,

  Plump du up dy pillow, I’ll gee dee no rest,

  If eence du lats me tak a hold i dy breast.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gavin was the first to move. He drew the rose out of the arrangement, and looked at it, sniffed. ‘Food colouring, at a guess, and still wet.’

  ‘I saw some in the kitchen, among the assorted stuff other people had obviously left behind.’ It had to be Adrien, the only one who’d left the table. ‘But why?’

  Gavin opened the kitchen door for me. ‘Annoyance at being questioned about the changed rose? To get back at your mother? Or simply to cause trouble.’ He broke the rose in two and dropped it in the bin. ‘Good thing we saw it first.’ He lifted the tub of Craafit ice cream, which I’d left softening on the table, and gave me a rueful look. ‘Lent.’

  ‘Me too. Shall we just serve it up, and leave them to eat while we make coffee?’

  ‘See how many want it.’ He went back to ask, and came back, shaking his head. ‘Only three: your father; Per; and Charles.’

  ‘A waste of good ice cream,’ I mourned. ‘Tomorrow ... can we get to evening Mass?’

  He nodded. ‘When is it?’

  ‘Six o’clock. We can wave them all onto the ferry, then race for the church.’

  ‘Of course. Then race for the Yell ferry afterwards? You’ll want to come home.’

  I hadn’t thought as far as afterwards. Home to Khalida ... with Gavin? The thought made my throat go dry in panic, and I could tell he sensed it, for he didn’t press the point, but focused on getting out plates, and helping me hack the ice cream onto them.

  After we’d filled the dishwasher, we went together to make up the bed in the pavilion, with Cat trotting beside us. From here, in this dark, Belmont was a magical house, the four tall windows and central arched one lit soft gold from inside: a giant dolls’ house, with a family of dolls in eighteenth-century dress, coats with flared skirts and a sword at the hip, high powdered wigs and ribboned stomachers, moving and loving and hating, who would revert to wax and sawdust when the front was opened ... I shook the fantasy away, tightened my arms around my bundle of bedding, and followed Gavin upstairs.

  It was like preparing our marriage bed. The pale, new wood was burnished amber by a little corner lamp; the moon winked in the skylight as the clouds scudded across it, and the slates rattled with each gust. We flattened the mattress out on the red and blue patterned rug and contemplated it, too shy to look at one another. Cat put one paw on it, decided it was unstable and went off to sniff round the skirting board.

  ‘Under the skylight, or in a corner?’ Gavin asked, his voice determinedly matter-of-fact.

  I considered the coombed ceiling. ‘In the middle? Otherwise we’ll hit our heads when we get up.’

  Gavin nodded, and set the foot-pump up. He inflated the mattress, while I coaxed the downie into its cover, then we spread the underblanket, sheet and downie together, and placed the pillows. There was an awkward silence as we looked at it together, the white cover smooth as snow. Gavin’s arm came up around me. ‘We should be strewing it with lilies, or carnations, or ladies’ bedstraw, or whatever else was used in medieval times.’

  I smiled at that, and felt less nervous. ‘I think I saw a celandine or two in the maze garden.’

  ‘Not quite as romantic.’

  I would need to say it. I looked away from him, and felt my cheeks burning hot. ‘I’m not on the pill.’

  His arm tightened around me. His voice was awkward. ‘I didn’t think you would be. I bought some condoms on the way up.’

  We both gave a huge breath of reli
ef and giggled like teenagers.

  ‘It’s going to be cold,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘You have no idea how icy my room can be in the minus-twenties of a Highland winter.’

  I leaned into his warm chest. ‘Then we’ll thole it together.’ All the same, I resolved, I’d go right now, get my hot water bottle back from Bryony’s bed, and put it in, to soften the initial shock of getting between ice-cold sheets. I reached into my rucksack, and fished out the bottle of champagne. ‘I brought your bubbly too.’

  ‘Then we’re sorted.’

  We walked back from the pavilion hand in hand. Cat bounded ahead, obviously preferring the warm house; maybe I could leave him in the drawing room overnight, except that he might need out, and I hadn’t brought his litter tray. Was it done to take a cat on your first night together? Someone was watching us from the drawing-room window, one of the men, silhouetted. I took one last look at the house, then headed for the kitchen to put the kettle on. Somewhere I’d seen a mention of picnic stuff. I searched, found it, and set two Thermos flasks ready to fill. With this wind, the power could go at any minute. I just hoped Khalida was okay.

  We gathered in the drawing room for the rest of the evening. The wind roared round the house, making the lights flicker, and the power surge and fall, so that Dad swore, put his laptop away in disgust and came to join us. Cat was chasing his marble round the sofa, losing it underneath every so often. I’d found a Scrabble board, so Gavin and I were playing; Charles was reading one of the BDs Sergeant Peterson had disapproved of, and Maman had got out her circular tambour frame, and was adding tiny stitches to a flower design. Fournier was in the armchair, lost in what looked like company accounts. Adrien hadn’t reappeared, and Per and Bryony too had gone to ground.

  Dad plumped himself down beside me and eyed up my tiles, then the board. ‘You’ve got a good one for a double word score there, so you have.’

  I glared at him, and reverted to a teenager. ‘Dad. I was working towards it so neatly, and now I won’t be able to use it. Gavin’ll think I cheated.’