Death on a Longship

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘Dubious at first,’ I admitted. ‘But it was his life. Ask him, he’ll tell you! I went along for lunch last Sunday, and everything was fine.’

  ‘We will be asking him,’ DI Macrae said. I bit my lip. The boyfriend. The first suspect – no, not the first suspect for killing Favelle. She was his wind farm’s golden goose.

  ‘Dad had no motive for killing Favelle,’ I protested. ‘She was all set to do the publicity for his firm’s wind farm.’

  ‘He could have mistaken her for Maree. As you said, what would Favelle be doing aboard the longship at that time of night?’ He took out my mobile, pressed some buttons, and turned it to show me Maree’s text.

  ‘I didn’t get it till after I found the body,’ I said.

  ‘What did she want to talk to you about?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Can you give me an account of your movements last night?’

  Not without dropping Dad straight in it . ‘I was restless, so I went for a sail. We went out at eight fifteen –

  ‘We?’ DI Macrae came in quickly.

  I answered clearly, ‘Khalida and I.’

  He gave me a sceptical look. ‘You would normally be counting your boat as an active partner?’

  ‘It’s a single-hander’s habit,’ I said. ‘You and the boat, you often talk about ‘we’ did this or that. The boat and I, we.’

  He still didn’t believe it. ‘You went out at eight fifteen.’

  ‘We came back in at ten to four.’

  ‘Very exact times,’ Sergeant Peterson commented.

  ‘I was at sea. I kept the log.’ I realised it would show my stop at Dad’s. I added, ‘I called in briefly at Dad’s house, to say hello, then kept going.’

  ‘I’d have thought,’ DI Macrae said, ‘that you would be too tired after a day’s filming to want to go for another sail.’

  ‘I was pretty bushed,’ I admitted. I looked straight at him, and Alain’s grey eyes pulled me to try and explain. ‘But I’m not used to so many strangers around me. These film people, I’m an alien among them. They’ve come from all over, but they all know each other, and talk all the time about people I’ve never heard of. I needed to get back to my own world. I just went out into the Atlantic and looked at the stars, and listened to the waves for a bit, then came back in. That’s when I found Maree.’

  ‘And you were alone.’

  I nodded.

  His face hardened. ‘I’ve had a word with Inspector Hutchinson. That’s not what Anders says.’

  ‘Anders?’ I echoed, startled. Now what was the boy up to?

  ‘His version of the evening is quite different. Would you like to change yours?’

  I wasn’t going to be tricked that way. ‘No.’

  ‘Why should Anders lie to us? We’re foreign police, so it’s not a good idea. He’s smart enough to know that.’

  I thought about why Anders might lie. What had driven him to spend the night in the boating club? Probable answer: a body. He was scared he’d be blamed, panicked, and run for cover, leaving me to do the official discovery in the morning. Thanks, Anders.

  No; that wouldn’t work. He was on watch. Favelle couldn’t have come aboard without waking him.

  ‘He says,’ the DI continued, ‘that you spent the night together, aboard your boat.’

  My mouth fell open. Spent the night together? That had better not mean what I thought it did. How dared he? I was about to burst into angry denials when I caught the DI’s calm eye, assessing my reactions.

  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘would I lie about my alibi if I had one?’

  ‘To get him into trouble? Very good-looking, if a bit younger than you. You fancied him, he didn’t fancy you, you want revenge. Frame him for the killing.’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I retorted. ‘If we spent the night together, why would I want revenge?’

  ‘Maybe you don’t want to admit to being a one-night stand. Did anyone see your boat go out and come back?’

  ‘This is Shetland,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Of course someone did.’ My voice rose slightly. DI Macrae remained poker-faced, but I caught a gleam of triumph in the glance Sergeant Peterson shot at me. I lowered my voice. ‘Just ask along the road there.’

  ‘And coming back?’

  I shook my head. There was no point in mentioning Magnie. He’d been two bottles away from being a reliable witness. The local drunk, m’lud. Furthermore, he wouldn’t be at all pleased by being called as a witness. ‘Co-operating with the police,’ I could hear him saying, ‘I’m never done such a thing in all my born days.’

  ‘In short, Ms Lynch,’ the DI said, ‘it doesn’t look good. She was killed on your ship. You thought she was Maree, who’d asked you for a meeting, and who you had reason to dislike.’

  ‘Maree lived just up above the marina, and she’d come down to visit me once before!’ I protested. ‘It was a perfectly natural mistake to make.’

  ‘Maree, I’m told, has short, dark hair. Favelle had very noticeable long red hair.’

  ‘Maree wore a wig for being Favelle’s double. I thought she was wearing the wig.’

  ‘Why on earth would she wear her wig away from filming?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think about that. I just took the body to be Maree.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, in that soft Highland voice, ‘you wanted it to be Maree. You were jealous of her relationship with your father, and you wanted rid of her.’

  That was nastily psychological enough to be plausible. Maree’d got rid of herself, though, getting Dad tested like that. It had been careless, to leave the letter in her pocket – I wondered if she’d done the testing before she’d come here. Had she had a fling with him in LA, got him checked out, and come back ready to continue the affair? Even for film people it seemed a bit strange.

  ‘And?’ DI Macrae said. I looked up. ‘I can see you’re thinking something through. Care to share it with us?’

  I shook my head. If in doubt, say nowt.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the start. You came off set – when?’

  ‘Just after six.’ I thought of a ball I could safely throw to distract him. ‘We were all a bit off balance because of the rock – oh, you maybe don’t know about that.’

  Faster than thought, he slammed his palm down. Sergeant Peterson’s pencil skidded a Z. ‘Don’t try to play games, Ms Lynch. I’ll come back to this rock. After six. Then what?’

  Very well, no nonsense. I straightened my spine. ‘Anders and I had a pint. Kenneth joined us, Kenneth Manson, he’s a local man, filming the filmers. Then Anders went up to the bar and I scrubbed the decks and checked Stormfugl over. I finished that around eight, had a shower, and washed the clothes I’d worn.’

  ‘What did you do with them?’

  ‘I pegged them out on the push-pit rail. They’re still there.’

  A glance sparked between the two officers. DI Macrae nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then I went along to see Dad. He was there, Maree wasn’t. We had a whiskey together. A nightcap.’

  ‘A bit early for a nightcap, wasn’t it?’

  Damn. ‘Dad’s evening dram.’

  ‘What did you and your father talk about?’ Sergeant Peterson asked. ‘How you’d got on that day?’

  I hadn’t even mentioned the rock, and it had been the big thing of the day. I didn’t want to give them the truth; I had to. ‘We talked about my mother.’

  ‘An odd thing for him to talk about, surely, with Maree around?’

  ‘She wasn’t there,’ I repeated.

  ‘Don’t try to be clever, Ms Lynch,’ she said. Now I had two bad cops on my quarter. ‘What brought the subject of your mother up? Were you trying to put him off Maree? You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? How do you feel about divorce?’

  ‘If Dad was serious about Maree he’d have to divorce Maman, I suppose,’ I said.

  The DI came in again. ‘You’ve made it quite clear you knew he was serious. What brought your
mother up?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Was it he who first mentioned her, or you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What were you saying about her?’ Sergeant Peterson asked.

  I didn’t want to give them this. ‘I learned that she’d had an abortion when I was little. She’d gone off to France to sing, and when she came back the baby was gone.’

  ‘Why did he tell you this?’

  ‘I suppose he was thinking about my mother – about setting Maree in her place. This baby would have been a boy.’

  ‘How did he know that? They didn’t have the technology then, not for a foetus young enough to be aborted.’

  I hadn’t thought of that. Had Dad just persuaded himself it would have been a boy, or had the baby been older than I’d envisaged, twenty weeks, twenty-four? I thought of the scan photo of Peerie Charlie that Inga kept in her purse and couldn’t bear it. ‘I don’t know how he knew. But it upset me to know about it, even though it was all that time ago.’

  I hoped he’d leave it alone then. Naive, Cass. ‘Not a happy topic from a man with a new, young girlfriend he could have children with. Was all well with Maree?’

  ‘As far as I knew.’

  The DI leaned forward, half-smiling. ‘You’re a very bad liar. Try again.’

  ‘We didn’t talk about Maree. We talked about my mother,’ I said doggedly, ‘and that upset me.’

  ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ he said softly. Then, harder, ‘That’s not just not incriminating others, Ms Lynch, it’s telling lies of omission.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘So,’ the DI continued in that soft, lilting voice, ‘a sum-up: you went to see your father. This rock had upset you, so you went to talk to your father about it, but you didn’t tell him. Instead you talked about your mother’s abortion over twenty years ago. Did you put him to bed before you went?’

  ‘Dad,’ I retorted, ‘is six feet tall, and strongly built. I couldn’t put him anywhere.’

  ‘He was drunk, then?’ Sergeant Peterson put in swiftly.

  ‘I told you, we had a whiskey together.’

  ‘Had he been drinking before that?’

  ‘He usually had a glass of wine with a meal,’ I conceded. ‘He had one whiskey while I was there.’

  ‘How drunk, Ms Lynch?’

  ‘I didn’t say he was drunk.’ Drunk meant he could have been angry enough to strike out at Maree, kill her without meaning it.

  ‘That’s right, he’d just had a nightcap. At half-past eight. Then what?’

  ‘Then I kept going. I just went out to sea until dawn, almost to Papa, then turned round and came home. You can see the log for yourselves, it’s aboard Khalida. I got back in and found the body.’

  DI Macrae nodded to the Sergeant. ‘Go and fetch the logbook.’

  ‘It’s lying on the chart table,’ I said. ‘A dark blue book.’

  She went out, and there was silence. The DI leaned back in his chair, studying me. I wasn’t going to do an out-staring contest, as if I was six. Instead I watched the Sergeant walk down the pontoon between Stormfugl and Khalida. I was unprepared for the wave of rage that swept through me as she stepped clumsily over our guard rail and clambered into the cockpit.

  ‘You don’t look like a murderer,’ the DI said suddenly. ‘Stubborn and self-contained, yes. So was Madeleine Smith, the nice Victorian girl who killed her French lover. You don’t look like a sailor either. You’re small and wiry, not tall and strong-looking, although I bet you have arm muscles that put mine to shame. But Ellen MacArthur doesn’t look like a sailor either, she looks like a primary school teacher. I don’t go by appearances.’

  Sergeant Peterson came out of the cabin, the log-book in one hand.

  ‘Do you know yet when she was killed?’ I asked.

  ‘He gave me a level look. ‘She died around the time you arrived.’

  That meant I could have killed her. I took a deep breath. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘can I tell you about the rock? It could be important.’

  Sergeant Peterson came in and laid the log-book in front of him. The inspector flipped it open. There was last night’s sail, with time, compass heading, boat speed, distance covered, wind direction and speed, sea state, cloud cover, visibility, and a line of comments in logbook shorthand: Busta abeam, full sail, port tack. It was written in ink pen, and he could see it wasn’t Tippexed anywhere.

  ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘that if you didn’t go for a sail this looks well-faked. You could do that easily enough.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Finish off your story before we begin on your saboteur,’ he said. ‘How about your dad? Where did he go?’

  I saw the trap at last. If he was drunk, he might have done the murder out of temper. If he was sober, he could have gone to meet Maree after I’d gone, quarrelled again and killed her.

  It wasn’t me they were after. It was Dad.

  I’d have liked to tell the truth and have faith in Scottish justice, but nobody was that naive these days. Even though I didn’t accept for a moment that Dad would have killed Maree, I wasn’t going to risk it. Yet, if I didn’t tell now, when I’d not spoken to him, then he wouldn’t be believed when he told the truth. I could certainly testify that he was out for the count when I left: beyond driving, beyond waking to quarrel with Maree, should she have returned. I thought about how I could begin: ‘When I went over Dad had just had a blazing row with Maree –’

  I couldn’t do it. Not unless Dad looked at me and said, ‘I’ve told them the truth.’ Then I’d corroborate. Not before. For now, I had the right to silence.

  Stupid! I had the right to a lawyer.

  ‘I want to phone a solicitor,’ I said, abruptly.

  The DI’s face hardened. ‘You have that right, of course. We can interpret this request as we choose.’

  I sat up straight again. ‘Please. Let me tell you about that rock, yesterday. You’re after incriminating my Dad, assuming Favelle was killed by mistake for Maree –’ Suddenly, I saw that Dad was off the hook. My mouth fell open. I looked at the DI and smiled.

  ‘It’s okay. Forget the lawyer.’ I looked him straight in the eye. ‘Look, when I got over, Dad had just had a row with Maree. That’s why I was stalling. He’s a lot older than she is, and she wants to have children, so she had him tested.’ I was annoyed to feel my cheeks going red. ‘For fertility. He found out and had an absolute fit. A slur on his manhood, you know. She stormed out and he got drunk. He told me about the row and then he talked about Maman and the baby, and then he flaked out cold. Believe me, I’ve put enough drunks to bed.’ It was a perennial problem of shore leave. ‘I couldn’t shift Dad, but I put a blanket over him, and I wouldn’t expect him to have moved till morning.’

  ‘Drunks can revive,’ DI Macrae said. ‘You know that too, Ms Lynch. Maree comes back, he wakes up, hits her.’

  I shook my head positively. ‘He was hoping she’d come back.’ I remembered his face when I’d come in, that mixture of shame and appeal. ‘He knew he was in the right, she shouldn’t have done it, but he was in the wrong too. He wanted to make up. Of course he was angry – no, that’s the wrong word.’ I groped for the Shetlan ‘Black affronted. How dare she doubt his virility?’

  I leaned forward. ‘Listen, though. As drunk as he was, he knew me. If he’d woken with someone else coming in, Favelle, say, coming to look for Maree, or coming to smooth things over, though I can’t see her doing either of those things, well, he’d have known her. Of course he would. He had a light on in the room, and I left it on. It’s like you said: Maree had short dark hair, and Favelle was a redhead. He couldn’t possibly have confused one with the other, no matter how drunk he was. So there. He wouldn’t have killed Favelle in the house by mistake for Maree, because he’d have seen who she was, and he couldn’t have killed her on the longship by mistake for Maree, because he couldn’t have driven there. If he’d woken, and got in the car to go and look for
her – and I grant you, he might have done that, because he wanted to make up – he’d have been in the ditch at the first bend. If you were to send someone to take a reading of his blood, I think that would corroborate that.’

  He gave me an intent look, then nodded. ‘That’s better, Ms Lynch. Sergeant –’ He scribbled on a bit of paper, and she went out of the door with it. I heard her voice phoning, but couldn’t distinguish the words.

  DI Macrae pulled the hook out of his pocket once more. His face had gone back to that friendly, good-natured air.

  ‘Do you do much fishing?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit, a bit. When I can. There’s a river, not far from where I live, with sea trout. I caught a twelve-pounder, just last week.’ He gave a sudden smile, like the sun coming out on a shallow river. ‘It’s not the fishing that I go for, it’s the quiet. Sitting by the river, with the wrens flitting from the moss-covered boulders, and sometimes, if I’m still enough for long enough, a deer.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Do you ever see strange things at sea, alone, on a night watch?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, only once, down at the river, I saw one of the Kellynch cats. Big and black, it was, with a tail the length of itself, and with eyes green as copper flames. It came down to drink. It must have been the size of a Labrador. The world’s a stranger place than the experts believe.’

  I could see it in my mind’s eye. The man, still and silent against the silver-trunked birches, and the river running, and the great black cat, raising its head to stare with those burning green eyes, then slipping away with only a waving of curved fronds to show it had been there at all. If he hadn’t been a police officer, I’d have told him about my mer-horse, off Fiji, with a glistening neck and blind, saucer eyes, but I wasn’t going to be cajoled into an alliance with the enemy. He saw my face close against him, laid his hook down.

  ‘Now, tell me about this rock of yours.’

  ‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘We were filming at the back of this island here, and there’s an old house up above the beach there. A firework went off and tumbled a sizeable rock down towards us. Something like an old lintel, it was rectangular. It cart-wheeled rather than rolled.’