‘And I’m to make up her bed, she said, and I didn’t quite like to ask your dad – that is, Cassie, I was wondering if she meant her own bed, or the spare room. After all, it’s been a while, and there’s this young lass, so I just wasn’t sure –’ She trailed off into a well-earned silence.
I’d been too busy looking at rigging to distinguish ropes. Yes, what exactly was Maman up to, sweeping home like this? Dad had seemed pleased enough, but was this the grand reconciliation, or was she just being extra-rational, the goddess descending in the machine to put everything right?
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Why not play safe, and put clean sheets on them both?’
‘I’m done that,’ she said. ‘And I’ve put a chicken casserole all ready in the oven, and a bottle of her white wine chilling in the fridge, and there’s a cold rhubarb crumble that you can just pop into the oven when you get home.’
‘That sounds great,’ I said. I remembered Jessie’s rhubarb crumble.
‘So that’s you all set. Now, how are they getting on with the investigations? I saw you had to get your boat searched.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Jessie, I was wondering –’
She was already powering over me. ‘What would you be attacking her for?’ she asked with heart-warming indignation.
‘They say I thought she was Maree,’ I put in swiftly. ‘In fact, I was wanting a word with her –’
‘That you’ll no get,’ she said, ‘for she left that same evening, with just a note on the dresser to say she’d be away for a few days, and no address to get her by.’
‘You don’t know what time she went?’
‘Before nine o’clock, for I was over at Jeannie’s, you ken, Inga’s man’s mother, and when I came back the news was just finishing on the wireless.’ Jessie had the odd habit of leaving the radio on to keep the house company while she was out; her own small contribution to global warming. ‘Your dad came over yesterday morning in a terrible state, looking for her. Have they quarrelled, now?’
There was no point in denying it. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s a good thing,’ Jessie said warmly. ‘She was likely a fine enough lass, I’m no’ saying she wasn’t, but far better if she’s taen herself off and your mam’s coming home.’ She took a deep breath and changed tack again. ‘But that was a bad thing, a bad thing, that poor lass gone like that. Do they even ken what time she was attacked?’
‘If they do, they’re not saying.’ Elizabeth had said good night at half-past ten; Favelle must have gone straight out, for Anders had seen her at dusk, eleven o’clock, and kept watch after that, and she still hadn’t come to Stormfugl. Where had she been?
Jessie and Gibbie’s house was just above the marina.
‘She died just before four,’ I said, and waited to see how she’d answer.
‘Aye, well,’ Jessie finished off. She was trying to sound casual, but I could hear the relief flooding into her voice. ‘I’ll tell Gibbie he has no need to worry, then, for he was certainly home and in bed by then, and that I’ll swear to.’
‘Oh,’ I said casually, ‘was he out earlier?’
‘Oh, you ken, he has sheep to look to and all that.’
Right enough, he did, but Jessie should have known that I’d know he wouldn’t need to be looking to them at this time of year. I was left convinced that Gibbie had been out, and tinkering with Stormfugl. The first chance I got I’d be aboard looking to see what he’d been up to.
In the meantime, I had twenty minutes. Maree. I opened my copy of the Shetland Visitor and considered. She’d stormed out at eight fifteen. She’d gone back to Busta and opened her Shetland Visitor, just as I was doing. Accommodation. Map of Shetland.
If I wanted to get where nobody could get at me, I’d go to an island. I found the ferries timetable and considered her chances. The remote isles were out. Maybe Bressay, the long island that made a sheltered harbour of Lerwick, but she’d been to Lerwick with Dad, and knew that she wouldn’t get lost in the teeming crowds of the big city. She was far more likely to walk into someone she knew the first time she poked her nose out of doors.
Whalsay, to the east, was a possible, and there were several ferries she could have taken. The best bets were the northern isles, Yell and Unst. She and Dad had done a day-trip to Yell, so it was slightly more familiar. Furthermore, the ferry terminal to Yell was only ten minutes’ drive away. I consulted the ferry timetable. She couldn’t get the ferry to Yell sooner than 21.05, by the time she’d gathered her stuff and phoned a B&B. I had a look at Unst, two ferries away from her problems, but she wouldn’t arrive there till nearly midnight – hardly inconspicuous, and a bit complicated even for a jet-setting American. I’d start with Yell.
Nothing beat local knowledge. I’d talk to Dodie, ferryman on the Daglion, who’d come to look at Stormfugl that first day. One of his jobs was to beckon the cars on to the ferry, and then he’d go along each and every car, saying hello to the person inside, mentally noting who they were, where they were going and why (and asking them if he couldn’t work it out, or his mam would be after him when he got home), taking the fare, and issuing a ticket. If he’d been on shift last night, I was home and dry. I flipped through the Shetland Directory, found his number, and dialled it. I was doubly in luck; he was at home, and he’d been on just that ferry, the 21.05.
‘We’re looking for one of the film people,’ I explained. ‘She’d have been an American wife on her own, in a Bolts Fiesta. She might have been wearing sunglasses, and a headscarf.’
There was a long pause. If you left him alone to work at his own pace, you could bet your last mooring rope on his answer.
‘Yea,’ he said at last. ‘She was the third car down, in the middle, and she came from the unbooked lane.’
I thanked Dodie warmly and promised him a sail aboard Stormfugl if ever the police let us back aboard. Maree was safely holed up in Yell, had been there long before Favelle’s death. She would keep. For now, we had to go and get Maman.
When I came into the house I felt I’d stepped back twenty years. Maman’s vases were filled to the brim with artfully dangling bluebells below a haze of bachelor button, the carpet was immaculate, and her piano was polished within an inch of its life. Had Dad kept it tuned? I plinked the C all the way up, and it sounded okay. The table was laid English-style in the dining-room, with a white damask cloth, red tablemats, the best silver, cut-crystal glasses, and another vase of flowers in the centre.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I assured Jessie, standing in the middle of it. Her eyelids were reddened, and her features dragged that blurred way they go when you have a heavy cold. When Dad opened the bathroom door, she started, and gave a nervous look over her shoulder.
Dad was looking good too. His hair was sleeked, and his face pinkly excited above his crisply ironed shirt. He’d gone for the casual look, dark trousers and open neck, laid-back but distinguished, like an RN Commander off-duty. The laid-back didn’t extend to his behaviour though; he was fussing about like the owner of a newly painted yacht on a crowded start-line.
‘I wouldn’t want her to think I’d let the place go to rack and ruin, now, would I, girl?’ he said. ‘Does it look fine, do you think?’
‘You look great, Dad,’ I assured him. ‘Let’s go and get her.’
Chapter Thirteen
It was a bonny drive to Sumburgh, the main airport. We threaded eastwards, the Atlantic at our backs, skirted Olnafirth with its lines of mussel rafts, then swerved to the highroad south. We drove for seven miles through dark green heather moor, with boggy patches of olive-green grass hazed white with bog cotton, and pools of water turned seaweed-rust with waving marsh grass. Being there reminded me.
‘Dad, this wind farm of yours, where’s it to be built?’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘And over there.’ He took one hand off the steering wheel to wave towards the west. ‘There’s not much happening here, so nobody is too bothered about this bit.’
‘Won’t it mean
a fair bit of road building over the peat?’
‘Jobs, girl. Jobs for Shetland folk.’
‘That’s a yes, is it?’ I persisted.
‘We’ll need roads to get the turbines up there, and to service them once they’re up.’
I looked up at the furrowed hill. Not much happening for people, sure, and not good grazing for sheep, but I’d seen an oystercatcher pecking into the earth not far from the roadside, and further over, in one of the larger lochs, a diver bobbed to the surface, tilted its bill, and dipped under again. ‘What about the birds?’ I asked.
‘They’ll move away for a year or so, while we’re building,’ Dad said. ‘But they’ll come back once there’s peace again. For the divers, we’ve commissioned a special survey – from the RSPB, we’re being absolutely transparent about this – and we’ll make sure we don’t site any turbines on their flight paths.’
The more often he said he was being transparent, the less I believed it. ‘Why the divers, specially?’
‘Because they’re special, girl.’ Dad settled into lecturing mode. ‘This is a unique environment, we fully appreciate that. Eighty per cent of the world’s diver population nests here.’
I gawked at him. ‘Eighty per cent?’
‘Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? But it’s true. They need to be able to walk out of the water to nest, see. This is one of the few remaining places they can do that.’
‘Flight path,’ I repeated.
Dad ducked his head away slightly. ‘Birds, y’see, they don’t expect hazards in the sky, so they’re not tuned into them. So we’ll site the turbines so they don’t fly into them.’
In short, turbines were liable to make mincemeat out of any birds environmentally unaware enough to use their airspace.
‘What about the other birds?’ I asked.
‘Oh, there are plenty of them,’ Dad said, ‘and they’re smaller, and faster flyers, so we don’t expect the losses to be as severe. And besides,’ he added honestly, ‘it’s the divers the bird folk are making the fuss about.’
I looked out again at the hills, jigsawed over with dark lines where rain had furrowed its way through the ancient peat. ‘How deep’s the peat here? Can you just lay roads over it, like the gravelly tracks up the peat road to the banks?’
‘Well, no. It needs to be proper roads. Each of the turbines, see, it’ll weigh a good bit, and then it has to have a proper concreted stand, so there’s a lot of material to be taken up there. The quarry will be jobs too, of course. The turbines will be in groups, but each group’ll need its own road – look, now, as we come round this hill here, you’ll get a better idea.’
We rounded the last of the brown hills and came into greener country, hills rippling with feathered grass, and the North sea on our left hand. Ahead of us was fertile Tingwall Valley, where the Norse settlers had held their parliament. On the hill above the loch were five white towers with three-bladed rotors turning lazily. They stood out in the landscape, but not horribly; elegant, gleaming white, thin-bladed, they were more like a modern sculpture than an industrial complex.
‘The first of their kind,’ Dad said, ‘and the most productive wind farm in Europe. People come from all over, girl, to look at them. We’ve got clean, unbroken wind, see, and lots of it. It’s a rare day those turbines aren’t turning. The problem, see, is that you don’t get all the potential energy, with renewables. If you put up a 2 Megawatt turbine down south, you’ll be lucky to get 0.75 megawatts. Up here you’ll reliably get 1, maybe 1.3 megawatts. Over fifty per cent, that’s really good. The middle one, Betsy, she’s the most productive single turbine in the world.’
I kept watching them as we drew nearer. These five were bonny enough in their gleaming white, but I imagined the bare hills we’d come from filled with them, and criss-crossed with grey roads. ‘How close together will they be, the new ones?’
‘Not as close as these. They’re twice the size, see. Twice the height, twice the diameter. The bigger the better. Folk have to be weaned off their dependence on fossil fuels, and the only way to do that is by giving them a cheap alternative.’
As we came down the hill and towards the golf course, they towered above us, dominating the sky. Double this size – I couldn’t imagine it. ‘Will that do all of Shetland’s electricity, then, and for free?’
‘Well, no.’ Dad focused on the curve. ‘It can’t. For a start it’s not allowed to. Not more than twenty per cent can come from renewables. And you can’t store electricity, you see. You’d still need a power station here in Shetland, for the days the wind’s not blowing, or for when it’s blowing too hard, and the turbines have to be stopped from turning. No, what we want to do is sell the electricity. Turbines like the ones we want, you could power half of Scotland. All we need is the cable connection, and we’ve got the go-ahead for that. We pay half, Scotland pays half.’
‘So,’ I said slowly, ‘there’s no real benefit to the community here. Not free electricity, anyway.’
In short, they were going to hack roads across Shetland’s ancient peat, erect huge turbines along the skyline, and destroy the wildlife that made it so special for the benefit of consumers south. I began to have more sympathy with Kenneth Manson’s point of view. I began to see, too, why Favelle was so important. Favelle talking of the need to sacrifice our landscape for the greater good of the planet could have been a clincher. An unbalanced anti-wind farm campaigner could well be desperate enough to resort to sabotage. Kenneth Manson, the anti-wind farm campaigner, who, according to Anders, had talked to Favelle up at the standing stone on the night she died …
I needed to find out more about Kenneth. I’d ask Inga – no, I wouldn’t. Her enthusiasm came back to me, the long story of how badly he’d been treated by his wife, what a talented and intelligent bloke he was. She was obviously well on his side: the maternal urge, I supposed, after his experience with the clean-him-out wife. It was always Inga the littlest primary bairns ran to when they were being teased. No, I’d need to ask somebody else. Magnie would know all the gossip.
If I lived here, I wondered, if it was my hills that were going to be disfigured to give more electricity to folk who wanted to keep their on-all-the-time lights and televisions and power showers, would I be ruthless enough to kill in their defence?
Would Kenneth?
Instead of taking the Scalloway short-cut to the airport, Dad came around the hill with the golf course below us and climbed up towards Lerwick.
‘Hey?’ I said.
‘I can’t have my own family talking like that,’ Dad said. ‘We’ve got time for a detour.’
I sat back, puzzled, as we drove into Lerwick.
‘Station Garage,’ Dad said as we passed it. ‘A herring station, not trains. The Town Hall up there, and all the big houses. That was Shetland’s prosperity then, the herring boom.’
He swerved around a second mini-roundabout, down a narrow street, and stopped in front of a building I’d never seen before, with great angled wings like the red sails of the herring smacks who’d founded the town.
‘This is our new museum, Cassie. It’s an amazing place, well worth a visit. And this, see, this is our new cinema and music venue. Two screens and a performance space, with a 170-seat auditorium. When the SNO comes up, they won’t have to play in the sports hall any more.’ With a jerk, we were off again, back along the waterfront, up the hill, and along the Hillhead to go past the old folks’ home.
‘Care for the elderly,’ Dad said. He came back down and round the roundabout to Lochside. The Clickimin Sports Centre crouched before us. I didn’t remember the red running track and rugby pitch before it, or the swimming pool alongside, with flumes twisting around the walls.
‘This sports hall,’ Dad said. ‘New swimming pool. One of eight in the isles. We’ve got a sports centre for every secondary school.’ He gestured towards the opposite side of the road. ‘The Education department. You can count the new schools as we pass them on the way to Sumburgh.’ He paused to n
egotiate the roundabout at the new Tesco. ‘Council houses. More being built now, look, up on the ridge there. Sound school. Sound public hall. And on the other side, all these new houses. That’s prosperity, girl. Shetland’s the richest authority in the UK.’
‘Yes.’ I agreed.
‘And where does it come from?’ He left a rhetorical pause. ‘Oil. See, Cassie, we’re the only small place in the world that’s actually benefited from oil coming to it. Other places visit us to see how we managed it. The oil made Shetland rich. From the cradle to the grave. You had as good an education as any thousands-a-term boarding school.’ His face clouded over as he remembered what use I’d made of it. Luckily he was in full flood of Irish eloquence. ‘If you needed a doctor, you saw him that day. The dentist came to the school – now, do you have a filling in your head yet?’
‘No,’ I admitted. I couldn’t afford to go to dentists, but nothing was hurting at the moment.
‘Even your boating club, it was Sullom Voe built that for their men. Those showers downstairs, now, they were put in by the Council for the Inter-Island games. The football pitches your pal Martin played on. The road we’re driving on – have you been to the West Highlands, girl, driven on the roads there? When I get that I’m not managing for myself, well, I’ll get a home help and meals on wheels, and there’ll be a place in the care centre. Or sheltered housing like that.’ He waved a hand at a row of little houses by the road, looking out across Cunningburgh meadow to the sea. ‘Oil did all that, and it’s oil money that keeps it running. So what’s going to happen when the oil runs out?’
I looked out at the landscape and saw the prosperity he was talking about. New house after new house; neat gardens filled with plastic swings and little houses for the children. The school had a play area with tyres hanging from chains and a log climbing frame. The house just past it had a gleaming black 4x4, parked beside a new conservatory.
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