Sacrifice (8 page)

‘I prefer my handmaidens naked,’ he said.

With one hand, I started to rub the loofah up and down his back. With the other, I unfastened the buttons of my shirt.

5

AFTER DUNCAN AND
I had made love I slept deeply. Until something woke me. I lay in the half light of our bedroom, listening to Duncan’s steady breathing beside me. Otherwise silence. Yet I’d heard something. People don’t wake suddenly from deep sleep for no reason. I listened hard. Nothing.

I turned to look at the clock: three-fifteen a.m., and about as dark as it ever got on Shetland during the summer, which wasn’t very. I could see everything in the room: cherry-wood furniture, lilac light-shades, free-standing mirror, clothes slung over the back of a chair. A pale glow like early dawn shone around the blind.

I got up. The rhythm of Duncan’s breathing changed and I froze. After a few seconds I walked to the window. Slowly, trying not to make a sound, I pulled up the blind.

It wasn’t the brightest of Shetland nights; it still appeared to be raining softly, but I could make out
just about everything: white police tent; red-and-white-striped tape; sheep in the neighbouring field; the solitary spruce tree that grew at the bottom of what passed for our garden; Charles and Henry, wide awake, with their noses poking over the fence, the way they do when someone appears in the next field. Horses are friendly – and nosy. If they see someone close by, they hurry over for a better look. So who were they looking at?

Then I saw the light.

It appeared inside the police tent, a faint brightness shining briefly behind the white canvas; flashing quickly then disappearing; then again. Flash, sweep, flicker.

Something stroked my bare hip. Then Duncan’s warm body pressed against me from behind. He swept my hair up, pushed it over one shoulder and bent down to kiss my neck.

‘There’s someone in the field,’ I said. His hands slid around my waist and moved higher.

‘Where?’ he asked, nuzzling the place behind my ear.

‘In the tent. There’s a torch. There.’

‘Can’t see anything,’ he said as his hands found my breasts.

‘Well, you won’t. You’re not looking.’ I pushed his hands away and they dropped down to the window ledge.

‘It’ll be the police,’ he said. ‘Dunn said they’d be leaving someone here overnight.’

‘I suppose.’

We stood staring out into the darkness, waiting, but the light didn’t appear again.

‘Did they hurt her?’ asked Duncan after a minute or two, so quietly I could barely hear him.

I turned in surprise, glared at him. ‘They cut out her heart.’

Duncan’s pale face drained. He stood back, arms falling to his sides. Instantly I regretted being so brutal. ‘Dunn didn’t tell you that? I’m sorry . . .’ I began.

He shushed me. ‘It’s OK. Did they . . . he . . . was he cruel?’

‘No,’ I said, remembering everything Dr Renney had told us about the strawberries, the anaesthetic. ‘That’s the strangest thing. He . . . they . . . they fed her, gave her pain relief. They almost seemed to . . . care for her.’ They cared for her. Before they tied her up and carved Nordic symbols into her skin, of course. What kind of sense did that make? I shut my eyes, but the image was still there.

Duncan rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Jesus, what a mess.’

There didn’t seem an immediate answer to that, so I said nothing. Duncan made no move to go back to bed and neither did I. After a while I started to feel the chill. I closed my eyes and leaned against him, seeking warmth rather than intimacy, but he wrapped his arms around me and his hands started to move down my back. Then stopped. ‘Tor, would you consider adoption?’ he said.

I opened my eyes. ‘You mean a baby?’ I asked.

He squeezed one buttock. ‘No, a walrus. Of course I mean a baby.’

Well, he’d certainly taken me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about adoption, hadn’t considered we were anywhere near that stage. We had any number of boxes to tick first. Adoption was the last resort, wasn’t it?

‘It’s just there’s a good programme on the islands. Or, at least, there always used to be. It’s not difficult to adopt here. A newborn, I mean. Not an emotionally screwed-up teenager.’

‘How can that be?’ I said, thinking that the adoption laws here were surely the same as for the rest of the UK. ‘How can Shetland have more babies than anywhere else?’

‘I don’t know. I just remember it being discussed when I lived here before. Maybe we’re more old-fashioned about single mothers.’

It was possible. Churches were better attended here than on the mainland and, on the whole, moral standards seemed comparable with what they’d been in the rest of the UK some twenty or thirty years ago. In Shetland, teenagers stand up on buses to let old ladies sit down. On the roads, drivers wait by passing spaces instead of racing to beat the oncoming car. Maybe this was a real possibility that I hadn’t considered.

Then Duncan took hold of me round the waist and lifted. He put me down on the window ledge. The glass was cold and slightly damp against my back. He lifted my legs and wrapped them around his waist. I
knew exactly what was coming. The ledge was just the right height and we’d done this before.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we could just keep trying.’

‘For a little while longer maybe,’ I whispered, watching him lower the blind.

And we kept on trying.

6

SARAH SAT ON
the edge of her chair. She had the
look
in her eye: angry, ashamed, impatient; the one that would increase in intensity month by month, anger gradually giving way to despair as the arrival of each menstrual period signalled a fresh failure. Of course, it could also disappear, completely and for ever, the second she knew she was pregnant. I knew that look so well. I saw it all the time. And not just on the faces of patients.

Robert’s expression, on the other hand, I couldn’t read. He had still to look me in the eye.

Although this was their first meeting with me, Sarah and Robert Tully had already run the gauntlet of tests, examinations and interviews with counsellors. They were running out of patience. He wanted the pats on the back down the local and the weekends browsing through model-train brochures. She wanted her feet up in stirrups and a good dose of artificial hormone coursing round her veins.

‘We were hoping you’d put us on the IVF programme,’ she said. ‘We know there’s a waiting list for NHS treatment but we have some money saved up. We want to start right away.’

I nodded. ‘Of course. I understand.’ Oh, how well did I understand:
Get me pregnant. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even want to think about everything that comes after – the nausea, exhaustion, backache, stretch marks, total lack of privacy, and then pain beyond anything I could ever have imagined. Just wave your magical, medical wand and make it OK for me too
.

What I was about to suggest they would find incredibly hard to accept; patience and the biological urge to reproduce don’t make comfortable bedfellows. ‘There is another way forward that I’d like you to think about.’

‘We’ve been trying for three years.’ With something between a hiccup and a sob she started to cry. Robert glared at me as though their failure to conceive was entirely my doing and gave his wife the handkerchief he’d had ready in his hand.

I decided to give them a moment. I stood and walked to the window.

It had been raining as I’d driven into Lerwick that morning and the clouds above were low and heavy, the town dark and damp.

Lerwick is a grey stone town on the eastern coast of the main island, a short channel hop from the island of Bressay. Like the rest of the islands’ townships, it isn’t noted for its architecture: the buildings are
simple and functional but rarely beautiful. The traditional choice of building material is local granite with a slate roof. For the most part, two storeys are thought ample by the practical islanders – maybe they worry about high winds blowing roofs away – but in the older parts of town and around the harbour a few three-storey, even four-storey houses can be seen. They seem to represent a rare flash of ambition, or defiance, on the part of the islanders.

Gazing at a rain-washed Lerwick did nothing to improve my mood.

I found myself stifling a yawn. I hadn’t slept well. Even when I hadn’t been fully awake and out of bed, I’d been restless, my head full of the woman I’d found. I’d seen her, touched her, knew something of what had happened to her. It was appalling . . . I should be appalled, and I was . . . but I was angry too. Because I’d wanted to plant snowdrops on Jamie’s grave to remind me of the time he tried to eat some. I’d gone out one evening to call him in and found a tiny white flower sticking out of his mouth. He’d looked like an equine flamenco dancer. But now I’d never be able to do that because some sick bastard had chosen our land to bury his dirty work on. And Jamie had been carted off to the knackers’ yard.

There was a movement behind me; a fidget. Sarah had stopped crying. I sat down again and turned to her.

‘You’re only thirty-one. You have a long way to go before you need worry about time running out.’ I, on the other hand, was thirty-three. ‘There’s no
guarantee of a baby using IVF. The clinic I’d refer you to has an average success rate of 27 per cent per treatment and, frankly, you’re likely to have a below-average expectation of success.’

‘Why?’ said Robert.

I glanced down at the file again, although I already knew what it said.

‘Between you, you’re dealing with sub-quality sperm and highly irregular periods. The tests you had on your last visit and the lifestyle questionnaire you filled in suggest some reasons why that might be.’

Both looked defensive, as though I was about to tell them it was their fault. Well, in a way it was.

‘Go on,’ said Robert.

‘Both of you show deficiencies in certain minerals that are very useful to conception. Sarah, your levels of zinc, selenium and magnesium are very low. You also have a lot of aluminium in your body. Robert, you have low zinc levels too, but what worries me more is a very high level of cadmium.’ I paused. ‘That’s a toxin present in tobacco smoke. You smoke about twenty cigarettes a day. And you drink alcohol most days. You too, Sarah.’

‘My father smoked forty a day and drank whisky just about every day of his adult life,’ said Robert. ‘He had five kids before he was thirty.’

I was losing this couple; but I wasn’t about to compromise everything I believed in just to give them some false hope today. On the other hand, they might just get pregnant on their first IVF attempt. It
was a huge lottery and I could be doing them a great disservice by persuading them to wait.

‘What I’d like to suggest is that you forget all about getting pregnant for the next six months and concentrate on becoming as healthy as you possibly can.’ I could see Robert about to interrupt. ‘Healthy people have the best chance of conceiving, Robert. I’d like to see you give up smoking and both of you to cut out alcohol completely.’

Robert shook his head, as though despairing of my idiocy.

‘I know it will be hard,’ I went on, ‘but if you want a baby, you’ll try. Even cutting down will help. Also, I’m going to prescribe a course of supplements to eliminate the various deficiencies you have and I want you both to be tested for a number of infections.’

They weren’t going to buy it. They’d come here for sophisticated medical intervention and I was offering them vitamin C.

‘Do you really think just that will make much difference?’ asked Sarah.

I nodded. ‘Yes, I do. I’ve written everything down.’ I handed over a typed sheet to Sarah. ‘If you follow this plan, at the end of six months, you’ll be much healthier than you are now and the chances of IVF being successful will have substantially increased.’ I tried to smile. ‘Who knows, you may not even need IVF.’

They stood up, sullenly, like children denied a treat. I wondered if they’d try the plan or just travel to a clinic on the Scottish mainland, where they’d
almost certainly be guaranteed a more sympathetic response. Not everyone shared my conviction about the importance of health and nutrition when trying to conceive.

Sarah turned at the door. ‘I know you mean well,’ she said, ‘but we just want a baby so much.’

The sound of their footsteps along the corridor faded away. I opened my top drawer and took out an orange file. The first sheet was the result of a sperm test taken in London twelve months earlier.

Total number of spermatozoa present: 60 million per ml – normal

Percentage of sperm alive at one hour: 65% – normal

Morphology level: 55% – normal

Antibody levels: 22% – normal

And so on, down to the bottom of the page. Everything normal. The name on the top was Duncan Guthrie, my totally normal husband. It was the third test he’d had. The results of the previous two were practically identical. Whatever our problem, it didn’t lie with him.

My own notes were underneath. FSH, LH, oestrogen and progesterone levels were all well within the normal ranges. My hormones were OK and, as far as I could tell via a slightly awkward self-examination, everything appeared to be in place.

The Tullys had been my last appointment but I had a ward round in twenty minutes. Immediately
afterwards I had to drive north and catch a ferry to the island of Yell for my monthly visit. I’d meet with the island’s midwife and hold a clinic for the eight women currently pregnant there.

Getting up, I wandered back over to my office window. The car park was immediately below. Without really thinking I found myself searching for Gifford’s silver BMW. Let it go now, he’d said, let the police do their job. He was right, of course. But I still had eighteen minutes to kill.

Back at my desk I accessed the hospital’s intranet site. I clicked on a few icons, thought a bit, then clicked on a couple more. For a hospital website it was surprisingly easy to navigate. It wasn’t long before I had the file I wanted: a list of every baby born on the islands since records had been computerized.