Sacrifice

by Sharon Bolton

  It doesn’t take long to drive up Yell and by nine o’clock we were on the last leg of the journey.

  Having known Duncan for seven years and been married for five of them, I could still say with complete honesty that I did not know his parents. For a long time I found it strange, even a little distressing, coming, as I do, from a large and noisy, frank and nosy family, amongst whom talk is plentiful and secrets in short supply. That was until I realized that Duncan doesn’t know his parents all that well either and that it wasn’t something I should take personally.

  Duncan is an only child. One who arrived relatively late into the marriage when, presumably, the certainty of children had long since given way to a half-resigned, half-resentful acceptance of something that may never be. One might have thought he would be all the more precious, all the more loved because of that, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  They had never been a close family. Whilst his mother was as doting as one would expect an older mother of an only son to be, there was no comfortable familiarity in their relationship. I’d rarely heard them joke together or share memories of childhood. Still less frequently had I heard her scold him. Polite seemed to best summarize the relationship between Duncan and his mother, although occasionally one could have called it uneasy.

  The relationship between Duncan and his father was easier to describe, although not to understand. It was formal, courteous and – to my mind, at least – distinctly cold. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk. They talked quite a lot – about Duncan’s work, the economy, current affairs, life on the islands – but they never touched on the personal. They never went sailing together, or for walks over the cliffs. They never sneaked off to the pub while his mother and I were preparing dinner, they didn’t fall asleep together in front of the TV afterwards and they never, ever quarrelled.

  On the fifteen-minute ferry journey from Yell to Unst I asked, ‘Did he retire early?’ I had no idea how old Richard was but he barely looked seventy. Yet he hadn’t worked in all the time I’d known him. I hadn’t mentioned Richard the whole journey but Duncan knew immediately whom I meant.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ he replied, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. If Richard had left his post under some sort of cloud, that at least could explain why he was so reluctant to talk about his former profession.

  Duncan shrugged without looking at me. ‘He had other things to do. And he’d groomed his successor.’

  ‘Gifford.’

  Duncan was silent.

  ‘What is it between you two?’ I said.

  Then he looked at me. ‘Do I need to ask you that?’

  ‘He said he stole your girlfriend.’

  The light disappeared from Duncan’s eyes and for a moment the face looking back at me was not one I recognized. Then he gave a sharp, angry laugh.

  ‘In his dreams.’

  The ferry was docking and the three other cars making the late crossing had started their engines. Duncan turned on the ignition. As the ferry engines roared up and the heavy harbour ramp slammed down, he muttered something under his breath, but I didn’t dare ask him to repeat himself.

  18

  UNST, LYING ON the same latitude as southern Greenland, is home to around seven hundred people and fifty thousand puffins. The most northerly of all the inhabited British islands, it measures roughly twelve miles long and five miles wide, with one main road, the A968, running from the south-eastern ferry port at Belmont up to Norwich in the north-east.

  Two miles after leaving the ferry we turned left along a single-track road and started to drive up and down the shore-edged hills. At the end of the road, just about literally, you find the handful of buildings that is Westing; and the cold, grand, granite house that is Duncan’s family home.

  Elspeth hugged Duncan and pressed her cold cheek against mine. Richard shook hands with his son and nodded to me. They led us into their large, west-facing sitting room. Drawn by the colours I could see outside, I walked over to the window. Behind me, a short silence fell; I bristled at a sense of being stared at, and then I heard the sound of a cork being pulled.

  The sun was almost gone and the sky had turned violet. Close to the shore at Westing stand several massive lava rocks, all that remain of ancient cliffs that in past days withstood the might of the Atlantic. These rocks were black as pitch where the light couldn’t catch them, but their beaten and jagged edges glowed like molten gold. The clouds that had been thick and threatening all day had become soft, dusky pink shadows and the surf bounced at the water’s edge like sparks of silver.

  There was movement beside me and I turned. It was Richard, holding out a glass of red wine. He stood beside me and we both looked out. The sun had disappeared behind the cliffs of Yell but, in doing so, had draped them in light. They looked as if they had been carved from bronze.

  ‘The loveliest and loneliest place on earth,’ said Richard, and he seemed to be voicing my thoughts.

  I took a large gulp of wine. It was excellent. Elspeth and Richard’s home had a huge cellar beneath it, but, unlike ours, it was kept well stocked. Richard took my arm and led me to an armchair near the fire and Elspeth scurried forward with a loaded plate. I surrendered myself to their hospitality and ate and drank gratefully, doing my best to respond to Elspeth’s attempts at polite conversation.

  Half an hour later, while Duncan and his father were discussing the state of the roads on the island and plans to develop some of its peat resources, I excused myself and went upstairs to our room. When we stayed with Duncan’s parents, we slept in the best guest room – not, as I had first expected, in Duncan’s old room. That, he’d told me once, had been in the attic but had since been converted into storage. I hadn’t asked what had happened to all his old stuff, all the dusty souvenirs of childhood.

  I pulled my mobile out of my bag and checked messages. There were three from Dana and I felt a glimmer of affection for her. She, at least, was not part of the general conspiracy to get me out of the loop. I knew my mobile wouldn’t work too well this far north so I risked using the landline in the bedroom. She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Thank God, Tora, where are you?’

  ‘Serving exile in the Siberian wastelands.’ The bedroom phone was by the window. Our room faced east. I could see more hills, bathed in a rich rosy light, and the strawberry-pink waters of the inland lake behind the house.

  ‘Come again?’

  I explained.

  ‘Well, that’s probably good. At least you’ll be safe up there.’

  Why did everyone keep going on about my safety? It was unnerving, to say the least.

  ‘Can you tell me what’s been happening?’ A puffin landed on the window ledge and looked directly at me.

  ‘Of course. I just got back from Edinburgh. I went to interview a Jonathan Wheeler. He’s the regular pathologist at your place. Been on sick leave for a few months.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him. What did you find out?’ The puffin, bored with me, started wiping his multicoloured beak against the stone of the ledge.

  ‘Well, it didn’t help that he’d obviously been warned I was coming. Your friend Gifford needs banging up for obstructing justice, if you ask me, but that’s hardly likely to happen, is it, given that he and my inspector are old rugger-bugger shower buddies, sharing a soap on a rope and any number—’

  ‘Dana!’ Not that I wasn’t enjoying her invective against Gifford but I knew my time was limited. I could hear movement downstairs.

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, that notwithstanding, he seemed pretty straight. I took him down to Edinburgh nick, kept him sweating in the interview room for half an hour, gave him the full treatment. He remembered the case – well, he would, wouldn’t he, having had his memory jogged by your boss – and was pretty forthcoming with the details. Haven’t got my notes in front of me but it all seemed to square with what we’d been told. Young woman, malignant lumps in both breasts and extensive spread of the cancer through most of her maj
or organs. I tell you what didn’t fit, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, apparently Melissa Gair was pregnant when she first went to her GP. Very early stages. Even Stephen Gair didn’t know.’

  ‘Gifford told me.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘Bloody man’s a menace. Anyway, Melissa and her GP did a urine test that proved she was pregnant, but by the time of the post-mortem, three weeks later, she wasn’t.’

  I was sorry to dampen Dana’s enthusiasm but I didn’t want her chasing stray hares.

  ‘That’s very easily explained.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Lots of early pregnancies fail to develop. Eggs get fertilized and the pregnancy hormone appears in the woman’s blood, giving a positive pregnancy test, but then the egg dies. Melissa could have had a period between her visit to the GP and being admitted to hospital that was actually a very early miscarriage. Given the invasive nature of the cancer, I’d say that was pretty likely.’

  There was silence, while Dana processed the information I’d just given her.

  ‘Dana,’ I continued, when she still hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ve been thinking about something. Maybe the woman who was admitted to hospital with cancer, who died there, the one you’ve been researching all day, wasn’t Melissa Gair. Maybe records got mixed up.’

  ‘We thought of that.’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘It was her. Her GP is adamant that Melissa came to see him. He’d known her for years. We also spoke to the receptionist at the practice. She knew Melissa, too. The hospital staff didn’t know her personally but I’ve shown them photographs and they’re pretty sure it was her. Of course, she’d changed quite a bit by the time she was admitted. Pain does that to people, apparently. But they all, distinctly and separately, remembered her hair and her skin. She was a striking-looking woman.’

  ‘They could be lying.’

  She was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Well, possibly. But their stories all match perfectly. We’ve been over it with them time after time and nothing budges.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Did she have a twin?’

  ‘No. An older brother, lives in the States.’

  ‘So were Stephen Renney and I wrong? Was I wrong about the dental records?’ I couldn’t believe it, but it seemed the only possible explanation.

  ‘No, you weren’t wrong. We’ve had another dentist look at the records. The body in the morgue is definitely Melissa. And another post-mortem has been carried out. She most certainly had a baby. They also found a small lump in her left breast. It’s being tested but they think it probably wasn’t malignant.’

  I was quiet for a moment. My brain simply could not compute the facts I was feeding into it.

  ‘We’re going round in circles,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘No one seems to know. The hospital staff and the GP have all gone home. So has Stephen Gair.’

  ‘You let them go?’

  Even over the phone line I could feel Dana’s frustration. ‘Tora, who is our suspect? What do we charge them with? We have six – no, seven – respectable members of the medical profession all saying the same thing: a woman called Melissa Gair was admitted with acute breast cancer in September 2004. Given the advanced stage of the disease, she wasn’t expected to live beyond a few weeks and she died in hospital. Everything was done by the book. There’s no reason to doubt their stories.’

  ‘Other than the obvious,’ I snapped. The puffin whipped its head in my direction and took off. Within seconds it had disappeared over the cliffs.

  ‘We’d have to prove that seven of them colluded, together with Stephen Gair himself, to fake a death. We haven’t a clue how that could have happened, or what their motive was. We can’t even begin to start constructing a case against them.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then I could. ‘Life insurance. How much was she insured for?’

  ‘I’m checking Gair’s finances but probably not enough to pay off seven other people as well. The other thing is that Stephen Gair has identified the body in the morgue. He says it’s definitely his wife.’

  ‘The one he watched die three years ago.’ My voice was rising.

  ‘Hold your fire, Doc, I’m just the messenger. My point is, would he make a positive identification if he was involved in foul play three years ago?’

  ‘Tor, are you OK?’ Duncan was standing at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up at me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said to Dana. ‘I’ll call you.’

  Duncan had his back to the peat fire. His parents sat close by. Even in May the air on Unst had a distinct chill to it. Duncan, I noticed, had finished the wine and moved on to Lagavulin, a single Highland malt that makes me think of rancid bacon.

  ‘Who were you calling?’ he asked.

  ‘Dana,’ I said, wondering if now was a good time to start acquiring a taste for single malt. One Melissa Gair: two very different deaths. How could one person die twice?

  Duncan closed his eyes briefly. He looked sad, rather than angry, which made me feel guilty – which made me feel angry again. Given everything that was going on up here, why should I, of all people, be made to feel guilty?

  ‘I do wish you’d leave it,’ he said softly, in a tone that suggested he knew I wouldn’t. From the corner of my eye, I saw Elspeth glance at Richard, but neither asked what it was, exactly, I was supposed to leave. I guessed they already knew.

  Over Duncan’s shoulder I spotted something that I suppose I must have seen several times, but had never really thought about before. I walked over and with one index finger began to trace the outline.

  The fireplace in the sitting room of Richard and Elspeth’s house is huge. It must measure six feet in length and be about four feet deep. The central grate is about two feet square and the base of the chimney a similar dimension. It has a terrific draught and the fires it creates on high days and holidays are small bonfires. I wasn’t looking at the fire, though – a relatively modest one for a spring evening – but at the stone lintel that ran across the top of the hearth. About eight feet long, seven inches high, supported on either side by strong stone pillars. Carved into the granite of the lintel were shapes I recognized: an upright arrow, a crooked letter F, a zigzag like a flash of lightning. They were repeated several times, sometimes appearing upside-down, sometimes inverted, like a mirror image, and an angular pattern had been carved around the edge of the lintel. The whole effect was more elaborate but still bore a striking resemblance to the carvings in our cellar at home. And the five Viking runes from our own fireplace that Dana and I had puzzled over were all here.

  ‘You’ve spoken to Sergeant Tulloch yourself, Richard,’ I said, tracing the shape of the rune I was pretty certain meant Initiation. ‘She needed your advice on some runes carved on the body I found.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Elspeth wince.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Richard, speaking slowly as he usually did. ‘She’d already found a book on the subject. I told her I had nothing to add to the interpretation offered by the author. I referred her to the British Library.’

  And a whole heap of good that would have done poor Dana, stuck up here on Shetland. I simply couldn’t believe my father-in-law had nothing useful to say on a subject so integral to the islands’ history. Was he joining the general conspiracy to keep Tora’s little nastiness under wraps? I realized that if Melissa’s murder was connected to the hospital, as seemed highly likely, then as a former medical director Richard Guthrie might have a strong interest in muffling the facts. I started to wonder if the instinct that had sent me to Unst for my personal safety had been entirely sound.

  ‘These are the same as the carvings in our cellar,’ I said, wondering how Richard would deal with a straight question. ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘I’ll gladly lend you a book in the morning.’

  ‘Initiation
,’ I said, my finger still tracing the outline of the rune.

  Richard joined me at the hearth. ‘Maybe you don’t need a book.’

  ‘Why would someone carve the rune for Initiation into the hearth of a house?’ I asked. ‘It makes no sense.’

  He looked down at me and I had to steel myself not to step backwards. He was a tall man, built on a very large frame. His physical presence, along with a formidable intellect and quick wit, had always made him immensely intimidating. I’d never crossed swords with him before and I could feel my heart rate starting to speed up.

  ‘Nobody really knows what these runes mean,’ he said. ‘They date back thousands of years and the original meanings and usage have almost certainly been lost. The book Sergeant Tulloch had offered one set of interpretations. Others exist too. You simply take your pick.’ As though bored with the subject he sighed and moved towards the door. ‘Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Elspeth, getting to her feet. ‘Do you two need anything before you go up?’

  ‘You don’t look much like your dad,’ I said, as Duncan started to undress.

  ‘You’ve said that before,’ he replied, his voice muffled by the sweater he was pulling over his head.

  ‘He’s much bigger, for a start,’ I said. ‘And wasn’t he blond when he was young?’

  ‘Maybe I take after my mother,’ said Duncan, unbuttoning his jeans. He was still annoyed with me.

  I thought about it. Elspeth was short and, not to put too fine a point on it, dumpy. There was no immediate resemblance to Duncan that I could think of, but the flow of genes is notoriously unpredictable and you never know quite what human cocktail each act of reproduction is going to kick up.

  ‘Are you going to shower before you come to bed?’ asked Duncan, and at last I’d found someone honest enough to admit I smelled like a skunk in mating season. I showered for a long time and when I got back to the bedroom Duncan was asleep. Five minutes later, mere seconds before I too drifted off, it occurred to me that whilst Richard Guthrie might bear little resemblance to his son, he bore quite a lot to Kenn Gifford.