Slowly, I uncurled myself and came out of the police car. Gavin put out a hand towards me, then drew it back. Outside, the moonlight had been replaced with floodlighting, rigged up on a cable from a van with a chugging generator, and the silence was broken by the crackling of police radios. It was bitterly cold.
Then I heard Reidar’s voice, questioning, and the paramedic, authoritative: ‘Just stay on board your own boat, please, sir. There’s been an accident.’
‘Cass?’ another voice said sharply.
‘Anders!’ I wanted to hurl myself into his arms, back into my security of sails and engines and voyages far from land, far from the police world. ‘I’m here, I’m fine.’
They both turned towards me. There was a police officer at the head of the gangplank, blocking the marina gate. Beyond him, Hubert’s prints stretched along the pontoon to where two officers were busy erecting a white tent over his body.
‘Don’t worry, Cass,’ Reidar called. ‘We will be with you in five minutes.’ A brief conversation, then they lowered Sule’s rubber dinghy on its davits. I watched them row for the slip, beach the dinghy, walk the ten yards towards me. I met them half-way and flung myself into Anders’ arms. He closed them reassuringly around me. He smelt of engines and salt and Norwegian aquavit. I clung to him for a moment, then stepped back. ‘Have you just arrived?’
‘Two hours ago. I was sleeping when all the noise began.’
‘And Rat?’
‘Of course, aboard Sule. What about you, are you barred from Khalida?’
‘I need to get Cat.’ I turned to Gavin, watching with that shut-off look. ‘Cat hates dinghies. I’ll have to go myself and put him in his basket, to take him over to Sule.’
‘I’ll send Sergeant Peterson with you. She can take your statement aboard Sule.’ He wouldn’t be allowed to take it, of course. Be damned to their rules. I wanted to stamp and scream as if I was three again, but if they had to invade my home to clear me, to clear Gavin, then there was nothing I could do, except be reasonable about it. ‘I’ll get her to take photos before you go aboard. Can you get clothes too, please, and let us have these ones?’
There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do about it. Guilty until proved innocent. I knew he minded as much as I did.
He turned to call, ‘Freya!’ I made a face into the darkness. Sergeant Peterson was the original ice maiden. She had pale, straight hair held back in a pony-tail, and green eyes like a mermaid’s, looking with the indifference of another species on human folly. We’d crossed paths on the longship case, and again in the witches murders, and not taken to each other. Gavin murmured instructions to her, and she nodded and followed us to the pier. I was gloomily pleased to see she balanced herself on the grey rubber side of Reidar’s inflatable as if she expected to go swimming at any moment. The men rowed to Khalida’s stern, and Sergeant Peterson clambered aboard first. Camera flashes dazzled on the snow in the cockpit. There would only be my prints from coming aboard, half-covered. At last she beckoned me forward, allowing me onto my own boat at last. Knowing it wasn’t Gavin’s fault didn’t help the rage building inside me as she watched every move I made: switching off the still-chugging engine, lighting a candle, Cat’s basket, Cat himself, miaowing indignantly at this late interruption, two tins of food. I turned my back on her and changed into clean clothes, and she gathered what I was wearing into a white bag. Then, in silence, we clambered back into the dinghy, rowed to Sule, and came aboard.
After the snow-cold outdoors, it was blissfully warm. I set Cat’s basket down on the U-shaped settee. ‘Rat?’
Rat wriggled out of the sleeping bag in the forepeak. He was only just smaller than Cat, with glossy black and white fur, magnificent whiskers, and an intelligent expression. He whiffled in my face by way of greeting, hooked his way down my front, tail waggling, and leapt for the fiddle that held Reidar’s cookery books on their shelf. I let Cat out of his basket. Cat patted up a paw, Rat dodged it, and within seconds they were playing their old game of chasing each other up into the forepeak, round the hanging locker, along the fiddles, across the engine box, over the chart table and cooker, and back to the forepeak. Anders sat down on the settee, and held his hand out. ‘Come and sit down, Cass, and tell us what has happened.’
I was stretching my hand out to him when I saw the blood on it, crusted red-brown, and recoiled, holding my hand away from me as if it was contaminated.
‘There is hot water in the heads,’ Anders said, indicating into the forecabin.
The pump system chugged into action as I turned the tap. I filled the basin and plunged my hands in, then lathered them with gel, scrubbed with the brush and rinsed again. It was too dim to see if they were clean yet; I soaped and scrubbed again, then dried them, came out into the light and dropped beside Anders on the settee.
He was just younger than me, Anders, twenty-eight, and stunningly handsome, in a young Norse god way: silver-gilt hair, a straight nose, beautiful cheekbones, and a neat seafaring beard. He was also a star with any engine, even my ancient Volvo Penta, which was why his father was keen on keeping him in the family boatyard. His mother was keen on marrying him off to a nice Norwegian girl who lived in a house and had a job which she’d give up for children. There were a couple of obstacles to these ambitions: he’d become hooked enough on sailing to dream of long voyages, and he was a nerd. To make his eyes light up, all you had to do was mention an odd knocking noise in the injector lines. He was also, I’d discovered during the longship case, a secret devotee of those war games you played with exquisitely painted figures, which is not generally a woman-puller, and a lot of girls also objected to Rat; Sergeant Peterson, for example, was looking decidedly uneasy as he and Cat hurtled along the settee towards her. I didn’t mind him; I wasn’t afraid of mice, and Rat was clean, intelligent, and generally trustworthy aboard a boat, if you kept the biscuit jar shut, and the light airs sails stowed away where he couldn’t nest in them.
Rat and Cat did a last circuit, then curled up together in Reidar’s bunk, Rat’s head pillowed on Cat’s belly. Sergeant Peterson shut her pink-gloss lips on what she’d been about to say, and sat down. Reidar began making hot chocolate. Anders gave my hand a squeeze and sat back, motioning Sergeant Peterson forwards. ‘You will want to ask questions.’
I ignored Sergeant Peterson taking out her black notebook. ‘But what are you doing here?’
‘I have come over for your Up Helly Aa. I worked over Christmas and New Year, so that I could have this week off.’
‘Oh, excellent!’ My voice felt as if I was saying the right things on auto-pilot. My hands were clean under Reidar’s cabin LED lighting, but I felt as if the blood was still there. ‘Have you got tickets for a hall?’
‘For the boating club, the same as you. We will dance together yet.’
‘Questions,’ Reidar grumbled. ‘Drink your chocolate first.’ He distributed the little cups and produced a plate of stem ginger biscuits, warm from the oven. ‘These are good for shock.’
I took two. ‘Thank you, Reidar.’
Sergeant Peterson cleared her throat, then took me through the evening, moment by moment: the shot, looking out from each side and seeing nothing, then from the forepeak, to see Hubert lying there. ‘Except I didn’t know then who it was.’ Yes, he’d been just conscious. I’d done what I could to stop the bleeding. She seemed deeply suspicious of me phoning the hospital, who naturally didn’t record calls. I repeated that I’d seen nobody, heard nobody: there had been nothing but my engine, the ripples against the hull, and the wind thrumming in the rigging. Nobody had set foot on the pontoon other than Hubert. I was sure of that: ‘I remember his tracks, coming straight forward.’
‘Did you smell anything?’
I nodded. ‘Fireworks. Gunpowder, I suppose.’
‘You see,’ Sergeant Peterson said, ‘the initial impression is that he was shot at close range. His murderer was two metres or less away from him.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
I thought it over. ‘Unless someone was hiding in one of the boats on the other side of the pontoon. I couldn’t see them till I opened the forrard hatch. They’d have time to come out, shoot, and nip back in. I didn’t rush straight out. I looked from the windows first. Half a minute, maybe.’
Sergeant Peterson shook her head. ‘The police have checked every boat on the pontoon. The only ones with disturbed snow are your yacht and –’ she looked across at Reidar, ‘yours, sir.’
Reidar held out his hand. ‘Reidar Pedersen.’
‘Mr Pedersen. We’ll look again once it gets light, of course.’
In the meantime, her look said, I was the obvious suspect, and only Gavin vouching for me was keeping me out of clink. She turned to Reidar. ‘What about you, Mr Pedersen, did you know the dead man?’
He shook his head. ‘I am starting to make contacts of course, for my business, but in Lerwick and here in Scalloway only. I would not have come across him.’
‘And you didn’t see or hear anything suspicious? Not even the shot?’
Reidar shook his head. ‘I was listening to music, through headphones. I saw only the blue lights, and then felt the feet on the pontoon.’
‘Mr Johansen?’
‘I only arrived from Norway two hours ago, on a fishing boat. I was asleep.’
The ice maiden moved on. ‘What did you think his words meant?’ She read them from her notebook. ‘Bridge – saw her. Bridge.’
I spread my hands, shook my head. The Georgesons lived at Bridge House. John Georgeson had ordered the bairns away from the bridge, when they tried to play njuggles there.
‘A name?’ she pursued. ‘It didn’t sound as if he was trying to say Bridget?’
Saw her. ‘It might have been.’ I tried to hear it again in my head. ‘I don’t think so. Bridget’s an unusual name here in Shetland.’
Her eyes flared, as if she knew something I didn’t. ‘You don’t know any Bridgets?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Did you never hear your teacher’s first name?’
‘We just called her Georgeson in the playground, but it did begin with a B – was she a Bridget? No, that’s not right …’ Memory stirred. ‘Brede, that was it, like the sister in Across the Barricades.’
‘That was what the family called her. Actually, she was Bridget. Her schoolmates called her Bridget, or Bridge.’
I was silent, digesting that. Hubert too would have called her Bridge. But where might he have seen her, that he needed to tell me? Not going into Ivor and Julie’s house, on the night Ivor had returned, for Hubert had still been south then.
‘And there’s nothing else you noticed.’
I shook my head.
‘Mr Johansen? Mr Pedersen?’
‘Nothing.’
She rose, and dipped in her pocket for a card. ‘You’ve had a very upsetting experience tonight, Ms Lynch.’ She held the white square of card towards me. Professional counselling, it read. ‘If you feel you need to talk to someone about it, then here are some numbers you can ring.’
I’d brought a boat home over a thousand miles of the Atlantic alone, with a dead man haunting me. She laid the card on the table. ‘I’ll leave you to get some sleep.’
Sleep? After Sergeant Peterson had left, we sat huddled together around the table, Anders’ shoulder warm against mine. The ginger had settled my stomach, but my face was numb. I kept seeing the way Hubert had lain there, curled tight on the white snow, like a discarded bundle of clothes; but then, I reminded myself, that was what his body was: clothing his spirit wouldn’t need for now, until it was raised as a glorious body on the Last Day. For now, he wouldn’t care about the indignity of lying there all night, behind the screens, until forensics could be flown in from south. Bridge … saw her. That was what he’d come to tell me, but it didn’t make any sense.
We didn’t talk much. Reidar made toddies, fragrant with lime and Malibu; we drank them while the blue lights flashed outside, the feet came and went on the pontoon, the radios crackled. Once I tried to move, to let Anders go to bed, but he pulled a downie over me and put his arm round my shoulders to hold me there. ‘I’m not sleepy. You will only have nightmares, anyway. Relax, and go to sleep if you wish.’
I didn’t sleep, but I was contented just to lean back against him, eyes closed, to breathe in the familiar smell of oily wool, to know that I was with friends who didn’t expect me to talk. From time to time he and Reidar chatted over me, Anders in Norwegian and Reidar in Danish, discussing the plans for the opening, the Up Helly Aa, the work Anders had just finished in his father’s yard, the boats lined up for the rest of January. As the night wore through, they fell silent. Reidar went to his bunk, in the quarterberth, leaving Anders and I on the couch. I knew by his softer breathing, the heaviness of his arm, when he slept.
Every so often I heard Gavin’s voice outside, but he came in only once, when the light crept at last over the east hill. We were eating breakfast, porridge with salt and cream. ‘I can’t stop. I’ll be interviewing all day.’ His grey eyes scanned my face. ‘You’re okay?’
I nodded; but I knew that he could see that I wasn’t. His face was bleak. I saw again the look I’d seen in the longship case: this is my job. This is who I am. There was no compromise possible. I wanted to reach towards him, but I still felt sick inside. I didn’t want to deal with death any more. As he turned away from me, I felt as if something was tearing inside me. I didn’t know how to go about fixing this. I knew I had to make an effort, or we’d be over, Julie had said, and gone sailing. I rose as he went out of the door, and followed him into the cockpit. There were a dozen officers on the pontoon, and in this still air they’d hear every word I said, yet I didn’t want to lie to him by pretending that everything was all right. I could feel Hubert’s blood on my hands still.
Gavin turned, but said nothing. I could only look back, struggling for words that would say what I meant without laying my feelings bare to the people surrounding us. ‘Phone me later, if you get time.’
His face lightened. He nodded. ‘You have a good day.’ His voice softened so that I could only just hear it; a tinge of red stole into his cheeks. ‘Prayer helps.’
He turned away and became absorbed into his world, and I went back below. Prayer helps … If I was to stay with him, I had to learn to cope, and cope on my own; he had enough to deal with, without having a tantrum from his girlfriend too.
I dragged my way into college. In that witch business in October my classmates had been shy of me; now, they knew me better, and I was greeted with a flurry of questions: ‘Come on, Cass, what’s happening?’ ‘Wha does your policeman reckon did it?’ ‘Is it right that Hubert Inkster’s dead?’
Peter burst in over them. He was normally a quiet soul, but the excitement of the approaching Scalloway Fire Festival was giving him confidence, for he was in the Jarl Squad this year, the lead squad, which wore Viking costume. He’d been growing the beard since October, and had dodged all our attempts to trap admissions about the colour of the galley. ‘Is it really right that he was shot from close to but with only his ain footprints ahint him?’
I gave a short account of what I’d seen, which naturally didn’t satisfy them.
‘He was shot from a boat then,’ Kevin said. ‘Someone hiding in one of the boats that was left.’
I shook my head. ‘The police searched them all, and there was nobody aboard.’
‘Could you walk along the very edge of the pontoon, holding on to the bows of the boats?’
We all visualised the white plastic rim of the wooden walkway.
‘You’d be awful noticeable,’ Jimmy objected, ‘clinging like a crab to the boat pulpits. Besides, there arena enough boats there ee now to get all the way along like that.’
‘And where would you go once you’d shot him?’
‘Someone came in on a boat, then. Shot him and went away again.’
‘I’d have heard the motor,’ I said. ‘We’d have seen the boat on th
e pontoon, with all the ones that are ashore for winter.’
They all agreed that yes, we would have, except for Peter, who had that dawning light expression.
‘I ken!’ he broke in. ‘Listen, all of you, this is a good idea. It’s one of this sub-aqua folk. They took the pistol in a waterproof bag, and swam ower to the pontoon, shot him, then just swam away.’
The lecturer came in then, and we had to get down to work. But between calculating boat weight and balance, the idea kept surfacing. The water was icy, you had less than five minutes if you went overboard, but a diver in a proper thermal wet suit could do it. Say he’d been waiting, black on the black shoreline, for Ivor’s car to arrive, and slipped into the water as soon as it came. Then why not shoot him there? the voice of reason asked. Because … because I might come straight out at the sound of the pistol, and see his car driving off? But a car had driven past, and without its lights I couldn’t see anything more: size, colour, certainly not numberplate.
I imagined a dark-clad person slipping into the water, swimming the fifty metres to the marina, bobbing up beside the pontoon and waiting for Hubert to almost get to me, then shooting. Immediately, the figure would duck back under and speed back to shore … no. I was pretty sure I’d have seen any movement on shore. But if they’d come to the far side of the pontoon, they could have gone out around the breakwater where I wouldn’t see them. They could have swum past the fisheries college to the car park, and driven away.
First we’d needed a horseman; now we needed a deep-sea diver. I shook away the thought of a njuggle sneaking up, pistol in hoof, and concentrated on cargo distribution.
It was an odd day. The snow fell at intervals, pouring down like a white river, blotting out everything but the window frame, then clearing again to brilliant sunshine. The hills around us were like a stage set for a very expensive version of The Snow Queen, with the glittering snow smoothed over each tussock of grass. I couldn’t see the marina from any of the classrooms, but I could see in my mind’s eye the white-suited figures going aboard my Khalida. They’d start at the forepeak, where my steps had led from, and lift the sails and bunk cushions, haul out the anchor chain and look underneath it. Then they’d move back: nothing to search in the heads or hanging locker, just the cabin floor to lift; then the main cabin. They’d look under the sole, and in each of the lockers. In imagination I heard the clatter as they took the pans from below the cooker, lined tins up on the table. They’d open each of my plastic boxes to check through my clothes, and undo my bunk to get underneath the mattress to the storage space below. They’d unhook the steps and check around the engine. Then they’d investigate the cockpit lockers: fenders, the gas bottle, ropes, flares, the liferaft, the spare anchor chain. I wondered if Gavin would be there, or if he’d turn it over to another officer, as he had with interviewing me.
The Body in the Bracken Page 21