They laid a plastic stretcher beside me on the beach, and lifted me onto it. An explosion of pain. There was a cold sweat on my forehead, and the stretcher was hard beneath me. Straps were secured over my body. Then I felt them lifting me between them, slanting me as we went up the beach. The stretcher levelled out. There was a clicking of catches, and the movement changed to rolling. Up into the ambulance. I opened my eyes again, and the white ceiling swam above me. A plastic mask was pressed over my nose. ‘Just focus on breathing now. In, out, in out.’ I was so sleepy, so very sleepy. Gavin would make sure Cat was okay. The hospital would make sure I was okay. I gave up the fight to stay conscious, and let the mist descend once more.
When I awoke, I wasn’t sure where I was. A white ceiling, a green curtain drawn around me, a ticking machine on my left, with an array of red lights and figures, and a clear tube drawn down to a butterfly of plasters on my elbow. I seemed to be wearing a shapeless green cotton nightdress whose sleeves came halfway down my arm. Then I remembered. Julie had shot me.
Gavin had sent officers to arrest her. Good. I thought about being attempted murdered and decided against it. I’d lost a fair bit of blood, and I’d have some bonny bruises from the way Julie had lumped me down the beach, but I could breathe, and there was no more blood in my mouth. I hadn’t inhaled any water, and although I’d been shudderingly cold I shouldn’t have developed hypothermia in so short a time. I wriggled my toes experimentally, and found they moved when asked. Fingers, ditto. No frostbite, then. I only had the gunshot wound to deal with, and even that didn’t hurt as much as it had. The stabbing pain had subsided to a dull ache. That was probably painkillers. I’d gambled on her not being able to hit a moving target accurately, and I’d been lucky.
I let my eyes travel slowly round the room. It was a small room, and mine was the only bed in it. There was a green plastic armchair on my left, and a locker on my right. The table had a green-capped jug of water, placed tantalisingly out of reach. The blinds were drawn, white horizontal blinds made out of broad semi-transparent stripes. Across from me there were various white cabinets on the white walls, and a sink with several admonitory posters stuck around it. The door was propped open, and that hospital-at-night hush breathed in: machines ticking, someone muttering, a bed creaking as someone else turned over, the distant hum of voices comparing notes, the occasional pad of trainer-shod feet down the corridor. If I closed my eyes and added the creak of masts and the shoosh of waves, I could pretend I was on a tall ship at night.
There was probably a clock somewhere, but I couldn’t see it, and they’d taken my watch off. I considered the orange light slipping between the blinds, and supposed it was still night, but other than that I couldn’t tell, and that was surprisingly disorientating. Then a nurse came in, a tall woman of about my own age, dressed in a mid-blue uniform. ‘Hello, Cass. How are you feeling now?’
‘Okay.’ I considered that for a moment. ‘Thirsty.’
She checked the chart that hung at the end of the bed. ‘You’re allowed 50ml of water every half hour.’ She poured me a mouthful of water into a plastic nip glass, lifted a remote control from the end of the bed, and raised my head up. I drank, gratefully, rolling each sip around the dry inside of my mouth.
‘How am I?’
‘Stable,’ she said, ‘and lucky, considering you were shot at close range. You spent the night in theatre – but the consultant will tell you all about that in the morning, when he does his round. You can go back to sleep now.’
She glided out, leaving me to contemplate the ceiling. Julie … I’d got her all wrong. I’d been distracted by the trickster njuggle; I should have remembered the other side of it, the ruthless creature that lured you on its back and plunged down into the waters with you. She’d fallen in love with Ivor at school, and not looked at anyone else. She’d gone to university with him, kept being there until finally he’d noticed her. I’d taken it as love. Now I looked at it the other way round: suppose it had been a man who’d fallen in love with a girl who wasn’t interested, followed her to university, kept being there … wouldn’t you call that obsessive, instead of touching devotion, and tell him to get a life? Well, then. She’d wanted Ivor and she’d been determined to have him. She’d got him in the end; but it wasn’t happily ever after. He’d remained the charmer she’d fallen for, charming other women, and the sea had taken him away from her too, sailing at weekends, holidays abroad. There hadn’t been children to give her love to.
What had Inga’s mother-in-law said about children? That was why they’d quarrelled. Julie was worried about the clock ticking, and wanted to try IVF, and Ivor wouldn’t hear of it. That was Julie’s version. But why should she want to have children in a marriage where the two people had drifted so far apart? That was just my supposition, of course; one partner constantly having affairs didn’t sound like a happy marriage to me. Perhaps she did still love him, and thought a child would bring them together again.
My head was starting to hurt. I didn’t do people. I did wind, and waves, tides and currents. I did setting of sails and steering a course. Then I remembered Anders, back in the summer: Think the way you would naturally think. Think where you would place them on a watch.
Very well. Ivor. A good sailor, a good navigator, a feel for the sea, but a risk-taker. I’d put him high up on the watch, but not as the leader, because he’d put the prize above the ship’s safety. I remembered what I’d thought before: an idealist. Full of new schemes for the rainbow tomorrow, Susan had said. What had his scheme been this time, to get away from the collapse of his partnership with Robert-John?
Julie. The word that kept coming back was efficiency. Nothing in her appearance, her speech, suggested flair, the ability to feel how things were. She’d got where she was by meticulous attention to detail, by organisation, by dogged persistence. She’d be valuable wherever you put her: she’d plot a course, create a watch rota that let every one of a hundred and fifty trainees try every aspect of the ship, organise the ship’s stores. What she wouldn’t be able to do was feel the ship moving through the water, know by instinct how to trim the sails or the course. If it wasn’t in a book, she wouldn’t be able to do it.
I kept thinking. She’d married Ivor, and it hadn’t worked. She didn’t have children to make the new centre of her life, so she’d got a career instead. You didn’t need to be touchy-feely in college lecturing; what was needed was well-prepared lessons, timely marking, good delivery of a good syllabus. She was tipped to become the Shetland College’s first female principal. You didn’t get that high without throwing your full determination into it. Now, why couldn’t she pursue that and keep Ivor too? The answer surfaced slowly in my drug-fuzzed brain: he’d gone from an asset to a liability. She was an IT teacher; computing, book-keeping, accountancy. It would be child’s play to her to inspect Ivor’s books. She might have been trying to check on his love life, or just doing a normal household finances balance, but either way it wouldn’t take her two minutes to see that things were going badly wrong. Soon there would be a smash. Would the College appoint the wife of a bankrupt embezzler as their principal? Having eroded away her love, Ivor was all set to destroy her ambition, the prize and culmination of her career.
And then Donna had come on the scene. Ivor had pursued her, and told her he was leaving his wife for her, only it turned out he’d never got round to telling the wife about it. Donna’d said Ivor had said he had told her, but then she discovered the wife was still coming on holiday in Scotland with him, as if nothing had happened. Now suppose … suppose Ivor was telling the truth. Just suppose that the marriage really had drifted apart. He’d never been truly in love with Julie anyway. Now he’d met shy, childish, trusting Donna, and fallen for her, really fallen for her, and he wanted to begin all over again, in his rainbow tomorrow. I considered Donna in my mind’s eye. Certainly not watch leader material. Honest, willing, trusting. Give her a task within her capabilities, and it would be done. Loyal, dutiful. She’d be ther
e on deck for the first stroke of eight bells, and wouldn’t leave until the next eight bells had finished chiming. The backbone of any ship’s crew.
I considered that picture, vaguely depressed. Was that really what men wanted, the perfect helpmeet, the Victorian wife? He for God only, she for God in him? Sweet, trusting, clever only in her own sphere. I sighed, and continued reasoning. Ivor had really fallen in love with Donna, and when she precipitated a decision by coming to Shetland, he meant what he’d said. He told Julie he was leaving her. He was going to set up home, in Shetland, under Julie’s nose, with a girl only just too old to be his daughter.
I added one more characteristic to Julie. She was proud. She had a sense of what she owed herself: in her appearance, in her teaching, in her organization. She wouldn’t let herself down. Now she was going to be let down, publicly, by the husband she’d secured in spite of everyone telling her to give up and find someone else. To her fears for her triumphant career achievement would be added personal rage.
Ivor had to go, and go in a way that would leave her all she wanted. All that formidable competence would be trained on achieving that object. She’d have read up on murders; the police would find that in her computer, unless she’d also read up – and of course she would have – on destroying your tracks. She’d have found out all the things forensics can see when they have a body to work on, or the suspicion of a death in a house: a hair, a fragment of skin, taking up floorboards and analysing pipe bends for minute particles of blood. Very well then, she’d leave the body elsewhere, where it would be quickly destroyed and where, if it was found, nobody would link it up with Ivor. She’d pretend he’d done the note-on-the-table act, and if she was tight-lipped and obviously not wanting to talk about it, nobody would pry. She wouldn’t report him missing; why should she? He’d left her because she wanted a child (a neat touch, giving that version to a crony of Inga’s mother-in-law, to make sure it spread all over Shetland, and a nice, sympathetic, womanly reason too), and she didn’t want to talk about it, she’d just throw herself into her work. If the embezzlement came out – and it might not, given Robert-John’s relationship with his father, which she’d know all about, through Ivor – then that was an extra reason for him to run. Poor Julie, left holding the can. If he’d gone like that, leaving her in it, there’d be no whispering about how ‘she must have known an’ all’. The College interviewing body might even have a touch of sympathy vote towards her application.
But how could she have done it? Killing him, yes; easily. All she had to do was suggest a picnic up on the hill slopes: ‘Is that a cave up there? Why don’t we walk up?’ A blow on the head, poison in his coffee. She was the person who could most easily have impersonated him in the house, then taken the ferry down with his car; she flew back from Inverness the next day. All she had to do was get a bus from Aberdeen to Inverness and get on her flight. But – the stumbling block to her guilt all along – she couldn’t have brought the boat back. Even with murder as a spur, she couldn’t have sailed back. I just didn’t believe it. Not only did she have to hoist the sails and set them, but she’d have had to trim them not only efficiently but well; Ivor’s return had made almost as good time as I had.
My brain had reached an impasse. Hubert, then; maybe they had done it together. She’d shot him so that he wouldn’t give her away. No, I didn’t believe that either. Julie was a loner, who walked by herself. I could see her at a staff do, with the party yet not of them, watching their drunken laughter with cool eyes. Besides, murder wasn’t a game to let others in on. I let my head loll on the rubberised pillow and closed my eyes. I was almost asleep again when I heard my own voice, back in Gavin’s sitting room: It’s frighteningly easy … You could get yourself into such trouble …
Instantly I was awake. I heard the fire crackle, saw the chart and books spread before me on the floor. ‘ Cass, bairn, you’re behind the times,’ Kenny had said, and then Gavin had got out his iPad, with my route already marked, compass course, distance, times. Computers were Julie’s business. The fancy chart plotter that had been removed from Ivor’s boat would have been child’s play to her. She’d have set it to work out all the calculations: distance, course to steer against tide-set. I’d been thinking of Ivor’s yacht as a sailing boat, and Julie couldn’t sail, but any driver could steer a motor boat, and Ivor’s yacht had a good engine. She could have punched the route into the plotter, linked it up to the wheel, set the speed at six knots, and never touched the steering again until Brae marina. It was a crazy idea, but for someone who didn’t know enough about the sea to know it was mad, it would seem perfectly feasible. I heard my voice again: People do it … People who weren’t used to the sea took boats they’d just bought second-hand out into the North Sea with only a land map to guide them. Julie would have heard plenty of talk about this yacht sailing off to Norway, that yacht going to Faroe. She’d think it was easy.
I wondered how afraid she’d been, once she was alone in the wastes of the North Sea, with only the grey tumbling waves around her, and no land in sight. Maybe her faith in her mastery of the boat gadgetry had been so complete that she’d gone below and slept, leaving the boat to get on with it. Powering forward at a steady six knots, no wonder she had made good time.
Then, arriving in Brae after dark, she’d berthed the boat and gone home in Ivor’s oilskins. She’d banged the car door to make sure her neighbour would register him being home, put the lights on. She’d gone before anyone was up to recognise her, or come to the door. She’d skulked around Shetland all day, then got on the boat, gone straight to her sleeping pod, put one of those daylight-excluding masks over her face to make sure she wasn’t recognised by anyone she knew, and slept until the call for drivers to go to their vehicles. If she had been recognised, it wouldn’t matter much, for there wasn’t going to be a police enquiry. She was just a woman whose husband had left her. No police, no courts, no fuss.
Word would spread, of course. Her final revenge on Donna would be knowing that Ivor’s other woman would find out that Ivor had left her too, without even a goodbye message.
Bridge … saw her. Ivor’s boat, with her highly recognisable green dodgers, coming up the west coast under engine. Hubert had seen her, and not thought about it, until I’d mentioned that she’d come home via the Caledonian Canal, and asked about heather. He hadn’t known what to say, so he’d gone to ask Julie about it, at college. It seemed out of character that she should suddenly confide in Susan; maybe she knew Herbert would have been seen visiting her, so that she had to get her version of what he’d wanted to know in first. Hubert had to go; and who was more likely to have taken Ivor’s pistol than his wife, who’d cleared out his boat?
I wondered how cool she’d remain under hostile police questioning.
Sunday 12th January
High Water at Scalloway UT 05.59, 1.3m
Low Water 12.29, 1.0m
High Water 18.31, 1.3m
Low Water 00.54, 0.9m
Moonset 05.34
Sunrise 08.58
Moonrise 12.53
Sunset 15.28
Moon first quarter.
Dem at wants ta kiss i da dark’ll aye finn da mooth.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Chapter Thirty-one
Visitors began at half past ten, as soon as the consultant and his entourage had inspected the ward. Maman and Dad were first.
‘They would not let us in any sooner,’ Maman said. Her eyes were red-rimmed under the careful make-up. ‘They just kept saying that you were stable, then, this morning, that you would be fine, but you would need clothes.’
‘I do,’ I said. The clothes I’d come in were crumpled in a bag in a locker, wet with blood and seawater.
‘So I went aboard your boat, and found what I thought you would need.’ She brandished a carrier bag. ‘I hope you do not mind.’
I smiled at her. ‘If my own Maman can’t rummage around in my clothes boxes, who can?’ I looked inside. ‘Oh, bles
s you, my toothbrush as well.’
‘Then we came in and waited.’ Her dark eyes looked me over. ‘You seem as if you will be fine.’
I nodded. ‘They said they’ll let me out tomorrow.’
‘You wouldn’t think, now,’ Dad suggested, ‘of coming home to the warm to convalesce? Cat would like it, sure he would.’
I knew they’d ask. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m acclimatised. Besides, I’ve got to finish my course.’ I could see Maman wasn’t happy. ‘If it gets very cold, Reidar would let me stay aboard his boat. He has heating.’
They weren’t reassured, but this wasn’t a dire enough emergency to warrant living ashore.
‘And your nice policeman phoned, with his apologies,’ Maman said, ‘and he hopes he will lunch with us another time. He is busy arresting the person who shot you.’
‘Good.’
The afternoon brought Reidar and Anders. By that time I’d explained myself to the elderly lady in the next bed, managed a shower, shakily, lain down for a bit, and got myself dressed, one item of clothing at a time. I’d need to speed that up when I got home. Reidar was inclined to blame himself.
‘I knew I should not have let you go out alone.’
‘As if you could have stopped her,’ Anders said. He laid a large block of fruit and nut chocolate on the bed. ‘Cat is fine, Cass, but missing you. When will they let you out?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Rat and I will come and fetch you.’
‘Rat will have to wait in the car. The hospital would have a fit.’
‘And I will leave Khalida’s engine running before I come, so that your home will be warm for you to return to, and Reidar will bring dinner, so that you can just rest.’
Men from my own world. ‘Thank you, Anders.’
They had just gone when Gavin arrived at last, with a khaki canvas grip slung over one shoulder, and a Thornton’s bag which he laid in my lap: several bars of their Sicilian lemon mousse. His grey eyes scanned me, noting the bulge where the bandage was. ‘They seem to think you’re doing fine.’
The Body in the Bracken Page 27