The Trowie Mound Murders (17 page)

We finished off our bacon rolls, had a cup of tea each, then Anders and I set out for the show, leaving Cat and Rat behind. Shows were only suitable for animals who could be trusted to behave on a lead. The Pierhead car park was empty, but the tables were set out ready for the throng who'd naturally gravitate there once the tent bar stopped selling. They'd be serving fish and chips during the day, too, and the restaurant upstairs with the dormer windows that looked right out over the voe would likely be booked out for the evening, as well as them doing a roaring trade in pub meals downstairs. It was worth coming to Voe just to eat there; Keith grew or caught all his own scallops, mussels, salmon, haddock, and monkfish. The only way you'd get fresher was in one of those restaurants with a pick-your-fish tank.

We came down the steps by the side of the B
ö
d, scrunched along the beach, then cut up the steep, green hill directly for the show. My legs protested as we went upwards again, after yesterday: two hills in two days. If I went on like this my fellow sailors would be volunteering me as a runner in the Shetland equivalent of the ‘three peaks' race. The grass was like a medieval tapestry, studded with gold tormentil, the first pincushion-scabious, sky-blue squill, the hooded dusky pink of lousewort. A lark twittered above our heads, and the smell of barbecued mackerel hung tantalising in the air. I reminded myself I'd just had a bacon roll. I'd save the fish for dinner, after a morning selling souvenirs.

We came between two houses and reached the road at last, a two-lane highway, the arterial route between Brae and Lerwick. We crossed it, and headed up through the car park to the marquees.

I'd forgotten that the rifle range was set up between Marquees D and E, in that nice clear space where stray bullets would fall harmlessly into the stretch of grass between the back of the marquees and the line of animal trailers. The stall-holder was still putting the last touches to it. I stopped to stare.
Brian's no changed
, Inga had said.
Go to the rifle-range
.

The range itself was competently home-made, with a high, plyboard back, two sheets of eight-by-four standing upright, and a shelf with pyramids of tin cans ready to be shot at. The plyboard was painted white, and well pocked with missed shots from previous years; the cans stood out in neon orange. There was a counter set up in front, a metre from the targets, with an upright pole bobbing with furry toys in garish colours, smaller toys along the front, and, in the middle, a two-metre space with a business-like rife lying in it. The dull gleam of the metal told me it was well used and maintained. There were several neon posters with slogans like ‘Try your luck, pardner!' and ‘Show off your sharpshootin' skills!' Above the counter, keeping it steady, was a title board, with Wild West lettering spaced between painted cowboy hats and pistol belts: ‘Shooting Range'.

Brian himself was busy hammering a long plank to the ground four metres from the front counter – the toe-rail for his customers. He was dressed in full Western gear, a checked shirt and leather waistcoat, leather chaps over his jeans, and a ten-gallon hat hanging down his back. He lifted his head as we came over, gave the board a last couple of bangs, then stood up and turned towards us. In the cowboy gear he looked like a Mexican extra from an early Clint Eastwood movie, and not one to be trusted either. His dark eyes flickered across at Anders, and his mouth curled in the scornful twist I remembered, then he looked at me and flashed white teeth in a smile.

‘Hey, Cass, come to have a shot at being Annie Oakley? How d'you like my stall?' Trying to impress me hadn't worked for him and Olaf at school, but it seemed old habits died hard. I gave the hats and pistols board a long stare.

‘It looks really good,' I said. ‘Eye-catching.'

He nodded, satisfied. ‘It gets brawly popular, especially as folk have a dram or two in the beer tent. All the men want a go then, to show their girlfriends how macho they are.' He picked up the rifle and held it out to Anders. ‘Here, have a go for free.'

I could feel Anders almost take a step back, then re-balance himself. He jutted his chin and stepped forward. They stood for a moment like that, eye to eye, a strange pair, like darkness and light, Brian's dark head and Anders' fair one, Anders' pale gold skin and Brian's mahogony tan, and the locked eyes giving off a bristling like two cats on a wall. I couldn't think of any reason why Anders should ever have handled a rifle, except playing cowboys through the forest as a child, but he took it easily enough, weighing the balance of it with his wrists, and lifted it to his shoulder as if he knew what he was doing. Brian noticed it too; the dark eyes narrowed, and his mouth thinned under the bandit moustache. But he'd laid down the challenge, and he had to go through with it now.

Anders took the rifle from his shoulder, and looked down for the marker plank. He stepped behind it, lifted the rifle again, sighted, then gave a contemptuous shrug, and took three, four, five paces back. A quick glance up at Brian, watching him with a look I couldn't read and didn't like, then he raised the rifle to his shoulder again. There was a long pause; the country music jangled in my ears, and I shifted my feet on the dew-slippery grass. Then Anders' finger moved on the trigger, and the centre pyramid of cans clanged to the floor.

He didn't bother to take a second shot, simply walked back to the marker, rifle held out. ‘It is a nice gun.' Brian took it from him in silence. There was no sign of triumph on Anders' face, no expression that I could read. He'd retreated, as he sometimes did, behind impenetrable smoothness. ‘Thank you. Cass –' A glance flicked up at Brian. ‘I'll head up to the hall. Text me if you need help in carrying boxes.'

He turned on his heel and strode off. The disquieting expression I'd seen in Brian's eyes had gone. Now he was laughing, although it seemed a forced laugh, and shaking his head. ‘I should have remembered that there are still bears in Norwegian forests.' He laid the rifle back on the counter and picked up the box of pellets. ‘What stall are you carrying boxes for?'

‘The Lifeboat.'

‘Oh, Cerys will be back soon.' He smiled, but it didn't look as if he was thinking about his wife fondly. Of course; if he knew about her games with Anders at the cottage, that would explain that little bit of one-upmanship which had backfired on him so badly. I decided Anders and I would be leaving Voe before the range closed, before the bar got rowdy. All that muscle suggested Brian might be too handy with his fists. ‘My wife, Cerys – you met her at Mam's, the other day. She's doing the stall for Kirsten.' His face shadowed. ‘You heard about the bairn, right enough. That was a tragic thing. He should never a been on that quad, he was over light for it. Cerys and I, we feel it like it was one of our own.' He dropped onto the spectator bench at the side of the marquee, and I sat down beside him. ‘We dinna hae any bairns, well, no yet anyroad, and Olaf and I have aye been pals, and then we married pals too, so their boys have been back and forward, well, since they were babies.' There were tears shining in his dark eyes. ‘I thought maybe they'd cancel the show, but it was just too late the news came. There'll be a lock o' folk not feeling like it today. But we canna make a better o' it.'

He took a deep breath. On the other side of the field, a tractor started up.

‘He was one of ours at the sailing,' I said. ‘He had the makings of a good seaman.'

Brian nodded. ‘Aye,' he said. He took another breath, and squared his shoulders. ‘So Cerys said to Kirsten that she'd see to the stall, get it set up, then go back to her. She'll be any minute. I needed the pick-up for shifting this, then she took it back to load up.'

He stood up and turned away from me, as if he'd had enough of the conversation. ‘You're in this marquee here.'

‘Thanks,' I said.

I took a quick look back from within the doorway of the marquee. He was slamming the fallen cans back with a ferocious energy that made me uneasy. In spite of the jaunty checked shirt and scarlet neckerchief, he was brewing trouble for somebody.

Chapter Nineteen

Since there was no sign of Cerys, I supposed I'd better get the apology to Barbara over with. She'd been a steward in the knitwear section all through my childhood, so I headed up to the hall. The knitwear had always been the first thing you saw, as you came in the back door, and it still was. There were two small rooms, normally used for committee meetings and the like. Each had a large table in the centre, and items pinned up all around the walls. The first room was adult knitting, with cobweb-fine lace shawls on one wall, thicker-wool ‘haps' in scallop patterns of natural colours or shades of green and red on another. In the centre were traditional Fair Isle jerseys, the women's yoke jumpers with a round-the-shoulders ring of the fir-cone or star pattern, and the spectacular men's ‘all-overs' like the one Magnie wore when he was dressed up, hoops of pattern in three shades of brown, green, or blue on a white background.

The second room was fun knitting, mostly by children. There was a tea-cosy in the shape of a croft house, complete with porch, and another made like a flowerpot with huge crochet begonias tipping out of it. A platoon of knitted scarecrows, soldiers, big-eyed moppets, and flat-faced bears stared at me. The youngest schoolbairns must have been doing ‘bugs and beasties', for there was a swarm of knitted ladybirds, dragonflies, and spiders, with two women I took to be the judges conferring earnestly over them.

Barbara was standing apart from them, catalogue in hand should she be needed, but making it clear by her stance that she wasn't influencing them in any way. I was about to back off, thinking this maybe wasn't the time to distract her, but the movement caught her eye. She looked over at me, and nodded. ‘Now then.'

She'd aged ten years. The eyes that had been so sharp behind their glasses were reddened, with dark bags under them, and her firm mouth had a tremor in it that hadn't been there before. Olaf's children must have felt almost like her own grandchildren. ‘I was expecting you last night.' Even her voice lacked conviction.

I sidled over, and spoke softly under the judges' deliberations. ‘Barbara, I'm really sorry. I heard about Alex being missing, and had a sudden idea where he might be. He'd been listening when we were talking about the trowie mound, up above your cottage.'

Her brows snapped together at the mention of the cottage. ‘He'd have no call to go there.'

‘Magnie was speaking about lights up at the mound. I thought he might have decided to investigate it. I just went chasing off without thinking about what day it was.'

She shook her head. The catalogue trembled in her hands. ‘It was an awful thing, an awful thing. I was always faerd o' those quad bikes. That's an accident waiting to happen, I thought.'

I nodded. ‘He was a fine boy. He was one of my sailors.'

‘Aye, his grandfather was a good hand with a boat. The boy favoured him, with the shade of his eyes.' She drew a hankie out from her sleeve, and blew her nose, then glanced across at the judges, moved on now from the ladybirds to knitted vegetables. ‘I'd need to be concentrating on this work.'

‘What day would you want me to come now?'

She turned back to me with an apologetic look, and looked away again. ‘I was thinking – I had a word with Brian – and he was feeling I'm no needing to pay for any help. He thinks I'd be better applying to the council for a home help, now I'm over sixty-five. So I doubt I'll maybe do that.' Her neck flushed a mottled crimson. ‘I hope I'm no' wasted your time.'

‘No, that's fine,' I said. Her embarrassment made me feel awkward too. ‘No problem. I'll see you later, then.'

I backed away from her, navigated around the tables, out into the fresh air and walked back down the field to D Marquee. So Brian had decided that his mother didn't need help, had he? Was it just because he thought the council would pay (a non-starter in the current financial crack-down, I'd have said), or because he didn't want a nosey-parker noticing unusual items, like a genuine Russian icon among the bric-a-brac? Cool Cass had been a bright one, doing well in tests, tipped for seven Credit Standard Grades if she hadn't been packed off to France …

Oh, well. I was sorry about the money, but Anders would be pleased.

I was passing the stacks of hen-and-duck cages when I noticed Kevin of the noisy motorboat. A glance down at the pier showed me he'd come around in it; it was moored outside
Khalida
. I hoped he'd used plenty of fenders, and taken a line to the pier, rather than to my cleats.

It was the furtiveness of his behaviour that made me notice him. He had something he was jingling in his pocket, and he was standing as if he was admiring the crated fowl, but with constant looks over his shoulder, as if he was trying to spot someone, or avoid them. He shuffled on a metre to the next set of cages (“Cock and two hens, same breed”), turned his face towards them and stood waiting, his eyes still darting everywhere. I stood at the corner of the pens and watched him, eyes as casually turned towards the exhibits as his.

He was getting impatient. He checked his watch, turned to look down towards the pier, then checked his watch again, other hand jingling in his pocket throughout. I was feeling too conspicuous. I slipped around the pens to the other side of where he was, a metre from him, with the tall stack of pens between us. I could just see the top of his head, and his welly-booted feet. I took a step back, conscious of my own feet. Now he wouldn't be able to see me at all.

The yellow boots fidgeted like a pony who's been asked to stand still. Then at last he turned round with a sharp, exhaled breath. ‘I was thinking you werena coming.'

A pair of muddy black wellies stopped beside the yellow ones. I tried to peer through the gap between two pens, but could only see Kevin's elbow. The other man had a deep voice, and didn't sound concerned in the least by his impatience. ‘The ram was being awkward. It wouldna load.'

The jingling noise came again. Kevin's hand pulled a key-ring out of his pocket. It had a cork ball on it – one of the floating ones, and so probably boat keys. ‘Here. It's all on board, ready. Just transfer it to your pick-up.'

‘Yeah, yeah.'

‘And mak' sure he doesn't see you,' Kevin hissed. ‘The place is crawling with fuzz,' he added.

The other man's voice rang out, unconcerned. ‘The fuzz are busy out in the voe, with this yacht they'd found on the bottom. The chopper's brought in another body too.' The black boots marched along the stack of pens; I dodged back quickly as they came out around, and watched them go. I didn't know the name of the crony who'd come up to him, but I recognised the face: one of the most persistent of the party-goers.

So whatever had been on board was being moved, before ‘he' found it. Gavin, I wondered, or someone else?

I went into D Marquee, and found two empty tables with a card marked ‘Aith Lifeboat' tacked on the nearest. We were right by the door, sharing the tent with someone from the council advertising composting bins, the Organic Food Growers, a stall selling bags of home-made toffee, knitwear, hand-made cards, and bric-a-brac, in aid of the restoration of Gonfirth Kirk, and the Cat Protection League with an array of cat-related items. I looked these over, wondering if I should be getting Cat a hessian-wound scratching-post with a swinging ball, to save
Khalida'
s woodwork.

‘I've just found a kitten,' I explained to the stall-holder, ‘and so far he's not sharpened his claws on my varnish, but prevention might be better than cure.'

‘It's an individual thing, with cats,' she replied. ‘Some are awful furniture scratchers, whatever you do, and others only scratch outside. How old's he?'

I was just giving the details when a red pick-up slithered over the grass and swerved to a halt with its rear to the marquee entrance. It had a dozen cardboard boxes wound round in blue and white RNLI tape in the back.

‘Speak to you later,' I said, ‘that's my stall arrived.'

The door opened, and Cerys got out, dressed today in a candy-pink vest top and the sort of shorts that are just sawn off jeans. Hers were so short that the flaps of the pockets hung down below the fabric. It looked odd to me, but I was willing to accept it as high fashion – what did I know? Her vest top swooped down to show a lacy black bra, and she had huge pink-framed sunglasses stuck on the top of her head. She was more ferociously made-up than ever, but her eyelids were swollen under the frosted powder, and the whites of her eyes were tinged with red.

‘Hi,' she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she'd talked herself ragged. ‘Hope you've not been waiting long.' The flat voice wasn't exactly friendlier, but it had less of a sharp edge. I supposed her mother-in-law didn't bring out the best in her.

I took a step to the pick-up. ‘Shall I bring these in?'

She held her hand up. ‘Let me just sort out the inside first.'

She was impressively efficient about it. I'd have set her to organising a watch-rota any day. Before I knew it, I was helping to shift the table to a place where it didn't rock that was simultaneously a yard out from the back wall of the tent, yet not sticking in the way of the folk who'd be coming in. She turned the second table around to make an L, with room for people to crowd round and look, and commandeered chairs for us to sit on, then directed me to a smaller, upright box which contained large polythene bags and rolls of that green plastic temporary path. I was set to laying the path out on top of the poly bags between the chairs and our stall, for us to stand on, while she borrowed a table from an as-yet unoccupied stall to lay the boxes on while we unpacked. Only then was it all hands to carrying boxes.

‘I've had a lot of practice,' she explained, once we had the ticker-tape boxes in a neat line. ‘Kirsten and I do this at each show, through the summer.'

There was nobody close. It was a good time to say it, as much as any time can be good. ‘I was so very sorry about Alex,' I said. ‘He was one of our sailors, and a real star.'

Her eyes filled with tears that glinted on the lacquer mascara. She shook her head, unable to speak, and pounced on the box labelled ‘cloths'. We draped white sheets and a banner with ‘Royal National Lifeboat Institution' on it along the table in silence, then began opening the boxes: books about the sea, notepads, decorative thimbles, fold-away hairbrushes, glass tankards with a Severn lifeboat etched on them, packs of cards, tea-towels and dusters, T-shirts and peg-bags, and carrier-bag holders. There was a whole box of pens, pencils, rubbers, and little notebooks, and another box entirely filled with plastic boats. Finally, there was the ‘bairnie gear': balls, crocodiles with wind-up arms for playing in the bath, grab hands in the shape of sharks, laser-patterned spinning-tops. I would never have believed so many different items could be squished onto two tables. It took a good hour to get it all set out.

‘There,' Cerys said, when everything had been set out to her satisfaction, and the last empty box had been stowed under the table. ‘Now there's just the food box, then I can get rid of the pick-up.'

She brought in one more box. She was obviously planning to settle in for the day; a silver flask stood up in one corner, and among the rest were packets of crisps, apples, a bag of marshmallows, and – going native here – a packet of the puffy, powdery biscuits known simply as ‘muckle biscuits', a tub of Lurpak, and a block of cheese. Two plates stood end-on beside the flask, held in place by two mugs, a jar of coffee and a plastic bottle of milk. A knife-handle stuck up in the corner.

‘Make's a cup of coffee, will you? I won't be a minute.'

She headed off. Now we were set up, people were starting to drift into the tent and look at the stall. I sold the woman from the cat stall a dish-towel, and an old seaman bought a notebook. I'd just set the two cups on the immaculate white sheets, on our side of the goods, when she returned and sank down on the chair with a sigh of relief.

‘Thanks, Cass. Once I've had a coffee I'll be able to face the day.'

‘What is it you do normally?' I asked. ‘At home, I mean.'

A wry smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. ‘I work on and off in a teenage boutique.'

A group of younger children came in. We sipped our coffee while they picked up everything on the stall, showed it to each other, laid it back, and moved on, chattering like a tribe of bosun's monkeys.

‘This is a treat,' Cerys said, watching them go. ‘They're too young and too honest to shop-lift. The tales I could tell – honest to God, I don't know what kids are coming to. I'm not twenty years older than them, and I'd have said I was streetwise enough when I was their age, but I'd never have thought of half the tricks they come up with.'

‘There's nothing to nick at the boating club,' I said.

A teenage lass came in, straight from the riding classes, judging by the immaculate jacket, tie and breeches, and the netted hair. ‘Do you have one of these instant shoe polish pads?' she gasped.

I'd laid them out myself. ‘These? £1.'

‘Thanks.' She paid for it and disappeared at a run.

‘They're nice kids here,' Cerys said. ‘Mind you, they can't complain. It's a rich place, Shetland, good wages, and the parents spend on them. Her outfit now, we're talking upwards of £300, and the horse and tack to go with it won't have come free neither.'

‘It's not just the money,' I said. ‘It's the community too.' I thought of the children I'd worked with abroad, in sailing schools, sullen teenagers whose parents just parcelled them from one to another, and who'd decided that their only way forward was to exploit any guilt coming their way. There was no lack of money thrown at them, but that didn't compensate for feeling they didn't have a home any more. ‘Here, there's no question about who you are, and where you belong. I felt it too, coming back. One day home and I was Dermot Lynch's lass, her that grew up out along Muckle Roe, that lass that got the sailing trophies. It's like an intricate map, and there you are on it, your place in the community.'