Night Falls, Still Missing

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘I’m just going to look at the causeway,’ she said, trying to sound upbeat, confident. ‘If it’s underwater I’ll be right back.’ She bit her lip. ‘If not …’

  ‘Fee,’ said Madison, her voice only hitching a little. ‘I’ll see you soon. And mind that slope on the way down.’

  The screwdriver vanished under the blankets.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The sleet had stopped, but the minute she put her foot on to the concrete step, it nearly shot away from under her.

  All was ice. The steps were ice, the thin, short grass rustled together like so many blades of glass. The very ground, so wet last night, had set into hummocks and ruts, spanned by frozen little pools of water.

  The wind sang and the sea roared.

  She would have loved nothing better than to go back indoors to Madison, but something stirred within her, some intimation of peril. They were not safe here. They would not be safe until they were back on the mainland.

  Carefully she blocked the door behind her as well as she could with the chair, and navigated the steps, her heart sinking at how slippery everything was. She was protected by the building from the worst of the wind at the moment, and the minute she was out of its shelter there was every chance she could be blown flat and slide all the way down to the edge of the island.

  Wasn’t that how Mads had broken her leg?

  That said, the clouds were little more than fast-moving banners, and the sky was a vivid pink and blue. The rain, at least, had stopped.

  She hobbled to the top of the rise, bracing herself against the tearing wind, heading for the three storage cases below, one lying open and half full of slate-grey ice. It occurred to her then, with a lurch of terror, that if she had stayed there and tried to shelter in it, she would almost certainly have frozen to death.

  For a long moment she could do nothing but stare at it, this box that would have been her tomb.

  Beyond the dig site, at the foot of the turf steps, there was no sign of the causeway – it was buried under frothy white water.

  Still, it was early. It was probably not long until low tide. If she could just hold on until …

  That’s when she spotted it.

  The boat was approaching from the east, with the ragged dawn behind it. If it had appeared unsteady, terrifying before, now it seemed to buck and roll in the frenzied ocean like an unbroken horse.

  There was no mistake. It was the boat the archaeologists had been using, the Samarkand.

  Fiona’s heart was in her mouth.

  Her purloined waterproofs were bright yellow. Very soon there would be no missing her as she stood here, exposed, on the bald, frozen brow of Helly Holm.

  She had to get to cover, now. She had to get back to the lighthouse, barricade them both in, wait for the coast to clear …

  She turned, ungainly, heedless in her fear, and slipped hard on the frozen grass, and then she was rolling, rolling down the hill towards the dig site, gaining speed and shrieking in panic, until with a thump that took the air out of her lungs she was sprawled in a mess of ice and tyres and black tarpaulin.

  Fiona was lying on her back, on top of the warrior woman’s grave.

  She staggered to her feet, sucking in the cold air, delirious with fear. She had knocked out one of the foot-long spikes holding the tarp down and it had gashed her hand and wrist. The scarlet was shocking against her ice-white skin, and drops of it fell on to the frozen grass as she scrambled towards the nearest storage case, ducked behind it, peered out.

  The boat had vanished, but Fiona was not fooled. The spit they lashed the boats to was just out of her line of sight, where the turf path came down over the buried stern of the Viking boat, and headed down towards the sea.

  She looked down at the tent spike in her hand.

  Run back to the lighthouse, she thought. Go NOW.

  But at the same time she realised she would never make it. She would only succeed in luring her enemy to where Madison lay, helpless.

  And as if to prove this, she saw the crown of Iris’s dark head appear, saw her moving up the path. Her face was pale, livid, and her eyes glittered as they roved over the beach, turned towards the dig site.

  Iris would not be cut and bruised and nursing a concussion.

  It struck Fiona like a baseball bat to the ribs. She would never be able to outrun her. All she could hope to do was find some piece of cliff to hide against, or, failing that, chance herself with the sea and try to swim to the mainland.

  Which would be nothing short of suicide, she realised, watching the vast, foaming breakers rise and fall beyond Iris’s approaching figure.

  Somehow, she would have to face her.

  46

  Helly Holm, Orkney, January 2020

  ‘Fiona! Fiona!’

  Iris was waving, hiking up the path, stalking carefully over the sea-blown kelp and shells the storm had racked up from the sea.

  The ocean was still lively, and she could see the waves bashing against Iris’s ankles in their steel-toed boots, pursuing her up from the beach.

  Fiona merely stared, paralysed with terror. She’s mad. One high wave could knock her into the sea at any moment.

  Of course.

  She’s mad.

  And quite, quite desperate.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It’s about Jack, Fiona realised. Or at least, that was how it started.

  Jack who is unfaithful, who flits from woman to woman. Jack who is sleeping with Madison, flirting with Fiona.

  Even so, Iris was in love with him. Iris suspects Jack knows her great secret, but so far, he has done nothing. Thinking back to how he was – with Fiona, with Madison, the barmaid – and that girl on the dig on Lewis last summer (what had been her name? Mara Miller?), Iris can’t, or won’t, surrender the digging to Jack while she pursues her media and academic career. She has to keep an eye on him. She has to be there.

  Of course Iris didn’t try to kill Madison over Jack. Not at all. That would be absurd. And anyway, she has other ways to get rid of her rivals; sneaky, underhand ways, that she carries through under the cloak of her mentorship and has perfected through the years, and until now they have always worked. Mara Miller finds herself receiving obscene pictures from a works computer, and clever Iris manages to turn that into an opportunity to up her surveillance, even while appearing to be tough on the perpetrators.

  Madison finds her stalker is once again pursuing her, that the C14 samples she is putting together are somehow incorrect or contaminated, that she is considered impaired and unreliable. Iris seems to support her, but probably does nothing to stop their murmurs, perhaps quietly encourages them under the guise of appearing concerned.

  And then Madison, who is nobody’s fool and who has suspicions – perhaps through listening to Becky’s sulky insinuations, perhaps having Jack whisper his worries in her ear during those snatched moments in Langmire – sees Iris hiding something at the dig site and puts two and two together.

  Madison, who is an agent of chaos, and now holds Iris’s life in her hands.

  Perhaps even considers wearing it around her neck.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it,’ Iris cried, her voice carrying over the sound of the waves. ‘We were so worried!’

  Then why are you the only one here?

  Fiona had always needed Madison to think the unthinkable, to say the unsayable. But Madison was not here now.

  It would be down to Fiona to think the unthinkable.

  To do the impossible.

  As Iris scrambled up the exposed rocks and icy grass towards the dig, Fiona realised she had mere moments to choose – to run, or to pretend to suspect nothing.

  She tried to tell herself that having failed to kill her through head injury, and then exposure, Iris might still believe that Fiona didn’t know who her attacker was.

  Because of course it was impossible that Professor Iris Barclay, respectable academic and media figure, would have sailed through suc
h dreadful seas alone to murder her here on this uninhabited, inhospitable islet. The mere thought was absurd, must be some kind of massive misunderstanding.

  In any case, they were not necessarily alone here. They were outdoors, and any birdwatcher or dog walker could happen along at any moment, see them from the mainland coast. A gale would not necessarily put the locals off here.

  Iris’s eyes were huge, her pupils dilated. No doubt about it – she was mad. Her colourful passions, her imaginative impulses – they were not affectation. She was actually insane and hiding in plain sight.

  But neither of them needed to hide any more.

  ‘It was you that tried to kill Madison.’ The wind had dropped, or perhaps the import of these words, their power, was enough to carry them across the broken ground. They erupted out of Fiona, despite her terror, which anchored her there, froze her on the spot. ‘You tried because she guessed. I think she’s not the only one that guessed, but she was the only one that confronted you.’ Fiona breathed in, felt the power in her words, the words that could not be taken back. ‘She knew you were a fake.’

  The silence that followed was like the silence after a gun goes off – solid and full of echoes.

  It was Iris that broke it.

  ‘Fiona, I don’t know what you’re talking about …’ Iris cocked her head to one side, her gaze soft, a picture of compassionate forbearance. ‘You’re delirious and freezing, and need to come back to the boat …’ She moved forward, to lay a hand on Fiona’s shoulder.

  Fiona snatched herself backwards, nearly stumbling on the icy ground.

  ‘You made the Jesmond Hill torc yourself. By hand.’

  Iris froze.

  ‘That’s … that’s not rational, Fiona …’

  ‘No, it isn’t, but you did it anyway. It’s the only thing that makes sense. You were going nowhere in your career, tired of being undermined, unappreciated. And then you had an idea. A big, bold idea. You’re good at those. You had a background in metallurgy. You made your own jewellery and sold it at festivals when you were a student. Jack told me. You probably still make your own.

  ‘And the thing was, you could afford to buy the gold for it – the right kind of gold, Irish gold, that has the right chemical signature so it wouldn’t look suspicious when the museum analysed it – it was probably what, about ten thousand pounds in bullion? And the torc is valued now at, I dunno, about three-quarters of a million pounds? It was a big gamble, yes, but you came from money and could afford to take it – and you’ve never been frightened of risk.’

  ‘Fiona, I think you’ve hit your head and …’

  ‘Well, you’d know I had, wouldn’t you?’ Fiona shouted, aware of the spittle landing on her frozen chapped lips, how desperate, how unhinged she must appear. ‘It was so perfect, such a great story! The last hour of the last day of this nowhere little dig, one they’re going to throw a supermarket up on top of, and suddenly you have the world’s attention with this amazing golden treasure! Just pulled it out of the ground! And they accept it as real!’ She let out a burst of shrill, hysterical laughter. ‘They put it in the British Museum!’

  ‘Fiona …’ Iris’s hand was still outstretched, but her eyes – Fiona had never seen eyes so cold. For a moment her fear threatened to smother her, to stop her breath.

  But she owed things. She owed things to Madison – Madison who was lying there, utterly broken and vulnerable, in the lighthouse. Madison was paying the price for her own courage.

  It was time for Fiona to pay for hers.

  ‘And this is the thing I’ll never understand, Iris. You’d got away with it. It was all over. Forever. They’ll probably never test that torc again in our lifetimes. There is absolutely nobody that wants to find out it’s a fake now, for an international institution like that to be embarrassed in front of the world. You got everything you could have wished for out of it, and more. Ten grand well spent.

  ‘But somehow, for some reason, you just couldn’t stop. You can’t stop …’

  ‘Fiona …’

  ‘You made the Valkyrie. You’ve probably made other things too, like that goldwork in the training dig at Lewis. Other places too, just little things. But you know, it’s something they say about frauds and killers. If you get away with it once, it becomes an addiction.’

  Iris appeared to have turned to marble. Her outstretched hand dropped to her side.

  ‘You probably planted the Valkyrie here on Helly Holm, ready to be discovered the next day, by one of the others, and she saw you do it. Madison. So she took it.’

  The beautiful golden Valkyrie. Small but exquisite. Smoothed and scratched with wear, having been lovingly worn and handled by unknown ancient hands; a gleaming talisman standing for a warrior woman.

  How had Iris got those authentic wear marks? She’d worn it herself, probably, for months, underneath her shirt, waiting for its opportunity to come, for just the right contract.

  She’d been wearing it in the video. Perhaps Madison had recognised the thong.

  ‘It’s all over, Iris.’ Her fear was smothering her, and yet somehow the words were coming out. ‘Don’t even think about trying to hurt us.’

  Us.

  That was a mistake. She should not have said us.

  Already Iris’s gaze was flickering up to the white tower of the lighthouse – because of course, if Madison was here and had somehow lived after being cast into the ocean, where else could she be?

  ‘Fiona,’ she said, facing her, her arms crossed over her breasts, and with only the slightest shadow of a tremor in her hands, ‘I think you have had a terrible experience, and you’re not thinking clearly …’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I think it was you that took the glass out of the wardrobe door at Langmire, because it was your blood in it. You fought with her there on the Monday, a couple of days before you came back to finish the job. Was it over Jack? Did you turn up and find him there with her?’

  Something in Iris’s face flinched.

  ‘In bed with her?’ asked Fiona, with a lightning flash of insight. ‘Was that it? Was that when she lost it, and told you she was the one that had taken the Valkyrie, had seen you plant it?’

  That flinching again.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ snarled Fiona, realising through her pounding terror, her rage, that this was the truth. ‘I know Madison. She could never be ruled. She told you if you came after her again – if you sabotaged her work again and blamed her – if you pretended to be Dom fucking Tate and threatened her online again, she would ruin you!’

  Iris appeared to have turned to stone.

  ‘Was Jack there? Did he hear?’ Fiona tilted her head, curious. ‘Or did all this wait till he left?’

  It happened so fast. No wonder poor Madison had been overwhelmed. In an instant Iris’s face transformed in rage – her mouth a red maw of gritted teeth, her eyes wide and her pupils bottomless.

  Out of her open coat appeared a glint of silver – a monkey wrench. She must have taken it from the boat. Her knuckles were blue-white around its handle.

  Fiona had that crushing yet bewildering revelation, borne in on a tidal wave of indescribable fear, that these were to be her final moments, as Iris’s arm was flung back, the wrench ascending into the air.

  Yet, somewhere at the back of it all, was a familiar, beloved voice, and it was saying: it’s you that needs to be the warrior woman now.

  And as the blow tumbled down towards her, Fiona lunged forward; the tent spike from the dig, the one she had shoved into her pocket, clutched and cutting into her frozen fingers.

  With a dire, trembling strength she had never known she possessed, she buried it in Iris’s heart.

  47

  Balfour Hospital, Kirkwall, Orkney, January 2020

  ‘It happened exactly like you guessed. All of it. Including the fight I had with Iris at Langmire.’

  Madison lay back on her hospital pillows, her torn lip closed with tiny sutures, the bruises around her mou
th starting to settle – or at least until she spoke. Then the black hole where her left incisor should be gaped, and she whistled softly if she said her ‘s’s too loud.

  Fiona slouched in the chair next to Madison’s bed.

  Everything seemed gauzy, unreal somehow.

  Two hours ago Adi had bailed her out of Kirkwall Police Station, led her out blinking into the thin winter sunshine. He had come straight to Orkney from Zurich immediately after their last phone call, looking for her, aware that something was very wrong, and arrived twenty-four hours later to find her missing and raise the alarm.

  Even he had seemed to flicker before her, like an illusion – or at least until he had grabbed her, hugged her so fiercely that the breath flew out of her, buried his face in her tangled hair.

  This too had seemed unreal, like something out of a dream, even as her hands had drifted up his warm back, under his leather jacket, closed around him.

  She knows they have problems. He does not always listen to her, and sometimes, she has realised, he thinks she is least like herself when she is being her most true.

  She does not know what she is going to do about Adi.

  ‘That cow,’ muttered Madison venomously. ‘I should have …’ She paused. ‘Are you all right?’

  Fiona glanced back at her; at the bandage across the back of her hand where the IV had been, the angry red grazes along her arm where the rocks had cut her in her fall, the blue-black shadows under her eyes, the elaborate pulleys and braces supporting her smashed leg.

  ‘Me?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes, you, you daft mare,’ Madison said, but her face was concerned. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t know,’ Fiona answered truthfully.

  Silence fell over them, weak and thin, like the afternoon sunshine through the window, and tiny motes drifted in it, trapped.

  ‘Hugo was here,’ said Madison. She didn’t look at Fiona.

  Fiona nodded. ‘I know.’