Death on a Longship

by Marsali Taylor

  DI Macrae finished the thought for me. ‘She wanted him to make her pregnant.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  We were approaching the end of Busta Voe now. The heather-dark back of Linga was abeam, the Rona opening out ahead. Strom was on our starboard side, with Magnie’s house tucked in under its hillside. He was out of his bender now; his front door stood open, and a thin trail of blue peat-reek trailed up from one chimney.

  ‘Magnie might know something,’ I said abruptly. ‘He was there that evening. He wouldn’t talk to you, though, he’d just say he was too drunk to remember.’

  DI Macrae’s mouth hardened. ‘We wouldn’t believe him.’

  ‘He won’t be leaned on.’ I laughed at the idea of Magnie caving in to the police. ‘He was a whaling man in South Georgia, for goodness sake. He’s endured storms and icebergs and shipwreck and hunger, and even the rum rations running out. He might talk to me.’

  ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t. Just go along as casually as you can. Let me know when you’re going. I’ll give you my own number.’

  ‘My mobile’s below,’ I said. ‘Put it in under contacts for me.’

  He went into the cabin, programmed it in, and returned. ‘Phone me when you get there, and then again when you leave. If you find anything out, tell me it straight away.’

  I looked him straight in the face. ‘I can’t promise. If it doesn’t harm anyone I love, then yes.’

  He didn’t challenge that, just turned his face away and looked out at the ocean for a moment. ‘Do you know how Favelle died?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Only that she was hit on the head.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was hit on the head not far from the standing stone. We found the place. She was still conscious when someone shoved her down into the ditch beside it, to hide her body from passing cars.’ His voice was even, detached, making the image more shocking. ‘We know that because there are the marks of her hands clinging on in the wet earth, and traces of that same earth under her fingernails.’

  I raised my eyes to his, shaken. ‘Still alive –’

  ‘She was still alive when she was picked up from there and slung into the back of a car or truck to be brought to the longship. There are the traces of one person’s footprints – only traces, nothing to help us. Someone carried her to the deck and left her to die. Perhaps not conscious, but if she’d been given help then she might still have been saved. She died as much of cold as of the head injury.’

  I felt sick. ‘The gulls –’

  ‘Yes, still alive even then. Don’t you remember the blood? Dead women don’t bleed. When you found her, she’d only just died.’

  I turned my face away. The water dazzled below my eyes.

  ‘She was lucky,’ that soft, implacable voice went on. ‘Her murderer had left her face down. Otherwise it would have been her eyes.’

  ‘Ms Lynch.’ He leaned forward. ‘I have to be her voice. That’s my job. The man or woman who did that chose to abandon their humanity and do that to her.’ He paused for a moment, looking out at the blue sky and the ocean horizon past the Vementry guns, then turned his head to me once more. ‘You have a choice too. To join them, or to join me.’

  We sailed on in silence. I was thinking, and he left me to think. ‘I’m not sure I have any puzzle pieces you haven’t found for yourself,’ I said, at last.

  ‘What did Ted want, last night? That’s a new bit.’

  ‘He wondered what Favelle was doing aboard Stormfugl. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to hurt him. And he wondered if I knew where Maree was.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘She’s on Yell. I don’t know where exactly.’

  He lifted his head, and I explained my reasoning, and Dodie the ferryman’s recognition of her description.

  ‘Thanks,’ DI Macrae said. ‘That’s useful.’ He lifted his mobile and spoke briefly into it: ‘Ms Lynch believes Maree Baker could be in Yell, probably in a B&B. Can you put the local man on to it? Thanks.’

  I hoped the local man wasn’t busy at the other end of Unst.

  ‘Did you get anything useful from Kenneth Manson?’ Now he was treating me as one of his officers.

  ‘He admitted to having talked to Favelle on the night she died, around eleven, at the standing stone, just as Anders said. He was trying to persuade her not to do the wind farm adverts.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said that she was very positive; told him to bring her the leaflets, and she’d read them and think about it. I thought it sounded more like she was fobbing him off to get him to go away.’ Favelle’s torn hands hardened my heart. ‘I think he and Inga could be having an affair. She’d told him about Favelle wanting Peerie Charlie. When I asked him about that he shut the door on me. I think they were together that night, at Inga’s. He knew the time I’d come in.’

  He nodded to himself again. I looked ahead. We were almost at Vementry. Time to turn around. ‘Tacking – stay still.’ The boom swung smoothly over our heads; Khalida leaned to the other side and gathered speed again.

  ‘The last thing,’ I said, ‘is that Elizabeth was out and about that night. The boy of the caravanners saw her up on Ronas Hill, in her own car.’

  ‘If Favelle was brought to the longship by car,’ DI Macrae said, ‘did you hear a car? See any sign of life as you came up the voe?’

  ‘Only Magnie,’ I said.

  There was a silence. I turned my head to meet his eyes, and knew it had come, at last, as I’d known it would. I’d courted it in offering my boat as a place to talk. He said, very gently, ‘Tell me how Alain Mouettier died.’

  I couldn’t lie, not with those eyes on me. My lips felt stiff.

  ‘I killed him.’

  It had been in the mid-Atlantic, in July, ten years ago. We were a thousand miles from Boston, a thousand to the outer Hebrides; twelve days out, twelve to go. Marielle was rolling along on the great green breakers, with the red and white cruising chute poled out on port and the mainsail on starboard. We’d settled back into our shipboard routine of rising, checking, eating, relaxing. Four hours on, four off, like a tall ship. It had been my watch, the graveyard shift. When Alain had woken me it’d still been dark, with the waning crescent making ghosts of the sails. Now the first streak of creamy green-blue showed in the east. The moon dipped into the sea; the stars faded as the darkness did, until only the steady lamp of Venus remained. The sun rose slowly, veiled by mist, blood-red with a broad orange stripe across its centre, and the mist stayed across it so that when it came up above the horizon it looked like a montgolfier hovering above the waves.

  Alain was still sleeping below as I went forrard to have a good look ahead: for whales, for floating rubbish, for clouds on the horizon that might mean storms or calms, for any changes in the limitless ocean. Sea and sea and sea. Our little ship and us, the only people in the universe. I’d stopped believing in crowded Boston so far behind us, and the Hebrides were a mirage somewhere in the future. There was only now, with the smell of the waves that splashed over the deck, the vast silence of the ocean broken by the sounds of the ship, the mast settling against its steel-wired stays, the cruising chute flap as it lost wind and filled again, the caress of the great rollers against the stern, the slap as her bow found itself free of the water, on the crest of a wave, and the long shooosh as she slid down into the trough.

  There was a smudge on the horizon that could be a ship steaming towards us. Nine nautical miles away. It could be making twenty or thirty knots, even more in these smooth conditions, which gave us fifteen minutes to take evasive action. I lifted the hand-bearing compass from its string around my neck and took a sighting, then went back to scribble it in the log. Ship sighted, 95 degrees. I left it for five minutes then I checked again. 95 degrees. Bearing unchanged; collision course. I gybed the mainsail, then wrestled the chute across. We were on a broad reach now, headed down to starboard of the approaching ship, a cou
rse change that had us pointing for Spain instead of Scotland.

  All that had taken five minutes. Now she was on the sea instead of floating on the horizon, a big cruise-ship trailing black smoke. I could even feel the throb of her engines through Marielle’s decks. I took a bearing again. 80 degrees. We’d get her wash, but she wouldn’t run us down without even noticing. 77 degrees. We’d clear her.

  I fished the binoculars out of their locker to get a proper look at her. She was called Sea Princess, and steaming at a good speed, as if she’d been delayed by bad weather and had time to make up. It was strange suddenly to have other people in our world: people waking to sex in a double bed with crisp white sheets, or a shower before taking a turn around the decks, people coming into an almost stable restaurant for their bacon and eggs, people taking a swim in the pool, then spending their morning chatting to strangers. There’d be a buffet lunch with fresh fruit, then an afternoon spent relaxing in a deck chair, watching the waves go by from over the top of a throw-away paperback. They’d dress for dinner then dance until dawn. It was a whole other world. I wasn’t really envious, except of the food, after five days of eating tins, soya mince, and fish. The last banana had gone yesterday. I envied them the romance too, for I wasn’t dizzily in love with Alain any longer. He was keen to try living together ashore, but I was resisting. Maybe it’d be fine; if you can get on well in a thirty-foot boat, you’d think you could get on well anywhere. We’d not done a lot together in Boston, though. Alain had gone off to look at the bars and the nightlife, and I’d wandered through the old part of the town and imagined Sam Adams and his friends stealing through the night dressed as Indians, hatchets in their hands and liberty setting their brains afire. I didn’t want to spend a lifetime ashore doing interesting things by myself.

  I was just about to resume our heading when I heard Alain’s alarm clock from below. Half past seven. Then he rang the ship’s bell, seven tings, followed by clattering about in the galley. I’d finish my watch while he made breakfast. We’d eat together, do the handover, then I’d go back to sleep.

  The wind had risen while I’d been watching the ship passing. The rolling waves wore white crests now, and Marielle was beginning to tilt to leeward. It was time to put the chute away and unroll the jib. I loosened the sheets and went forrard. The chute had a snuffer, a long tube which pulled down over the unruly half-parachute of red and white nylon. I wrestled it down at last and dropped it into the forepeak, then hauled up the jib and went back to the cockpit to sheet it in. The wind was definitely rising now, and shifting a point too. We’d need a reef in the mainsail.

  Alain was half-way up the companion-way ladder with a plate of porridge in each hand when a gust picked up the boom and threw it over. I felt it go, and ducked instinctively, yelling ‘Gybe!’ He didn’t have a chance to dodge it, only to turn his head away and duck a little; it hit him square on the back of the head, a metal boom with the strength of a force 5 gybe behind it. I didn’t hear the crack of bone at the time, lost in the judder of the boom falling, but I heard it in my dreams each night afterwards.

  The boom would come back again if I didn’t grab the helm and steady the ship. I pushed the tiller from me. Marielle surged forwards, off course, but it didn’t matter. I’d get us back on track after I’d looked at Alain.

  The plates were still in his hands, but the porridge had slid out of them onto the cockpit floor. He gave me a queer, blank look from eyes that were focused on something in front of me. There was a trickle of blood coming from his nose, and he licked his lips and swallowed, as if it was running backwards into his mouth too. He spoke first. ‘I’m okay – I’m –’

  The plates slithered from his hand and fell with a plastic thud. ‘Better sit down. I’ll be fine. I …’ That licking movement again. ‘I’ll get some water.’

  ‘Sit still, I’ll get it.’

  ‘No. We need to reef.’ A deep breath, a wince of pain. ‘I’m fine.’ Suddenly, irritably, ‘Don’t fuss. It’s my watch now. A reef in the mainsail, and put that preventer back on.’

  Captain’s orders. He brought us head to wind while I let the main down and secured it round the ram’s horn. I came back to pull the slab reefing lines in, tightening the new bottom of the sail, winched the halyard drum-tight and reached up to thread a line through the eyes in the mainsail.

  I kept looking back to the cockpit. The dead white of Alain’s face terrified me. ‘We just passed a ship. We could call her up.’

  A smile touched his bloodless lips. ‘Panic measures, Cass. Have a look at my pupils. Even?’

  ‘Even,’ I admitted. He winced as I turned his head around. ‘No sign of blood on the back of your skull.’

  ‘Well, then. Breakfast.’ He bent forward to examine the porridge, and I saw him wince as he straightened. ‘What do you say, scrape it up or make new stuff?’

  I didn’t want it, with that crash as the boom went over still echoing in my ear, and the whiteness of his face sending slithers of dread around my stomach. ‘You stay at the helm. 95 degrees. I’ll get some oatcakes.’

  I kept glancing up at him as I fished the oatcakes out of their tin and buttered them. His colour was coming back again, and there was no more blood trickling down his upper lip. It had been a hard crack, but he had ducked a little, maybe that had helped ride the blow, and there was no obvious sign of injury. It hadn’t even broken the skin.

  He’d made the tea already. I passed the mugs up through the companionway, then followed them with the oatcakes.

  ‘Here.’

  He ate two, and he seemed alert enough. ‘I don’t think it’ll blow much harder.’ He looked at me and smiled, the last smile I saw him give, but I didn’t know that then, and it reassured me. ‘Cass, you’re dead on your feet. Preventer, ma fille, then sleep.’

  I obeyed, yawning fit to break my jaw. Below, I crawled into my quarterberth in my top and long johns, eyes closed, and out. I didn’t sleep well, though; I lurched from one confused, anxious dream to another. Each time I awoke, Alain was sitting by the helm still, eyes looking ahead. At half past eleven, he reached in and rang seven bells. I opened my eyes properly.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘A headache, and a touch dizzy, but nothing more. When you’re ready, come and take over, and I’ll have a lie down again.’

  We did the usual handover things, a look at the log, an update on course and wind. I left the course and the reef alone but bent on the larger jib, and Alain went to bed, leaving me alone with the sea. I got the fishing line out, more in hope than expectation, and trailed it behind us; I checked the rigging again and let the sheets out a little more, then unhooked the windvane and steered by hand for a bit, feathering up the waves and bearing away down their backs, so that Marielle was surfing. I felt Alain moving about below, and then suddenly the forehatch opened, and he swung out on deck. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, feet bare, and his gun was in his hand.

  It was pointed at me.

  ‘Delirium?’ DI Macrae asked.

  I nodded. ‘He thought I was pirates. He was seeing double – that’s a standard skull fracture thing, I found out later – so he didn’t realise there was only one of me. Didn’t realise it was me.’ I spread my hands. ‘I know it sounds mad. But pirates really are a problem for travelling yachts. Alain had been boarded once, in the Gulf of Mexico, and the first thing he’d done when he got ashore was buy a gun. So when he awoke and saw two people – as he thought – on board –’

  The scene had unrolled before my eyes a thousand times since. Alain, his face still paper-white, but his eyes blazing, and the little pistol in his hand, black mouth towards me. I knew it was loaded.

  ‘He told me to get off the boat. Motioned me towards the side. He didn’t know me.’

  ‘Alain …’ I’d said, but he didn’t even seem to hear, just took a step towards me, repeating, ‘Get off the boat, or I’ll shoot you. Get off. Off.’ His legs were unsteady, but the pistol mouth was unwavering.

>   We seemed to stand there an endless moment, staring at each other. I was half standing, the tiller by my hand, he was shaking but implacable. ‘Off. I’m warning you.’

  I raised my hands. ‘Alain – I’m Cass – you’re injured – it’s me, Cass –’ The pistol jerked. His eyes were as black as its muzzle, his mouth set in a hard line. I stepped up onto the cockpit bench. The guard rail was just above my knees now, and the dark green water swirled below.

  ‘Off,’ he said again, and when I didn’t go, he fired. I felt the bullet scorch my cheek, heard it hit the water behind me, like a thrown stone. My face stung as if someone had drawn a red-hot wire across it. I lifted one hand, and the fingers came away bloody. I looked at his face in startled disbelief, and saw my expression mirrored in his, as if he hadn’t quite believed he could do it.

  ‘Alain –’ I said again, and I thought his expression wavered. I took a step towards him, speaking as if he was a frightened animal. ‘Alain, it’s me, Cass. You’ve been injured –’

  ‘Keep back,’ he said, and gestured with the gun again. His eyes were flicking from me to a space to the right of me, in the cockpit. ‘Keep back, both of you. I’ll shoot.’

  My face hurt, and I was terrified. I was afraid of having to throw myself over, to watch Marielle sailing away as I choked in the waves; afraid of another bullet, breaking bone or touching a vital organ; afraid of a slow, painful death out here in the middle of the ocean.

  ‘He fired at me once.’ I reached up to the scar. ‘That made him pause, but he still thought there were two of me. Maybe if I’d kept trying to talk to him I’d have got through. I’ll never know. I just felt this sudden flood of hatred that I didn’t even try to fight. I kicked the helm over, hard, then grabbed for the jib-sheet and let it go.’