OxCrimes

by Peter Florence

  ‘I wait, and I watch,’ said Didrik.

  Nikolas worked his way around the hives, puffing in smoke to subdue the bees, raising the lids to lift out the supers, examining the honeycomb and the honey sealed within. When he was done, he removed the helmet and the gauntlets, and put out the smoke-gun with a splash of water from the donkey’s trough.

  ‘All healthy,’ he said. ‘Plenty of honey for next year. So, now maybe you can help me with these boxes.’

  At the police station, a group of people was waiting: the Chief of Police and his sergeant, three senior investigators from Athens, a man haggard with pain, his wife worn thin with suffering. As Didrik walked in, the haggard man put his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

  ‘How was it?’ asked one of the officers, coming forward. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘He didn’t say much,’ said Didrik. ‘But I have an idea where you might look. It may be nothing, of course. I persuaded him to open the hives, but the hive at the centre, he didn’t touch.’

  At dawn the next morning, two police cars pulled up outside Nikolas’s house. Nikolas was in the kitchen, brewing coffee. He opened the door before the policemen reached it.

  ‘Kali mera, Nikolas,’ said the Chief of Police. The investigators stood at his shoulders.

  The Chief of Police waved an envelope.

  ‘I have a warrant to search this property.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Nikolas. ‘You’ve turned over every centimetre of this property more than once. Why can’t you just leave me in peace?’

  A man was climbing from one of the police cars, a man Nikolas didn’t know. He was carrying a beekeeper’s helmet and gauntlets.

  They left Nikolas in the house under a constable’s guardianship. The beekeeper they’d brought with them put on his helmet and gloves.

  At the entrance to the centre hive, there were no bees coming and going. The beekeeper put his ear to the red-painted side, and listened. The hive was silent.

  The Chief of Police signalled him to open it.

  The beekeeper raised the lid, and smelled not honey sweetness but faint fungal decay. Inside, curled on itself like a foetus was the skeleton of a child; set amongst the delicate hand-bones was a small pot of honey.

  At the harbour-front kafenion, the girl in the red hat was sitting again with her friends. When she saw Didrik, she smiled and waved. Didrik looked a different man, clean-shaven and urbane in linen and espadrilles. She kissed his cheek.

  They walked together to the police station, where Didrik ushered the girl through the crush of camera-crews and reporters, into the crowded office upstairs.

  The Chief of Police made introductions, and invited the reporters to put their questions to Didrik.

  A woman from Greek national radio raised her hand.

  ‘Mr Bernat,’ she said, ‘you’re a world-renowned actor, last year you won an Academy award. Can you tell us what persuaded you to come to Greece to help out in this case?’

  The girl with Didrik had taken off her red hat. His put his arm affectionately around her shoulder.

  ‘Quite simply, my beautiful daughter Sissi,’ he said. His English was clear and fluent, his accent American. ‘This was all her idea. She told me I should do whatever I could, so I offered my only talent. I had to help, because things might have been different. I was here, with my family, the day Flora was taken. It chills my blood to think so, but he might have taken Sissi instead of her. How Flora’s parents have borne their grief, I shall never comprehend.’

  The shutters on Nikolas’s house were closed. The Chief of Police led Flora’s mother and father down the path to the meadow, where a line of crime-scene tape was strung around the bee-hives, the loose ends fluttering in a breath of evening breeze.

  The red hive was set apart from the others, close to the honey store. Flora’s mother was carrying white roses, and a pink teddy-bear.

  She placed her gifts at the foot of the hive.

  ‘I’ll wait under the olive tree,’ said the Chief of Police, and he walked away.

  ANN CLEEVES is the author of twenty-seven novels, the most recent of which have been part of her ‘Vera Stanhope’ and ‘Shetland Island’ (Jimmy Perez) series. Both series have been adapted for TV, as Vera (ITV) and Shetland (BBC) and the books have been translated into twenty languages. In 2006 she won the inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black. Born in Hereford in 1954, Ann now lives in Northumberland.

  The Spinster

  Ann Cleeves

  She twisted the carded fleece between the fingers of her left hand and fed it into the spinning wheel. Her right foot rocked on the pedal and kept the rhythm smooth and regular. The view from her window was of her neighbour’s croft land towards the sea. She’d grown up in this house and usually she took the scene for granted, but now Stuart’s digger was biting into the peaty soil and preparing the foundations for his new home. It wouldn’t block her whole view and he’d come to her, very polite and quiet, explaining that with the new baby on the way, the old house wouldn’t be big enough.

  ‘Much easier to start from scratch,’ he’d said. ‘The planners have given their permission.’

  She’d seen that even if she objected the house would be built and Stuart had always been a good neighbour. She’d known him since he was a bairn and she didn’t want to fall out now. So she’d smiled and said of course they needed a bigger place and it would be good to see a child playing from her window. Joan was a spinster and there hadn’t been a child in Holmsgarth since she and her sisters were young.

  But the sight of the digger made her uneasy. It disturbed the rhythm of her spinning and when she looked at the yarn it was uneven and bobbly. It would knit in an interesting way, but it wasn’t how she’d intended it to be. She set her spinning aside and went to the kitchen to make her tea, but even from there she could hear the rumbling of the machine, and she fancied that she could feel its vibration under her feet.

  Later she took up her knitting. She was working on an all-over jersey, a commission from an American woman, who’d wanted natural colours and traditional patterns. By now it was dark outside and she had the curtains closed. She switched on the television to hide the sound of the digger, but the headlights were so bright that they shone through her curtains, making weird shadows on the wall. Then the lights went away and everything was quiet and for the first time that day she could concentrate on her work.

  She knitted as her mother had done with a leather belt, padded with horsehair and three pins pointed at both ends. One of the pins she’d stuck into the belt and the garment grew as a tube. There were three colours: Shetland black, grey and mourrit and she kept the tension even as she wove the wool into the back of the pattern. She was working on the anchor motif and that reminded her of her father, who’d had his own fishing boat and had been lost at sea. Soon she was so lost in her memories that when there was more noise on the building site she hardly noticed it.

  They’d been three sisters. Half-sisters, in fact, because Joan’s mother had died when she was a bairn and her father had remarried. Joan was the oldest by ten years and then there’d been Annie and Edie. Now Edie was away and Annie was dead, taken by cancer just two years before. None of them had found a man. The nearest any of them came to it was in the seventies when the oil had first come into the islands. Then men had flocked to Shetland, like the seabirds arriving on the cliffs in the spring, jostling for space on the rocky ledges. Men were everywhere and girls could take their pick. Joan was in her thirties then, already considered something of an old maid, but Annie and Edie had been young and wild and looking for husbands. It was a while since Joan had remembered that time, but now, her fingers busy with the knitting, stopping occasionally to follow the pattern she’d made by plotting tiny crosses on graph paper, she relived those months in the summer of 1974.

  She’d watched from the sidelines as her sisters made fools of themselves at dances and parties. There was one particular man from the Scottish mainland. He was a
n engineer with the construction company and he had digs with Margaret Hay, who lived just down the road from Holmsgarth. He’d hired a car and set off to work every morning looking very smart. Both Edie and Annie had thought that he would make a fine husband and often found excuses to drop in on Margaret when they knew the man was at home. Joan paused for a moment and rested her work in her lap while she struggled to remember his name. James Mackie. How could she have forgotten it when he had caused so many arguments in their house? So much disruption to their lives.

  She continued knitting. The anchor pattern had finished and she felt a moment of calm. It was superstition but knitting the anchor always made her uncomfortable. Now she had three rows of mourrit to work. Easy and needing no concentration.

  James Mackie, quiet and respectable, from somewhere on the west coast of the Scottish mainland, with an accent that was soft like cream. All three sisters, starved for so long of new male company, dreamed of James Mackie when they went to sleep at night. Even Joan, who understood that she was too old to have a chance with him, who would always be a spinster. By then their father had died, drowned in an accident, his body never found, and they were just four women living at Holmsgarth. Joan’s stepmother and the three sisters.

  Without realising she’d finished the three rows of plain knitting, she took up the graph paper again and focused on the pattern.

  There had been a dance in the community hall and they’d all gone along. It had been planned for weeks. The band was from Cullivoe; the boys were fine musicians famous throughout the islands. In Holmsgarth, the women had baked, even Joan who’d been working all day in the post office in Lerwick. They’d packed up the bannocks, the tray-bakes and the fancies into old biscuit tins and carried them very carefully along the road to the hall. Edie had got there early. She’d cut long sheets of white paper to make tablecloths for the trestle tables set at one end of the room and the band was on the stage, tuning up. There’d already been an air of excitement. More than that, an air of tension. Like just before a thunderstorm.

  Joan turned back to her knitting. There was more noise on the road outside. She looked at the clock on the mantel shelf. Stuart must be working late tonight or perhaps they’d invited pals along to a party in their house. They’d not be doing so much of that once the bairn arrived. Joan felt a sudden pang of regret. All her pals had grandchildren now, and she had to look at the photos and pretend to be interested. She turned her mind back forty years to the dance in the hall, saw James Mackie walking in. You could tell that he’d prepared for the party too, that he’d had a shower after work, chosen an ironed shirt. His dark hair was slicked back. Some of the local boys walked with a kind of swagger but he moved lightly. Joan could see that he’d be a splendid dancer.

  She was jerked back to the present by a banging on the door. ‘Come in,’ she said. She didn’t want to get up and disturb the knitting attached to her belt. Besides, her door was never locked. She turned in her seat and saw a man walk in. He was dark and he walked lightly, just like Mackie. Perhaps because she’d been thinking about the engineer, for a strange moment she wondered if it was Mackie and if she’d slipped back in time somehow and into the world of her memories. Then she recognised the newcomer as the police inspector from Ravenswick. ‘Jimmy Perez, what can I do for you at this time of night?’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Joan.’ His voice was soft like cream too, but the accent was Fair Isle, not mainland Scots.

  ‘Well, take a seat by the fire, Jimmy. And you won’t mind if I take up my knitting. It’s hand-spun wool and the Yanks will pay a fortune for a Shetland all-over jersey.’

  He nodded. ‘Stuart was working on the foundations of his new house,’ Perez said. ‘He found a body. Old but preserved in the peat. Would you know anything about that Joan? You’d likely have been living in this house when he died and in those days that was Holmsgarth land.’

  She changed the knitting pin in the horsehair belt and as the needles clicked she began to talk. She thought it was time that the story was told and this gentle man, who knew about grief, was the right person to hear it.

  ‘There was a dance,’ she said. ‘I was there with my sisters. And there was this soothmoother, an engineer at Sullom Voe. James Mackie.’

  ‘Is that the name of the man Stuart found?’

  She hesitated for a moment and then she nodded, thinking again that it was time for the truth to be told. ‘I had two sisters, Annie and Edie, and they fancied him, fought over him. You know young girls. And it was a wild time in the islands, Jimmy. The oil was coming ashore and we were over-run by strangers. It seemed kind of lawless. Like a gold rush town.’ She knew that was no excuse for what had happened that night, but she wanted him to understand. He said nothing and she thought he would sit there all night if that was as long as it took.

  ‘Most folk had been drinking,’ she said. ‘Not me. I’ve never liked it so much, but my sisters had been outside with some of the boys. They had bottles of whisky in the cars. You know how it goes, Jimmy. Much the same these days with young people.’

  Still he said nothing. In her head she relived the scene. Mackie walking through the door, the music starting and him walking up to her and giving her a little nod. ‘Would you dance with me, Joan?’ That voice which had haunted her dreams. Caressing. And she’d set down the plate of scones she’d been holding and he swung her onto the floor and the music carried them around, until she was dizzy with the sound and the excitement at having been chosen. At the end she’d been aware of Edie and Annie watching them, thinking he’d picked their big sister for the first dance out of politeness, waiting for their turn. Only their turn never came. James Mackie had danced with the old maid all night.

  ‘He walked us home,’ Joan said. ‘All three of us. My sisters were in a dreadful state. Angry.’ And she’d understood their humiliation. Of course they’d danced, but with the local boys and the roustabouts from the rigs. Not with the smart man in the shirt, with the soft voice and the polished shoes. Not with the object of their dreams. And on the way home they’d behaved like spoilt little girls again. Their father had doted on his younger daughters and given them everything they wanted. Joan, the child of a previous marriage, had been expected to behave. She explained all this to Jimmy Perez, who listened, nodding occasionally to show that he understood.

  ‘You were like Cinderella,’ he said, with a smile.

  ‘But they weren’t the ugly sisters!’ Joan paused in her knitting. ‘They’d always been bonny little things. Everyone loved them. Especially my father. They could do no wrong in his eyes.’

  ‘You were telling me what happened when you were on your way home.’ Perez leaned forward to listen.

  Joan replayed the scene in her head. The girls, stupid drunk, egging each other on, taunting the man. ‘Why did you choose her to dance with when you could have had us?’

  Then Mackie had stood in the middle of the track. Quiet and firm, his face lit by the moon. ‘Why would I choose a child when I could have a woman?’

  And then Edie had lashed out at him in frustration, the attack shocking and unexpected. She’d always been uncontrollable when she was angry, given to fits of temper. Suddenly she had a pair of scissors in her hand, the sharp scissors she’d brought from home to cut the paper tablecloths. The steel flashed in the light and then they were in the man’s neck. Blood everywhere. They knew death, all three of them. They’d helped kill their father’s beasts.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘We buried him.’ Joan looked up from her knitting. ‘In the land that Stuart bought from us for his grazing. It never occurred to us that he would build a house there, that the body would ever be found.’

  ‘You helped them?’ Perez seemed shocked by the idea. He knew her as the former post-mistress, a respectable spinster. ‘You didn’t think to tell the police?’

  Joan thought about that for a moment and shook her head. It had been an evening for her to remember but she’d known she could never leave Holms
garth to go south with James Mackie. She hadn’t lost that possibility with the man’s death. They’d sent Edie away to an aunt’s in Canada and she’d gone on to be a journalist on a woman’s magazine. Famous in her own way. Rich at least. Edie had sent Joan money for a visit but Joan had never gone. ‘What would be the point in telling the police? Just another life ruined.’

  Besides, there would have been something hypocritical in that, when Joan herself was a murderer. She’d killed their father, after all. After his marriage to the new woman from Baltasound he’d treated Joan like a kind of servant and Joan had had a temper too. In the end she’d had enough of it, being treated like a slave in her own home while her sisters were spoiled and feted like princesses. She’d felt as Perez said, like a kind of Cinderella.

  One morning she’d risen early and drilled holes in his yoal before he set off after the fish they called piltock. She’d stood by the jetty and watched him drown. But that was a secret she’d never tell, not even to the police inspector from Ravenswick with the kind smile and the voice like cream.

  MARTYN WAITES is the author of ten novels, most recently Angel of Death, the sequel to Susan Hill’s Woman in Black. He has also been known to get frocked up as Tania Carver, whose latest novel, The Doll’s House, was an international bestseller. He has also held two writing residencies in prisons, taught creative writing to recovering addicts and excluded teenagers, and twice been the RLF Writing Fellow at Essex University. He was born in Newcastle and worked as an actor before turning to crime writing.

  Diagnosis: Murder

  Martyn Waites

  Cancer. Such a big word for such a small amount of letters. Cancer. Two syllables, six letters – two of which recur – four consonants, two vowels. Cancer. Small word. Big impact.

  I didn’t take in anything else the doctor had said once he had said that word. He was still talking, leaning across the table, giving me his most humane, sorrow-filled gaze. Empathising. Sympathising.