Shocked, Fiona hit pause on the video and shoved the phone in her pocket, then hurried out on deck. Iris was there, and the others, and soon she found herself helping to carry the wheelbarrows down the steps into the hold.
‘Right, that’s it,’ said Iris, smoothing her damp hair out of her eyes and heading for the wheelhouse. ‘You guys take a seat.’
‘Did we get the total station?’ asked Jack, poking his head through the door.
‘Did we … oh shit, no.’ Becky looked around. ‘Callum, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Jack, where did we leave it?’ barked Iris.
‘Up by Trench C.’ He pulled up his hood. ‘I think. Should I get it?’
‘Well, we can’t leave it here,’ snapped Iris. ‘It’s a brand-new piece of surveying kit and cost me nearly ten grand.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Fiona, realising this was her chance to leave, now they were all gathered together. ‘I’ll get it. I have to go anyway. I’ll get it back to you later.’
‘Perfect,’ said Jack. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘Yep,’ said Fiona. ‘See you later!’
‘Thanks, Fiona!’ called Iris. ‘Be very careful on that causeway! Now, let’s get off this rock and find ourselves a pub!’
The others let out a cheer, as Iris guided Fiona over the deck and back on to the spit, holding on to her arm until both feet were safely on dry land.
‘I wouldn’t linger, if I was you,’ she said, nearly shouting against the whipping weather. ‘That sea is rough. You get one bad wave while you’re out on that causeway and …’ She made a shooting, slipping gesture.
‘Thanks, Iris. See you later!’
And she was away from them, hurrying up the steep path. A couple of times the wind nearly knocked her down, pushing at her back, the stray grass around her susurrating and whistling as she grabbed at it, used it to hold her steady till she reached the top once more.
The sky was transformed into a swirling dark grey of clashing clouds. The dig was before her, with the three storage chests in a circle in a little natural depression, all locked up tight with padlocks, the mattocks and spades lying in the middle, like captured spears, and the trenches all covered now with black plastic sheeting, nailed down with iron tent pegs and weighted with old tyres.
Trench C, Trench C – that was the one on the lighthouse side, wasn’t it? She hurried towards it, and there was the total station theodolite in its green plastic case, sitting upright on the edge.
What a strange place to leave it.
She bent down to pick it up, glanced over her shoulder. She was completely alone, able to think, able to wonder.
Why had Madison wanted to send that video?
It wasn’t a YouTube link, or something online. It was raw, unfinished – it had the running time printed along the bottom. It had been obtained from somewhere.
Hadn’t Becky told her that Mads had been doing unpaid research work for Discovering the Past?
Why send it? What did it mean?
Carrying the theodolite with her back to the path, she paused.
Watch it. There’s only a minute left.
Madison wanted to show you something.
The storage cases came to thigh height, and she sat down heavily on one, the one with the loose hasp that now rattled in the wind, hunching her back against the gale.
The video on the phone was paused as she lifted it out, but impossible to hear over the noise of the wind. She popped her earbuds in and listened, the total station resting next to her on the case.
‘… the most spectacular find from the Bronze Age burial discovered at Jesmond Hill by myself and the team in 2015. You can see the tiny scratches of wear at the front here …’
The camera was back on Iris, and she was talking directly to it.
Then, like a crash of thunder, Fiona understood what was going on.
She was so mesmerised, so stunned at its enormity, that she didn’t realise that someone had picked up the green plastic case next to her until they smashed it into her head.
43
Helly Holm, Orkney, January 2020
When Fiona woke up she was freezing, blind and stiff – everything hurt, especially her head. It sent out waves of sharp pain, like a radio signal. And …
She couldn’t move.
She was curled into a foetal ball and crammed into a tiny space, only big enough to contain her. All was total darkness. The only sound was the wind, howling mournfully, all around the outside of wherever she was.
Her fear was vast, all-embracing – she could not even scream, shocked into muteness. She was trapped in what seemed to be a locked box or a coffin, with only the buffeting wind and her own fast, shallow breathing for company.
And something else – a faint rattling, of metal against metal, happening somewhere close to her head.
She tried to stretch her chilled legs, heard her boots clang against steel. Her frozen hands pressed against the icy walls of her prison – yes, it was a metal box. She pushed upwards against the lid, and it seemed to rise a couple of millimetres before stopping dead, and the air instantly grew even colder, the wind howled louder, and the rattling from outside grew momentarily heavier then ceased altogether.
Silent with horror, she realised that she knew where she was – she was in one of the site’s all-weather storage boxes. The rattling was the padlock, trembling as the wind buffeted the box.
She had been locked inside it.
A surge of sheer panic moved through her, and she couldn’t breathe with it, and it seemed to her that there wasn’t enough air in the box, there wasn’t enough air, she was going to suffocate, she was going to …
No. You are not going to suffocate. If the wind can get in, air can. Stop this. Concentrate. Think.
But she couldn’t, not for a long while, as she tried to calm her gasping breath, her racing heart, to control her ratcheting claustrophobia – I can’t be in here I can’t move what if I never get out and I am stuck here forever I can’t move I can’t …
Be calm. Breathe.
Eventually she was able to recover herself enough to realise that she was lying on top of some kind of bulky weatherproof fabric and what seemed to be aluminium rods – one of the smaller wind shelters for digging delicate finds, she suspected. Everything – the material, the box walls, her coat – was covered in a faint mist of dampness; the condensation she had breathed against her prison walls. Her numb hands, crabbed with cold, travelled over the rods beneath her, but they were nearly exactly as long as the box and she couldn’t lift or move them.
I was so stupid. I couldn’t wait to watch the end …
But there was something else in here with her, pressing into her thigh through her wet jeans. It had a wooden handle, and as her hand fell on it, she recognised its diamond-shaped blade. It was a garden trowel, of the type the archaeologists used, the edges still crusty with compacted mud.
She drew it out. The blade felt fragile, thin, but she had no choice.
Bracing the lid above her with her feet, she once again felt the freezing bite of the wind as she inserted the blade into where the gap between lid and box must be – she couldn’t see it, so had to feel with her cold fingers.
At first it merely scratched along the inside of the steel, with a horrible squeak as the tip moved over the metal, then, just as she was despairing, it disappeared easily into the gap.
But when she tried to lever up the lid, the padlock held firm in its hasp. Her fingers moved to the place where the blade was, while her legs shook with the strain of pushing. There was a gap, and it felt at least half an inch wide, but would go no wider. And something else – the weather bit her fingers – and there was a sudden flash of blazing white light.
For a second she could see it – the gap – and then it was gone. It didn’t matter, though – it would be back, she knew.
It was the Helly Holm lighthouse. The fact that it was the only light she could perceive told her something els
e too – night must have fallen. If it was still daylight, that would be getting in the box too.
It doesn’t matter about the dark, she told herself, while her heart pounded again and her fear seemed to overwhelm her once more. If you can get out of this box, you can cope with the dark.
First things first. You need to get out of this box.
No amount of kicking or pushing at the lid with her legs made any difference, and now her legs were growing tired, the muscles in them trembling. Her feet were so cold she could no longer feel them.
Maybe she could break the hasp.
The rattling, the way the lid rose up – the padlock was threaded through it, but the hasp was loose, she could tell. She had noticed it earlier that day. If she levered her trowel through and used her feet to push near it rather than straight up, she might be able to get it to break off.
A sudden upwelling of hope grew in her then, and all the inevitable dangers she would face afterwards – the cold, the darkness, the lack of heat or shelter, her isolation, suddenly counted as nothing. If she could only open the box.
She couldn’t get the angle right. There wasn’t enough room to get her legs to bend high enough to truly push, the trowel needed gripping with both hands, and even then she couldn’t properly bring all her strength to bear in the cramped, shuttered space.
I bet you’re sorry you didn’t stick with the yoga now, a voice like Madison’s seemed to murmur in her head, and when this happened – either memory or hallucination or concussion or visitation from the unquiet dead – whatever it was, Fiona’s panic calmed for a moment, and with a deep breath, she shut her eyes and simultaneously pushed with her legs and pulled down on the trowel handle.
Without warning the lid of the box flew upward, and a swirl of icy sleet descended upon her, the wind driving it into her face.
With a huge sucking breath, as though she had been underwater, Fiona jerked upright, her frozen hands gripping the edges of her would-be coffin, and she was clambering out into the darkness, her feet splashing as they contacted the ground, the back of her head aching, pierced with the icy cold. When she lifted Madison’s hat to touch her hand to her scalp it was wet, and it came away slicked with some warm liquid.
All was soaked, muddy and slimy, and so, so cold.
In the background, the sea roared, like a furious crowd bearing down on her.
She gazed about the abandoned site, shivering. The other two storage boxes lay locked nearby, and tarpaulin and old tyres neatly covered the open ground of the dig.
Then all was darkness once more, and there was only the tiny, painful kiss of the sleet on her face, stinging her with cold.
I’m going to freeze to death up here.
She sucked in a deep breath.
You can’t think like this. You need to get off this island. You need to …
Call the coastguard. Yes, call the coastguard, like it said to do on the safety signs. Of course! Burly men would come in a red helicopter and she could tell them everything – all about Madison and the Valkyrie …
Her hand felt in her pockets – her coat, her jeans – searching helplessly.
There was no sign of either her phone or her car keys.
She let out a little cry of disappointment, bent back over the box, tearing out the fabric and poles as the lighthouse slowly lit her up, then cast her into darkness, then lit her up, but her phone and keys were not there either.
Fiona raised her naked hands to her face and howled. She had no way of telling what time it was, as the clouds were thick and fast, moving and combining like oil in water, and the lighthouse lit them in ugly orange and sulphuric yellow as it passed over them, and then blinked off.
The only shelter she had was the box and windbreak inside it. The thought of climbing into it again horrified her, and as for the windbreak, there was no way it would stand upright in this angry wind.
As she stumbled over to where she thought the tyres and tarpaulin might be, her arms wrapped around her sodden coat, she wondered if it was worth trying to shelter under them somehow. Perhaps …
Again, the light.
Only this time, with it, an idea.
It took a few more flashes of the lighthouse for her to find the trowel, and one of the short poles that acted as ribbing for the windbreak.
This last she shoved under her arm.
∗ ∗ ∗
She was freezing, really freezing, and wherever she put her feet she seemed to be ankle-deep in rushing rainwater, as though it was springing like a fountain out of the spongy ground. It made the going slimy and treacherous.
It didn’t help that she couldn’t see – the blazing world of the lantern, every twenty seconds, made it impossible to adapt her eyes to the darkness in between flares.
She could only force herself on towards it, and hope.
She was climbing the slope towards the lighthouse, the angle growing sharper as she staggered upwards, the rain driving into her face, and overhead, just once, the crack of seething lightning, like jagged teeth in the inky sky. Surely, if lightning were to strike, it would strike the lighthouse first?
But say it did? The ground was so wet. She was so wet. And she was exposed …
Exposed as she was, she was starting to feel warmer, and with a slice of panic, realised that this was the beginning of hypothermia. She needed to get indoors soon, or there would be no way she would be able to check its racing progress.
Gritting her chattering teeth, she started to climb.
∗ ∗ ∗
Fiona yanked down on the steel door handle to the lighthouse, and to her surprise it scraped freely, uselessly up and down, and here, sheltered a little out of the wind, she could hear something on the other side rattle at the same time, as if in sympathy.
The lock was broken. Burglars or vandals perhaps, encouraged by the lonely location.
Excitement bloomed within her, galvanised her in her frozen misery.
She pulled the door towards herself, and it flew open for an inch or two before holding fast with a metallic ring. A tiny whiff of warm, fetid human scent, one with a familiar tinge, whipped past her nose and was gone, as completely as if she had imagined it.
She tugged again, hard, driven with new adrenaline. But the door held – something inside was catching it, stopping it from opening.
No, this couldn’t be. She had to get inside. She had to get out of this weather or she would die in it.
And then she remembered the short pole she had brought from the chest, its weight jostling against her thigh in the deep, sodden pocket of her anorak.
She could use it to lever the door open.
If she didn’t, she thought it unlikely she would make it back to the site and the box alive.
The end of the pipe was hammered flat, and Fiona rammed it between the door and the jamb, using it as a crowbar. She pulled.
Some wild thing had woken in her now, and her teeth gritted and she strained, groaning as there was a sudden tearing noise, and then the metallic ping of something falling to the concrete floor. The door, its lock still in place but redundant, swung out wide, nearly striking her.
The darkness within yawned wide.
It was the loveliest thing she’d seen all evening.
She had then a moment of clarity. It was not that she stopped being cold and terrified, but that her own will leapt to the fore.
If she died out here, in this terrible, endless night, then she would effectively be the victim of a perfect murder.
It would be easy enough to explain Fiona’s death away as an accident, a terrible consequence of mixed messages and poor comms. ‘We were so sure she had gone back over the causeway,’ they would say, weeping. ‘We were all on the boat, we’d already set off. And we were all so distracted in the wake of Madison’s death …’
Madison’s death.
One of them had killed Madison.
And with a rush of certainty, Fiona knew who. And she was not going to let them get away with it.
Helly Holm Lighthouse, Orkney, January 2020
The first thing that struck Fiona as she stumbled into the darkness of the lighthouse was the smell – stale, sour – the odour of sweat, concentrated urine, and just a metallic hint of blood.
Suddenly the lights, moved by some sensor, flickered into fluorescent life with a click.
What the hell?
She was blinking in the sudden illumination, her hand wrapped around the short pole, knuckles whitening.
She stood in a small, windowless, L-shaped room – furnished with cabinets, a counter, and a narrow interior door lying open, leading to a chemical toilet and a sink. It must have at one point been a neat, compact space, but it was now utterly dishevelled, as if it had been looted at some point.
Probably just vandals, she told herself, while she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, kids using the place as a drinking den.
On the floor at her feet lay a single screwdriver, now slightly bent. She reached down, picked it up. If Fiona could guess, this was what had been rammed through the door handle and into the broken lock in the frame to secure it.
‘Hello?’ she called out, hearing the quaver in her voice.
Nothing. There was nothing to see and no one here, only mess and disorder – spilled medical supplies, discarded waterproof clothes piled around a small, freestanding oil radiator, and an upended green box with a white cross painted on it.
She sighed, pulled off Madison’s wolf hat, now soaked, ran her fingers through her tangled hair.
It was still better than nothing. Whoever these vandals were, by bursting open the lock they had probably saved her life.
She pushed the screwdriver back into the door, threading it through the handle, back into the gap left in the frame, hammering it home as well as she could with her frozen palm.
There.
For the first time she let herself sag after her long labours, draw a deep breath, try to think.
There would be no leaving the island tonight, not unless she found a radio in here somewhere.
Night Falls, Still Missing Page 29