The Body in the Bracken

by Marsali Taylor

  I made a doubtful face. ‘She was tough and determined, but she was principled too. We trusted her to be fair. I think she could have done it, if it was important enough to her. I don’t know how she got on with Robert John, but she talked a lot about her big brother, Laurence, the re-enactments one.’

  ‘Laurence wasn’t here the weekend Ivor was killed. He was on the mainland that whole week, going down on Friday night, with deliveries for Inverness and pick-ups in the area.’

  ‘Which puts him right on the spot. Don’t they have a drivers’ log, or a spy-in-the-cab?’

  ‘The drivers keep a diary, but the secretary couldn’t find Laurence’s in among last year’s. That’s not particularly sinister. There were several drivers who hadn’t turned theirs in yet. However Serco-Northlink confirmed that a Georgeson truck whose driver was named as L. Georgeson went down on the Friday night boat, and returned from Aberdeen on the Sunday week.’

  ‘What about brother 2?’

  ‘Peter. The one with the office supplies business. He was down at a trade fair in Glasgow that weekend. His hotel confirmed he checked in on Friday afternoon, and ate Saturday and Sunday breakfast. We need to interview the trade fair stall holders with his photo. He had various meetings with suppliers in the central belt during the first half of the week, and he came home on Thursday’s boat.’

  ‘On the spot for disposing of the body.’

  ‘But not here for Ivor’s death, unless he did a Freeman Wills Croft alibi-creation involving rapid flights up and down again, or bribing someone else to eat his breakfast.’

  ‘And Miss Georgeson?’

  ‘The schools had just gone back, so she was teaching all that week. She could have gone down to the mainland on Saturday night with the car and the body, returned on the Sunday night ferry, and gone straight into school on Monday morning.’

  I made a face. ‘A double night on the boat.’

  ‘The school secretary said she looked a bit under the weather.’

  ‘So,’ I said, processing this, ‘she and her father could have done the murder, but not disposed of the body. Laurence and Peter couldn’t have done the murder, but they were on the spot to help dispose of the body, if Miss Georgeson had brought it to them in Inverness.’

  ‘You make it sound like a family party.’

  I remembered the way Miss Georgeson’d flushed at the mention of Ivor’s name. ‘I don’t know if she’d have killed him.’

  ‘But would she have helped cover up for her father, if he’d killed him?’

  ‘Oh, yes, for sure.’ I had no doubt about that. It was a family which stuck together, except for Robert-John, the break-away.

  ‘It took two officers all day on the phone, but we’ve finally checked up on every passenger on board the ferry back to Shetland on the Sunday and Monday. The bairns were back at school, praise be, and the main tourist season over, so there were fewer than we feared, only about a hundred and thirty.’ He sighed. ‘Not one is unaccounted for. Every one of them was who they said, living where they said. If someone else took Ivor’s car down to the mainland, that person didn’t come back by ferry.’

  The clock on the dashboard read 15.20. Already the light outside was beginning to thicken, the hills in the distance turning from olive to grey. We’d come past the ruffled silver of the Loch of Girlsta, where the drowned Viking princess slept on her green island, past Sandwater Loch and the Half-way House, past Petta Water, pressed in the shape of the Giant Petta’s two-toed foot. As we came up to the Whalsay ferry turnoff, Gavin made an exasperated noise. ‘I’ll need to stop at the Voe shop. Two minutes.’

  He pulled in around the pump and went quickly through the glass door, then came out with a packet of XXXX mints in his hand. ‘Njuggle bribery. You’ll see.’ He stuffed them into the misshapen pocket of his tweed jacket. ‘Now for this loch of yours.’

  We came past the Pierhead and up the hill between the houses, built when the road was a foot-worn path, so that now the asphalt track had to snake round on itself to avoid them. John Georgeson’s picture windows were gold rectangles in the dusk above the hump-backed bridge. As the road climbed, we were looking down on the two substantial farmhouses in the river valley, houses like a child’s drawing: a square front with two windows and a porch below, three windows above, a thread of smoke from one chimney. There was a large byre, and a scatter of Shetland ponies coralled in one corner of a field: two black, two red-and-white and one grey. Two small figures in dark jackets were working among them.

  Around a bend, another, and the loch lay grey before us. Gavin pulled over to the gravel path beside the road, tucking the car in under the bank of the hill, and we got out.

  The wind had fallen away completely. The loch lay mirror-still between the cradling hills. The western horizon was bathed in deep rose, and the sun’s last rays spilled over the hills, dusting them with neon-pink light, and turning the water to whisky-amber. We walked briskly alongside the crash barrier that separated the single-track road from the loch, with just a metre of steep bank and pebble shore between. Gavin paused at the centre of the loch, looking out. ‘I’d like to try this loch with a trout rod.’

  ‘Brown troots,’ I told him.

  ‘Aye. And that buoy there, I’d think it’s for mooring a boat just off shore for that very purpose. What’s in the shed?’ He nodded over at a square shed ten metres from the road, with a little jetty leading out into the water.

  I shrugged. ‘I’d always thought it was water works. I suppose this loch supplies Voe. I’ve never seen a boat at the jetty.’

  Gavin looked critically at the crash barrier and shook his head. ‘You’d never ask a horse to jump over that, with the drop behind it.’

  ‘Jeemie said it came down here.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ Gavin said. He came around the end of the crash barrier and walked down to the pebble shore, stopping every two or three strides to examine the ground, looking first, then reaching a hand down. ‘Here we are.’

  I joined him. His finger touched a round indentation in the grass. ‘A hoofprint?’

  He nodded. ‘And another. A small, heavy pony with a well-bred hoof, charging its way down the hill. Where will we wait until dark?’

  We strolled slowly up and down the road, watching the rose light fade from the sky, until the moon came up over the north-east hill, almost a full quarter, and turned the water to molten silver. It was eerily still.

  It felt an age that we waited there. I was just about to suggest we gave up when there was a clatter of stones, and then a black shape sliding and stepping down the hill towards us, head up, mane tossing. The moonlight glinted in his wild eyes. His coat sparked light, like the sea’s phosphorescence on a dark night, and I could have sworn there was water weed entangled in his thick mane. He was all fire and muscle, with a broad chest and rounded quarters, heading straight at the section of road we were on, as if he was all set to mow us down. I took a step back, but Gavin stayed put, and half-spread his arms. For a moment my heart was in my mouth as I saw him being trampled under the creature’s feet, and without thinking I came back to stand with him. Maybe it would think twice before attacking two of us. It was coming fast, fast, head turning from Gavin to me, as if unsure, then it jumped down over the last piece of hill and landed on the road with a clack of hooves, snorting and flinging its head up.

  ‘Whoa there,’ Gavin said, as calmly as he was on the back of one of his own garrons, and the creature jumped sideways, wheeling its quarters round, as if preparing to kick out. Gavin stood his ground, and I stood with him. It could probably smell my fear, but I was damned if it was going to see it. ‘You’re not fooling us, boy. Steady then.’

  The dark head tossed, the eyes rolled. I could have sworn there was a spark of annoyance that we hadn’t run like everyone else. It flattened its ears and bared its teeth. Gavin stepped forward. ‘You don’t expect us to be taken in by that, do you? Come on now.’

  I’d never heard his voice coax like this. I’d d
efied the no-nonsense investigator and been teased by my sort-of lover. I remembered the wildcat spread along his shoulders in the wood-lined sitting room.

  The creature lowered its head, sidled backwards and stood at the verge, waiting. Gavin held his hand forward, palm-up. The creature snorted again, and the wildness went out of it. It stepped forward, feet picked up as daintily as if it was in a show ring, and accepted the offered mint, tossing its head as it tried to crunch it. Gavin produced a cord from his pocket and looped it around the creature’s neck, fashioning a halter out of it, and suddenly he was holding a Shetland pony, taller than most, with a thick mane and a bush of a tail, just as Jeemie had described. I advanced cautiously. The pony flung its head up again, and Gavin shooshed it, voice gentle as a lover’s. ‘Come on, then, this is Cass. She’s no’ going to hurt you. Have another mint.’

  The beast gave me a sideways look and stamped one forefoot on the road with a clatter. ‘We’ll no keep you long,’ Gavin assured it. He ran one hand down its shoulder. ‘There you are, Cass, a very bonny Shetland stallion who’s well used to being handled.’ He put his hand to the green streamers in its mane. ‘Wool, fastened with those little clips girls use for hair extensions.’

  ‘Hello, njuggle,’ I said warily. He blew a warm stream of mint-smelling breath into my face. I patted his broad neck, and felt the muscle beneath the thick coat.

  ‘He must be only just within the breed standard,’ Gavin said. ‘They have to be below a certain height to be allowed in the Stud Book.’ He stepped back and admired. ‘Solid muscle. He’d be as strong as one of our garrons. Look at the length of that mane.’ It fell to below the pony’s thick neck, twisting like flowing water. The pony suddenly lifted its head, as if it could hear something, although to me the night was still graveyard silent. ‘Shall we let him loose and see what he’s been trained to do?’ He untwisted the halter. The beast shouldered between us, charged down the little hill, splashed into the loch, picked its way confidently in the water by the shore for some fifty metres, to the next break in the hills, then scrambled out again, charged up over the hill and was out of sight.

  ‘Did you see the way he heard something we couldn’t? That’s a dog whistle been used to train him, I’d say. Let’s go around the hill and meet the owner.’

  He strode round the bend in the road. Now the whole west side was spread before us in black and silver. Gavin pointed silently to the hill on our right and began working his way around the side of it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to match his stealth on the hill, so I stayed put, listening. Thirty seconds later there was a whinny from the pony, as if it was recognising him and demanding another four-X, and giggles from a couple of girls. I followed, and found them in a little gully, hidden from the loch by the headland and from the road by the hill.

  It was Inga’s Vaila, of course, and her pal Rainbow, unfortunately named daughter of a family who’d taken the retro sixties fashions a bit too seriously. Now I thought about it, she lived in one of the farms in the valley, so they must have been the two figures we’d seen among the ponies.

  ‘Were you scared, Cass?’ Vaila asked.

  ‘When I heard him coming.’ I didn’t want to spoil their fun by macho pretending. ‘When he appeared out of the shadows on the top of the hill, he looked really eerie in the moonlight, and I was definitely scared when he came charging towards us.’

  ‘You didn’t look scared.’

  ‘You couldn’t see me shaking.’ Close up, his coat still glinted in the moonlight. ‘Have you put glitter on him?’

  ‘Glitter hair gel. It doesn’t hurt him.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Gavin asked Rainbow.

  ‘Redsand Yahbini. It means star. He’s five, and he was passed for a stallion last summer.’

  ‘It’s good to see a Shetland this tall with strong bone. We have a couple of Highlands.’

  She began bombarding him with questions. I turned to Vaila. ‘How often have you done this?’

  She giggled again. ‘No’ very often, for fear he’d get hurt on the road. Just when we ken there’s someone coming along on foot.’

  ‘How did you train him?’

  ‘It started with them being on the hill.’ The herd running loose, she meant, bounded only by the fences of the whole scattald, which meant in this case that they could be up to seven miles away. ‘It was a right pain when we wanted to go riding. They’d come when they heard us call, but we had to get sight of them for them to hear us. So we thought of a dog whistle. We’d find them and whistle, and when they came we’d feed them. Soon all we had to do was blow the whistle and they charged across the hill like a wild west stampede.’

  I could imagine it, the summer hills pine-green with heather, the piston hooves thudding, the manes tossing as the ponies charged towards them.

  ‘Then Izzy, she’s the drama teacher that visits all the schools, well, she came with this play, Kirsty and da Snarravoe Njuggle. Rainbow said she could train one of her horses to be a njuggle and charge into the water, and we thought what fun it would be to gluff Jeemie when he was staggering home from the pub. Yab’s the biggest, and he’s black, so we worked with him. Njuggles are supposed to like mills, so we tried at first by the brig, you ken, at Mill House, but then Councillor Georgeson cleared us, so we came up to the loch. I’d stand behind the hill here and whistle, and Rainbow rode Yab down and along the water edge. Once he’d got that idea we tried him on his own. He learned really quickly. Then we had a sleepover one Friday night, and we gluffed Jeemie.’ She was laughing so much at the memory that she could hardly speak. ‘Honest, Cass, you shoulda seen his face. He ran for his car as if a demon was after him.’

  ‘The Njuggle’s Nest,’ I said. ‘He’s using you as publicity.’

  Vaila giggled. ‘The funniest thing was, he painted the sign himself, and he asked Rainbow if he could come and draw her stallion, as that looked the most like what he saw. I wasn’t sure if he was being stupid, or if he was laughing at us.’

  Laughing, I suspected, but I didn’t say so. ‘Has anyone else seen him?’

  ‘A group of boys from the school, when they were out kale-casting. They were boasting in the playground of coming to look.’ She grinned, white teeth glinting in the moonlight. ‘One of them was Drew, you ken, that comes to the sailing, and he was that scared when Yab came over the hill that he musta been back at Voe by the time Yab got to the loch. They all ran like rabbits.’ Her voice was joyous with satisfaction. ‘There was a lot less big talk in the playground for a month after that.’

  Yahbini had his proper halter on now and was looking round and fidgeting his feet like a bored Peerie Charlie. Gavin swung onto his back and led the way back to the road where we’d left the car. His feet couldn’t be far off the ground, but the pony didn’t seem in the least worried by an adult’s weight.

  ‘Shetland ponies are stronger than any other breed, for their size,’ Rainbow told me. ‘They used them to pull carts in mines, after Parliament made a law to stop them using children. That’s when the ponies became valuable, up here.’ I suspected that she’d become a horsey encyclopaedia with any encouragement; but she changed tack. ‘The policeman said we weren’t breaking any laws. We ken no’ to do this when there are cars about.’

  We said goodbye to the lasses and Yahbini at the car. Gavin dismounted reluctantly. ‘Let me know when you have his first foals.’

  They scrambled up on his back, Vaila behind Rainbow, and clattered off down the road. We sat in the car for a bit, windows open, letting them get home before we came past them with noise and sight-spoiling light.

  ‘Well done,’ Gavin said, as the knock of hooves had died away.

  ‘I’d have run if you hadn’t looked so sure that he’d stop.’

  ‘The hoofprints proved it was a real pony, trained by someone, which meant it would probably respond to commands. I was pretty sure it would swerve rather than knock me down.’ He turned his head to smile at me. ‘Don’t go trying that with a real wild horse.’

/>   ‘No fear. Did you think Jeemie was behind it? I did.’

  ‘From what you said, I thought he’d had a genuine fright, but was cashing in on it with the shop’s name, and the sign board, and telling the story … ergo, he doesn’t have anything hidden in or near the loch, because he’d be trying to scare people away from it, and njuggles are just too intriguing to be scary. The girl – is she really called Rainbow?’

  I nodded gloomily. ‘In France, you’re only allowed to call children by a name from an approved list.’

  ‘She said a few people had come to look, but she didn’t want to release the stallion if there was any chance of a car coming along, so not many have seen him. A pity. He was spectacular in the moonlight, with his coat glinting like that, and his mane and tail flying. A real beauty.’

  ‘But it was just a fun. Nobody put them up to it. It was a challenge to see if he’d do it, and to scare the boys in their class. So the loch and the njuggle are just red herrings. Red ponies.’

  ‘They are, but I still agree with you that there’s something funny about Jeemie’s business. It may just be delicacy on his part, of course, showing his rings only to tourists.’

  ‘He showed them to me.’

  ‘Because you asked. Magnie only knew he had them because he’d seen him showing them to a tourist.’

  ‘Delicacy, because they’ve been sold by someone local, and other people would recognise the ring and gossip?’

  ‘It could be that.’ He turned the key and put the car into gear. ‘Let’s go and ask.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Your girl came to talk to me,’ Gavin said. He pulled out into the road and we drove on. ‘Just after one, so I suppose it was her lunch hour. Very tearful and repentant. I said I wouldn’t tell her new boyfriend if she hadn’t killed Ivor, and she assured me that she hadn’t.’

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘I don’t see her hauling a body about, but she could well have been a horsey little girl.’

  ‘Her brother works with Co-op dray horses.’