‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Fiona. ‘Though I have to tell you, that this coin here – see it?’ She let her fingertip rest just above, but not on, a tiny dark disc half-buried under the mud-coloured leather fragments. On it was a little triangular representation of a banner, surrounded by etched runes. ‘That there is a triquetra penny from the reign of Anlaf Guthfrithsson, minted in Harrogate in the tenth century. That’s worth nearly thirty thousand pounds to a collector, just on its own.’ She looked hard at Iris. ‘You can’t … you can’t just keep this stuff here!’
‘I know, I know. It’s so against protocol. But I trust you.’ She turned to Fiona, and her face seemed to shine with passion. ‘Did Jack tell you about the burial?’
‘The primary burial being a woman? Yes, he did … it’s amazing to think, isn’t it?’
‘You know, you wait your whole life to find something like that.’ For a second Iris seemed too overcome to speak, on the verge of tears. ‘I feel like this woman, whoever she is – I feel like she has chosen me.’ She offered a tiny half-laugh of embarrassment, as though remembering where she was.
‘I sound like a madwoman, don’t I? No, don’t answer, I know I do. But this could be so huge, Fiona. Not just for our views on women’s roles in the past, but also on the careers of women in archaeology, right now.’
‘Absolutely.’ Fiona nodded. ‘It’s a great find.’
‘And maybe there is something in this for you, too.’
‘Me?’ Fiona was taken aback. ‘I don’t understand. I’m just a bystander.’
‘There are no bystanders in life, Fiona. But I’ve been thinking about this. There will be media opportunities in this discovery, and it should be the women on this dig that take advantage of that fact, and promote that message. Madison and I talked a lot – she would have been wonderful at this.’
Fiona felt a tug of loss at these words. Yes. Madison would have been good at this.
‘But you know, perhaps you coming up here was fated.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I know your work. You’re presentable, articulate, you’re on the ground here now, as they say – there could be opportunities here for you too.’ She reached forward, closed the lid of the box. ‘I’m already in talks with a production company. I could put you in the mix right now.’
‘I … thanks, Iris, I don’t know what to say. I’m very flattered, but I’m afraid I can’t possibly think of this right now, with Madison …’
‘Of course,’ said Iris, blushing. ‘I’m sorry, I’m letting all of this run away with me. Naturally you have much more important things on your mind.’ Her arm came about Fiona’s shoulders. ‘But in due time, have a think about this. Come on. Help me put this stuff back. Most of the others don’t know it’s here.’
Quickly they replaced the box, and Iris screwed the wooden plate back on, concealing it, while Fiona’s attention travelled the room, fell on the dresser. There were three photos, ones that Iris must have felt important enough to bring up with her. The first was of herself with her arms around a fat chocolate Labrador, the second of two little girls dressed as Disney princesses, and finally, one of her and Jack taken at Stonehenge, before the Altar Stone, and from some time before the first sprigs of grey had appeared in his temples.
Through the window, Stromness was quiet, still.
With a flicker of unease, she wondered if Dominic Tate was out there somewhere.
‘There we go,’ said Iris, running a possessive hand over the sealed fireplace. ‘All tucked away.’
Fiona felt anxious, suddenly, burdened with the knowledge of this treasure secreted within. What if something happened to it?
They returned downstairs, Iris chatting away about the day’s work. Fiona merely nodded amiably along as they re-emerged into the living room.
So Iris felt chosen. Choosers of the slain – that was another name, a kenning, for a Valkyrie.
She was so keyed up on this, so obsessed – and the DNA results weren’t even back yet. They might not even get DNA. This dream of hers might yet tumble away to nothing.
What would Iris do if she thought that Madison had stolen something so precious, so apparently personally meaningful, from the dig on Helly Holm?
And something else occurred to Fiona then – if this dig was such a huge opportunity for the women on it, then it was striking, and a testament to Jack’s truthfulness earlier that evening, that Iris hadn’t mentioned Becky once.
TUESDAY
* * *
38
Nordskaill, Stromness, Orkney, January 2020
That night, on the sofa in Nordskaill, Fiona dreamt of Madison.
She dreamt she was back at Langmire again, having been led there by a vague sense she had forgotten something.
When she reached her journey’s end and opened the unlocked door she already half-knew what she would find.
Sitting in the kitchen, her knees crossed under the table, was Madison, her large green eyes fixed on her.
‘You’re late,’ was all she said. ‘I’ve been waiting ages.’
Fiona wasn’t even surprised, merely vaguely uncomfortable.
‘Everyone’s looking for you,’ she said. ‘They think you’re dead.’
Madison merely half-shrugged and smiled, as though Fiona was overreacting and should worry less.
‘Your mother is sick,’ said Fiona. ‘She had a heart attack.’
The shrug again.
‘Don’t you care?’
‘I didn’t say that. Did you forge your sword?’
‘Wha …’
‘A sword, Sword Lady,’ repeated Madison, with that sharp, exaggerated diction that masqueraded as patience, and yet signalled its absolute opposite. ‘Did you bring it?’
‘No …’
‘Well, that’s no good. How will you fight your blood feud, then?’
‘My … my what?’ Her fear was suddenly huge, overwhelming. ‘Madison, we have to go.’ She reached out to grab her sleeve. ‘Your family is coming, we have to tell them …’
Madison didn’t move and didn’t look away from her face.
‘You’re my family,’ was all she said.
Fiona woke up.
∗ ∗ ∗
She was sweating, and her T-shirt clung to her damp skin. The living room was a sauna, condensation sparkling on the double-glazed windowpanes. The heating was turned up way too high.
She fumbled for the lamp switch, blinked in the resulting light. What a weird, weird dream. When she closed her eyes she could see Madison’s direct, unpanicked green gaze …
And why had Madison asked after a sword? A blood feud … what on earth had she meant? Why had she dreamt of that? Was that what was stirring in the depths of her subconscious, some antiquated notion of Viking revenge, a revenge that was almost always at blade point?
Vikings … the Valkyrie … Choosers of the Slain.
Something stirred within her, some flash of … no, it was gone.
It was all moot, anyway. All hopeless.
She burst into rasping sobs, surprising herself and she stifled them with her hands and the thin bedsheets, so as not to wake the others.
The one person that she could talk to about this, that she wanted to talk to about this, was Madison herself.
How will you fight your blood feud, then?
What did it mean?
∗ ∗ ∗
‘Fiona,’ Jack whispered. ‘What are you doing up?’
‘Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.’ Fiona rubbed at her red eyes, her tears dried to a salty crust. She’d come to the kitchen to get a drink of water, had not expected anyone to be awake.
‘D’you want a cup of tea?’
She was confused, unsure. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘No, it’s gone six.’ He grinned at her. ‘You’re up north now.’
She looked down at her phone: it read 6:04.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Tea?’
Fiona scratched her head. She felt wide awake now and would have liked to talk to someone.
‘Um, yes. Yes, please.’
In the kitchen she became aware of her T-shirt and its bralessness, but Jack paid it no mind as he pottered about, switching on the steaming kettle.
‘Why are you up so early?’ she asked.
‘We need to get out there as soon as possible. Iris was listening to the forecast last night, and everything is going to be earlier and worse.’ He reached over, scratched his shoulder. ‘We need to get everything tied down and storm-ready before mid-morning. Which means we need to be on the boat in an hour.’ He shook his head. ‘Not going to be a popular decision.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, as Jack placed the cup in front of her. Two half-drunk ones were on the table. One was Iris’s, presumably.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Jack said, ‘you could see your way clear to helping us out for an hour or two? It’s not digging, just helping us throw everything on the boat.’
‘Um,’ she said, aware of Jack’s hopeful face, his gift of tea. She would rather have done anything else in the world but was conscious that she had no good excuse to refuse. It was a vitally important dig.
Fiona had a strong sense that this was where her duty lay.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I have to make some phone calls this morning – I need to check in with the police. But yeah, I’ll come over. Shall I drive …’
‘Sorry, no. Low tide’s not till eight-thirty today and it’s just too late. We’re going across in the boat in …’ He checked his phone. ‘Forty minutes. Can they wait until this afternoon?’
Say no. Say you can’t go to Helly Holm today, and it was as though Mads was talking to her. There is nothing good waiting for you there.
His gaze on her was intent, unwavering, and she felt a second’s chill.
There was no way. The dig was so important – unique. She had to help them protect it. To refuse was to fly in the face of everything that she believed was valuable, important.
But the thought of the boat, especially in this weather, made her blood run cold.
‘I suppose I could always make those calls now,’ she said. She picked up her cup of tea. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
39
Nordskaill, Stromness, Orkney, January 2020
Sprawled on the sofa, Fiona opened her laptop to check her email. It was mostly department circulars and invitations to present papers to international conferences, but also a few imaginative excuses from students as to why their essays were late. She was about to shut off the browser when she saw a text had arrived in iMessage, the little red icon glowing.
Could it be? Her heart leapt. Had Madison got in touch?
She clicked eagerly on it.
TONI&GUY HAIR – Take advantage of our winter bargains! 30% off until the end of February …
Disgusted, she moved to delete it, saw it stacked against all the other texts she’d received, including the ones from Madison.
She clicked on these. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, a record of their friendship through the years, a collection of candid pictures, links, emojis … but nothing new. The last four she’d received were there too. Read against the others, Fiona was quietly furious that she hadn’t spotted straight away how different they were.
How self-absorbed she’d been, how selfish. It made her numb and nauseous.
Hugo had told her during their fight that the police could find no records of Madison texting after Wednesday, yet here they were, indistinguishable from all the other texts she’d ever sent Fiona – from the same contact, and with the same avatar – Madison in big sunglasses, vivid lipstick and red-spotted bikini top, grinning brightly at the camera like an escaped fifties pin-up.
A white flash of understanding came over Fiona.
Whoever had texted, pretending to be Mads, would not necessarily need her phone to do it.
If they could get into her laptop, log in as her, they could text anyone from that. From there it would be easy to send texts to Fiona purporting to be from Madison.
Fiona sat on the sofa, completely frozen. In the kitchen, she could hear Iris marshalling the others for their unexpected early start.
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense, the pieces clicking into place.
She researched it quickly on her computer. Texts sent through the laptop app did not go through the mobile network. They were sent through the internet. This was why they hadn’t appeared on Mads’ phone records.
She saw, instantly, how it had played out.
Whoever had sent those final texts had had access to Mads’ computer, not necessarily her phone. Her phone was probably in the sea with her, and Fiona brutally crushed down the spike of anguish this thought gave her. Even now, Madison could still be down there, in the icy pounding depths. Even now, while the freezing snow beat against the glass.
However, Fiona still didn’t know why the texts had been sent in the first place. Why would they lure Fiona of all people up here? What could it possibly achieve? Why invite that kind of trouble?
But it was starting to become clearer, as she let herself fall back against the cushion.
If the killer texts me, she thought, and tells me to turn back when I’ve already set off from Cambridge, what is the first thing that will happen?
I will demand to speak to Madison in person.
Whoever it was would need time to destroy evidence … to get rid of the phone, the car, the mirror glass from the cottage – which, in his panic, he probably forgot about and came back for.
Somehow, whoever this person was, they had access to Madison’s laptop.
But not Mads’ actual laptop, surely? Her laptop was in Kirkwall police station now – Fiona had given it to DI Gillespie yesterday, when she’d gone in, given her statement on the Valkyrie.
Previous to that, Mads’ laptop went off to the mainland for repairs for at least a week. Nobody had had access to it. How could anyone have sent texts, genuine or otherwise, from it?
∗ ∗ ∗
‘Hi, I just got my laptop back from you and I wanted to check something.’ Fiona’s voice felt tight – she supposed what she was doing was technically fraud. Well, not technically fraud. Absolutely fraud. Her nails drifted up to her mouth as she nervously chewed on the skin bordering her thumbnail.
The man on the other end of the phone sounded polite but bored. ‘Sure. What’s the reference number?’
‘I don’t know, sorry – I threw the paper away.’
‘It don’t matter,’ he said. ‘I can search for you by postcode.’
Fiona reeled off Madison’s details while the man on the other end clacked away on a keyboard, occasionally asking her to repeat things.
‘Ah yes, Miss Ko-wow-allchick.’ The man cleared his throat, as though attempting to say Madison’s name had physically irritated it. ‘I see it now. It says on our system that we repaired it, but as it was out of cover you were liable for the repair costs.’
Fiona frowned. She had been with Madison when she’d bought it, mere months ago. It had been a beautiful autumn day in Cambridge, and the students had just returned in a flurry of shopping and busywork. They’d both laughed at the anxious, self-conscious confusion of the freshers gazing owlishly about themselves as the pair of them drank coffee in King’s Parade.
‘Remember when that was you?’ asked Madison, sprawled on one of the squashy sofas, a flat white perched in her hand.
‘I still feel like that,’ said Fiona, and Mads had snorted.
This memory made Fiona ache, distracted her for a moment from her purpose.
‘Out of cover, you say?’ she asked the man, gripping the phone, coming back to herself. ‘But that laptop was practically brand new.’
‘Yeah, but it had been accidentally damaged, see? Your warranty don’t cover that.’
‘What do you mean, accidentally damaged?’
‘It says on our system,’ said the man, clearly determined to kee
p any possible recriminations tied to this self-same system rather than himself, ‘that when the technicians opened it they found water inside. It says they talked to you, and you said to go ahead and repair it anyway.’
‘Water inside it?’
‘Yeah. Quite a lot of water inside it. Like a glass of water had been spilled over the keyboard.’ He sounded nervous, as though expecting trouble from Fiona. ‘Any liquid inside it counts as accidental damage – we discussed this with you, according to our records. Twice. We recommended you replace it on your home insurance.’
‘Oh yeah,’ lied Fiona, hearing a suspicious hitch in the man’s voice now, conscious once more that what she was doing was deceitful. ‘I remember now. And the stuff on the laptop?’
‘Have you switched it on yet? Can you see it?’
‘Um, no. No, I can’t.’
‘Sorry, but it’s probably gone then. You might find someone good with computers who can try recovering the hard drive, but to be honest, I wouldn’t be hopeful.’ He let out a little chuckle. ‘They don’t swim well, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah well. Never mind. I’ll look into that, thank you.’
‘No problem, thanks Miss Kow … Madison.’
‘Bye now.’
Fiona stood there for a long while, staring out of the window at the sea.
It might have been an accident. Say Madison had been at the house with the other archaeologists, one of them might have, in a well-oiled moment, spilled some beer over it and this had gone undetected till the next day.
Possibly the person who had done it would have noticed it at the time, then neglected to mention it. It was an expensive laptop.
But beer would have smelled – the man on the phone would probably have said ‘liquid’ rather than ‘water’. And the guy had said it went over the keyboard. Quite a bit of water. Madison could be careless about her possessions, but she would have shut the lid of her nearly new laptop if not using it. It had been a substantial purchase for her – she was still paying it off.
Night Falls, Still Missing Page 26