‘Dunc, they’re digging up the field. They’re looking for more bodies. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to find that a bit difficult to ignore.’
Duncan shook his head, the way a fond parent does when his child has become over-excited about something. He was preparing salad and I didn’t like the way his knife was slicing into a red pepper.
‘There aren’t any more bodies and they’ll be finished by the end of tomorrow.’
‘How can they possibly know that?’
‘They have instruments that can tell. Don’t ask me exactly how it works. You probably understand it better than I do. Apparently, decomposing flesh gives off heat and these gizmos can pick it up. Like metal detectors.’
Except any bodies out there were buried in peat. They weren’t decomposing. ‘I thought they’d have to dig up the whole field.’
‘Apparently not. The wonders of modern technology. They’ve already done one sweep and found nothing. Not even a dead rabbit. They’ll do another tomorrow, just to be sure, then they’re out of here. Do you want something to drink?’
I filled a jug with water from the tap and added ice from the freezer. One benefit of living on Shetland was that we were saving a fortune on bottled water. Oh, and the local smoked salmon was pretty good. Apart from that, I was struggling.
‘That wasn’t the impression Detective Sergeant Tulloch gave me. She thought they’d be here for some time.’
‘Yes, well, reading between the lines, I think the sergeant has a tendency to get a touch overenthusiastic. Bit too anxious to make her mark and not afraid to set a few hares running in the meantime.’
Which hadn’t been the impression I’d had of Dana Tulloch. She’d struck me as someone who played her cards quite close to her chest.
‘You seem to have got very chummy with DI Dunn on the strength of one phone call.’
‘Oh, we know each other from way back.’
I should have known. I felt a touch of annoyance that Duncan, who’d played no part in the discovery of the body, should have been given far more information than I had, purely on the strength of being a fellow islander.
We sat down. I buttered some bread. Duncan served himself a large helping of cold chicken. Some of the flesh was still pink and jelly had congealed around it. At the sight of it, the nausea I’d been fighting in the post-mortem room reared up again. Great, after nearly fifteen years in medicine, I was getting squeamish. I helped myself to salad and a piece of cheese.
‘Were there any reporters when you got home?’ I asked. By the time I’d arrived, just before nine, the place had been deserted apart from one solitary copper standing guard. I’d braced myself to run the gauntlet of press questioning and been pleasantly surprised.
Duncan shook his head. ‘Nope. Dunn’s trying to keep a lid on the whole thing. Apparently under pressure from his Super. Thinks it might be bad for business, just as the summer tourist season starts.’
‘Jesus, not again. I had the same thing from Gifford just now. Bad for hospital PR. I think you people need to get your priorities sorted out. This is not the people’s republic of Shetland. You are remotely answerable to the outside world.’
Duncan had stopped eating. He was looking at me, but I didn’t think he was still listening.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Gifford,’ he replied. The shine had gone from his eyes.
‘My new boss. He’s back. I met him just now.’ Mentioning the drink didn’t seem like a terribly good idea.
Duncan stood up, emptied his glass of pure Shetland water into the sink and poured an inch of neat Talisker into it. He drank, looking out of the window, his back to me.
‘Can’t help thinking there’s a story here,’ I said.
Duncan didn’t answer.
‘Anything I need to know?’ I tried again.
Duncan muttered something that included more than one expletive and the phrase ‘should have known’. Unlike me, he doesn’t normally swear much. By this stage I was shamefully, gleefully curious.
He turned. ‘I’m going for a bath,’ he said as he left the room.
I made myself wait ten minutes before I followed him. I wandered back into our sitting room. There was one bookcase, its contents somewhat sparse. I’m really not much of a reader. Duncan tells anyone who’ll listen that I won’t consider a novel not written by someone called Francis (Dick or Claire – take your pick). Duncan is marginally better, but not exactly one for the classics. He had, however, inherited his grandfather’s library and there were a few volumes by Dickens, Trollope, Austen and Hawthorne on the top shelf. I looked closely. Nothing by Walter Scott.
So I switched on the TV just as the late news was starting. If I’d been hoping for a starring role I’d have been disappointed. The last item was a twenty-second piece about the discovery of a corpse in some peat land several miles outside Lerwick. The location hadn’t been specified, nor had there been any footage of our home. Instead, DI Andy Dunn, standing outside Lerwick police headquarters, had said the minimum possible whilst still using words. He did, though, finish with a speculative comment about the possibility of an archaeological find – I guessed the recording had been made before we’d met Stephen Renney. It was an obvious attempt to play down the situation but I assumed he knew what he was doing.
When I judged I’d left enough time I went upstairs. Duncan was in the bath with his eyes closed. He’d filled the tub so full that water was trickling down the overflow pipe. I knew from experience that the temperature would be pretty close to forty degrees. Duncan and I never shared a bath. About a year ago, before the sperm tests, I’d wondered if Duncan’s hot baths were behind our failure to conceive. The effect of hot water on sperm is well known and I’d suggested he might try soaking his testicles in ice water for five minutes a day. He’d looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘How?’ I was still thinking about it. Maybe one day I’d invent a device for the convenient cold soaking of the male genitalia. Western fertility levels would soar and I’d make my fortune.
I leaned against the sink. Duncan made no sign of knowing I was there.
‘You can’t just leave it at that, you know. I have to work with the man. We’re probably expected to entertain him and his wife for dinner over the next couple of months.’
‘Gifford isn’t married.’
I felt a jolt of something like relief mixed with alarm. Had I been hinting? And if I had, had Duncan spotted it?
‘What is it?’ I tried again.
Duncan opened his eyes but didn’t look at me. ‘We were at school together. I didn’t like him. The feeling was mutual.’
‘He’s from Unst?’
Duncan shook his head. ‘No, I’m talking about secondary school.’ That made more sense. On Shetland, children from the more remote islands often attend secondary school in Lerwick, either boarding during the week or staying with relatives.
‘Is that it?’ I said.
Duncan sat up. He looked me up and down. ‘You coming in?’
I leaned across, dipped my hand in the water and took it out again quickly. ‘No,’ I said.
Duncan picked up the loofah and held it out to me. It looked like some sort of kinky invitation. If I picked it up, we would have sex. If I didn’t, I was rejecting him and would have to deal with sulks for the next couple of days. I thought for a second. My period was due any day but you can never be sure about these things. It was worth a try. I reached out for the loofah. Duncan leaned forward towards the tap, exposing his sleek, strong back.
‘I prefer my handmaidens naked,’ he said.
With one hand, I started to rub the loofah up and down his back. With the other, I unfastened the buttons of my shirt.
5
AFTER DUNCAN AND I had made love I slept deeply. Until something woke me. I lay in the half light of our bedroom, listening to Duncan’s steady breathing beside me. Otherwise silence. Yet I’d heard something. People don’t wake suddenly from deep sleep for no reason. I listened hard.
Nothing.
I turned to look at the clock: three-fifteen a.m., and about as dark as it ever got on Shetland during the summer, which wasn’t very. I could see everything in the room: cherry-wood furniture, lilac light-shades, free-standing mirror, clothes slung over the back of a chair. A pale glow like early dawn shone around the blind.
I got up. The rhythm of Duncan’s breathing changed and I froze. After a few seconds I walked to the window. Slowly, trying not to make a sound, I pulled up the blind.
It wasn’t the brightest of Shetland nights; it still appeared to be raining softly, but I could make out just about everything: white police tent; red-and-white-striped tape; sheep in the neighbouring field; the solitary spruce tree that grew at the bottom of what passed for our garden; Charles and Henry, wide awake, with their noses poking over the fence, the way they do when someone appears in the next field. Horses are friendly – and nosy. If they see someone close by, they hurry over for a better look. So who were they looking at?
Then I saw the light.
It appeared inside the police tent, a faint brightness shining briefly behind the white canvas; flashing quickly then disappearing; then again. Flash, sweep, flicker.
Something stroked my bare hip. Then Duncan’s warm body pressed against me from behind. He swept my hair up, pushed it over one shoulder and bent down to kiss my neck.
‘There’s someone in the field,’ I said. His hands slid around my waist and moved higher.
‘Where?’ he asked, nuzzling the place behind my ear.
‘In the tent. There’s a torch. There.’
‘Can’t see anything,’ he said as his hands found my breasts.
‘Well, you won’t. You’re not looking.’ I pushed his hands away and they dropped down to the window ledge.
‘It’ll be the police,’ he said. ‘Dunn said they’d be leaving someone here overnight.’
‘I suppose.’
We stood staring out into the darkness, waiting, but the light didn’t appear again.
‘Did they hurt her?’ asked Duncan after a minute or two, so quietly I could barely hear him.
I turned in surprise, glared at him. ‘They cut out her heart.’
Duncan’s pale face drained. He stood back, arms falling to his sides. Instantly I regretted being so brutal. ‘Dunn didn’t tell you that? I’m sorry . . .’ I began.
He shushed me. ‘It’s OK. Did they . . . he . . . was he cruel?’
‘No,’ I said, remembering everything Dr Renney had told us about the strawberries, the anaesthetic. ‘That’s the strangest thing. He . . . they . . . they fed her, gave her pain relief. They almost seemed to . . . care for her.’ They cared for her. Before they tied her up and carved Nordic symbols into her skin, of course. What kind of sense did that make? I shut my eyes, but the image was still there.
Duncan rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Jesus, what a mess.’
There didn’t seem an immediate answer to that, so I said nothing. Duncan made no move to go back to bed and neither did I. After a while I started to feel the chill. I closed my eyes and leaned against him, seeking warmth rather than intimacy, but he wrapped his arms around me and his hands started to move down my back. Then stopped. ‘Tor, would you consider adoption?’ he said.
I opened my eyes. ‘You mean a baby?’ I asked.
He squeezed one buttock. ‘No, a walrus. Of course I mean a baby.’
Well, he’d certainly taken me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about adoption, hadn’t considered we were anywhere near that stage. We had any number of boxes to tick first. Adoption was the last resort, wasn’t it?
‘It’s just there’s a good programme on the islands. Or, at least, there always used to be. It’s not difficult to adopt here. A newborn, I mean. Not an emotionally screwed-up teenager.’
‘How can that be?’ I said, thinking that the adoption laws here were surely the same as for the rest of the UK. ‘How can Shetland have more babies than anywhere else?’
‘I don’t know. I just remember it being discussed when I lived here before. Maybe we’re more old-fashioned about single mothers.’
It was possible. Churches were better attended here than on the mainland and, on the whole, moral standards seemed comparable with what they’d been in the rest of the UK some twenty or thirty years ago. In Shetland, teenagers stand up on buses to let old ladies sit down. On the roads, drivers wait by passing spaces instead of racing to beat the oncoming car. Maybe this was a real possibility that I hadn’t considered.
Then Duncan took hold of me round the waist and lifted. He put me down on the window ledge. The glass was cold and slightly damp against my back. He lifted my legs and wrapped them around his waist. I knew exactly what was coming. The ledge was just the right height and we’d done this before.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we could just keep trying.’
‘For a little while longer maybe,’ I whispered, watching him lower the blind.
And we kept on trying.
6
SARAH SAT ON the edge of her chair. She had the look in her eye: angry, ashamed, impatient; the one that would increase in intensity month by month, anger gradually giving way to despair as the arrival of each menstrual period signalled a fresh failure. Of course, it could also disappear, completely and for ever, the second she knew she was pregnant. I knew that look so well. I saw it all the time. And not just on the faces of patients.
Robert’s expression, on the other hand, I couldn’t read. He had still to look me in the eye.
Although this was their first meeting with me, Sarah and Robert Tully had already run the gauntlet of tests, examinations and interviews with counsellors. They were running out of patience. He wanted the pats on the back down the local and the weekends browsing through model-train brochures. She wanted her feet up in stirrups and a good dose of artificial hormone coursing round her veins.
‘We were hoping you’d put us on the IVF programme,’ she said. ‘We know there’s a waiting list for NHS treatment but we have some money saved up. We want to start right away.’
I nodded. ‘Of course. I understand.’ Oh, how well did I understand: Get me pregnant. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even want to think about everything that comes after – the nausea, exhaustion, backache, stretch marks, total lack of privacy, and then pain beyond anything I could ever have imagined. Just wave your magical, medical wand and make it OK for me too.
What I was about to suggest they would find incredibly hard to accept; patience and the biological urge to reproduce don’t make comfortable bedfellows. ‘There is another way forward that I’d like you to think about.’
‘We’ve been trying for three years.’ With something between a hiccup and a sob she started to cry. Robert glared at me as though their failure to conceive was entirely my doing and gave his wife the handkerchief he’d had ready in his hand.
I decided to give them a moment. I stood and walked to the window.
It had been raining as I’d driven into Lerwick that morning and the clouds above were low and heavy, the town dark and damp.
Lerwick is a grey stone town on the eastern coast of the main island, a short channel hop from the island of Bressay. Like the rest of the islands’ townships, it isn’t noted for its architecture: the buildings are simple and functional but rarely beautiful. The traditional choice of building material is local granite with a slate roof. For the most part, two storeys are thought ample by the practical islanders – maybe they worry about high winds blowing roofs away – but in the older parts of town and around the harbour a few three-storey, even four-storey houses can be seen. They seem to represent a rare flash of ambition, or defiance, on the part of the islanders.
Gazing at a rain-washed Lerwick did nothing to improve my mood.
I found myself stifling a yawn. I hadn’t slept well. Even when I hadn’t been fully awake and out of bed, I’d been restless, my head full of the woman I’d found. I’d seen her, touched her, knew something of what had happened to
her. It was appalling . . . I should be appalled, and I was . . . but I was angry too. Because I’d wanted to plant snowdrops on Jamie’s grave to remind me of the time he tried to eat some. I’d gone out one evening to call him in and found a tiny white flower sticking out of his mouth. He’d looked like an equine flamenco dancer. But now I’d never be able to do that because some sick bastard had chosen our land to bury his dirty work on. And Jamie had been carted off to the knackers’ yard.
There was a movement behind me; a fidget. Sarah had stopped crying. I sat down again and turned to her.
‘You’re only thirty-one. You have a long way to go before you need worry about time running out.’ I, on the other hand, was thirty-three. ‘There’s no guarantee of a baby using IVF. The clinic I’d refer you to has an average success rate of 27 per cent per treatment and, frankly, you’re likely to have a below-average expectation of success.’
‘Why?’ said Robert.
I glanced down at the file again, although I already knew what it said.
‘Between you, you’re dealing with sub-quality sperm and highly irregular periods. The tests you had on your last visit and the lifestyle questionnaire you filled in suggest some reasons why that might be.’
Both looked defensive, as though I was about to tell them it was their fault. Well, in a way it was.
‘Go on,’ said Robert.
‘Both of you show deficiencies in certain minerals that are very useful to conception. Sarah, your levels of zinc, selenium and magnesium are very low. You also have a lot of aluminium in your body. Robert, you have low zinc levels too, but what worries me more is a very high level of cadmium.’ I paused. ‘That’s a toxin present in tobacco smoke. You smoke about twenty cigarettes a day. And you drink alcohol most days. You too, Sarah.’
‘My father smoked forty a day and drank whisky just about every day of his adult life,’ said Robert. ‘He had five kids before he was thirty.’
I was losing this couple; but I wasn’t about to compromise everything I believed in just to give them some false hope today. On the other hand, they might just get pregnant on their first IVF attempt. It was a huge lottery and I could be doing them a great disservice by persuading them to wait.
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