None but the Dead Read online

  For DI Bill Mitchell

  Contents

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  60

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  None but the dead are left to tell the tale.

  Music, chatter and laughter spill from the Nissen hut to follow them. Her hand is hot in his as they run, her breath coming in small gasps. Reaching the top of the dune, he jumps down onto the beach. Turns and lifts her.

  She is light as a bird in his hands. The smallness of her excites him as he lays her on the white sand. Pushing up her dress he finds the warm smooth skin of her inner thigh.

  She halts his hand and anger sparks, though he strives to quench it.

  ‘You do love me?’ she says, her lovely eyes questioning.

  In that moment, he does, as he loves everything he desires.

  She releases his hand and offers up her mouth to him. It is soft and sweet and deep.

  She smothers a cry as he enters her, and he knows now for definite that he is the first. This excites him even more. He has lost sight of her now, drowning in his own pleasure.

  Realizing this, she suddenly shifts, emptying herself of him.

  Her cry of ‘No’ is swallowed by his big hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he says and tries to re-enter.

  But she fights. Oh, how she fights. His surprise at that gives her the chance to momentarily escape his clutches.

  He cannot allow this.

  His anger explodes, like the surge of water through the nearby channel.

  When he surfaces it’s still dark, his mouth is thick with whisky, the skin on his bare thighs rubbed raw by grains of sand. She lies beneath him, half buried. Her eyelids are veined blue, the smudged lipstick distorting the shape of her mouth.

  Her eyes, which he thought beautiful, are now as glassy-eyed as a dead fish.

  He stands up, adjusts his clothes. For a moment he feels pity. Then it becomes annoyance and anger at her for spoiling the moment.

  The sand will shift, he thinks. I cannot bury her here.

  1

  He could definitely hear the sound of children’s voices.

  Mike threw open the kitchen door. The area which would have served as a playground was empty, the supposed cries of children replaced by the wail of the wind.

  He’d read all about the gales that swept these northern isles before he’d decided to move here, and had thought himself immune. After all, he’d been brought up next to the North Sea.

  But I didn’t know an Orkney wind.

  At this point the object of his thoughts tried to wrestle the door from his hands. Mike stepped back inside and closed it. The summer had been windy, but there had been occasional days when that wind had softened to a breeze and he’d been lulled into a false sense of security as he’d worked on the renovation of the hundred-year-old building.

  Wait until winter, had been the most common response from the locals. Mike had smiled each time that had been said, indicating he wasn’t afraid of bad weather. It wasn’t as though the temperature dipped dramatically. Snow was almost unheard of. Frost too. What could be so bad about winter here on the island?

  He stood for a moment, listening to the wind whistling through the eaves.

  That was what I heard. Not children’s voices.

  ‘I was a teacher for too long,’ he said out loud as though to convince himself.

  Leaving the kitchen area he went to check on the stove, touching the wall behind, feeling the warmth absorbed by the stones. The conversion of the big room that had been the main classroom in the island primary school had created his living space. Open plan, it was his kitchen and sitting room combined. His bedroom was a smaller room off one end, which he thought had been the teacher’s office. All this had been his spring and summertime task. Now autumn was here he was planning to break up the tarred area behind the house and prepare it for his garden, or more properly his vegetable patch, to be ready for next spring.

  Mike put the kettle on. It would be dark soon. The nights had drawn in swiftly. That was the other warning he’d had. The long dark nights when day ended by mid-afternoon. That hadn’t worried him either. If he was deep in a book, it didn’t matter if it was night or day. He would read in the dark months of the year and work on his painting during the long summer days. And there were other jobs he could do when the weather was bad. Such as sorting out the loft.

  Mike glanced upwards. The rafters above this room were exposed, so no loft here, but the yet-to-be-renovated half of the building, which had been the teacher’s living quarters, had a sizable loft. He’d opened the trapdoor and stuck his head in to take a look. Even fitted a light, but he hadn’t got round to checking the loft space out properly. Maybe now was the time to do that. After all, the digger wasn’t coming to break up the playground until tomorrow.

  There were thirteen of them. Placed at regular intervals among the rafters. Finding the first one had excited him. Flower-shaped, the intricately tied greyish strip of muslin resembling a rose – like something fallen from Miss Haversham’s wedding veil. It was obvious by the colour and texture of the material how old it was – as old as the schoolhouse that stood resolute against the winds that stripped bare this northern isle.

  Intrigued by one, Mike found himself disturbed by thirteen. All as intricately tied, all distinctively different as though each referred to someone or something unique. He had removed only one from the thick layer of dust and ash that lined the loft, carefully bagged it, and taken it to the tiny island heritage centre.

  The curator, Sam Flett, who wasn’t an incomer like himself, had welcomed Mike and asked what he could do for him. When Mike placed the muslin flower in its clear plastic bag on the desk, the result had been unexpected. The weather-beaten face had openly blanched, but worse was to come when Mike attempted to remove the flower from its bag.

  ‘Don’t handle it,’ Sam had said sharply, causing Mike to let go of the bag in surprise.

  Sam, who’d appeared to be avoiding even looking at the flower, had asked, ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘In the loft at the schoolhouse.’

  ‘Then my advice is to put it back,’ he’d said. ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘But what is it?’ Mike had asked, apprehensive now.

  Sam had hesitated, before saying, ‘On death, the hem of a child’s smock was torn off and fashioned into a magic flower.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘The flower represents the child’s soul.’

  Mike had expected him to add of course, that’s just superstitious nonsense. He hadn’t.

  ‘There are another twelve of them in the loft,’ Mike had told h
im.

  ‘Leave them there, and put this one back.’

  I didn’t follow his advice.

  He hadn’t disturbed the others, but thinking to investigate further, he’d left the single flower in its bag on the kitchen table, where it still sat. After all, he’d reasoned, what harm could a muslin flower do him?

  Hugh Clouston was an island man born and bred. Owning the only resident small digger had made him invaluable, a treasured part of the community, and oft required in all weathers. Hence his confident yet relaxed demeanour.

  He gave Mike the thumbs-up as the metal teeth finally broke through the compacted surface and the bucket scooped at what lay beneath. The filled shovel rose, then swivelled to the right and released its load.

  Low sunlight caught the cargo as it fell, a shower of sandy soil mixed with small stones, and something else – white, solid, shapely.

  Mike didn’t register what looked like a bone at first, not properly, but the next scoop brought something he couldn’t ignore. The skull rose and, as the digger turned and the bucket released, it fell earthwards again, landing on top of the mound of displaced earth as though to watch its own grave being excavated.

  Hugh, earplugs in place, didn’t hear Mike’s initial shout, nor did he appear to register his frantically waving hands indicating something was wrong. The noise of the digger seemed to rise with Mike’s distress, as though the sudden and obvious presence of death had resulted in a crescendo.

  ‘Stop!’ Mike screamed.

  This time it worked. Hugh emerged from whatever daydream he’d been having. The engine was shut down. Mike dropped his waving arms and pointed at the white object sitting atop the pile of earth and stones.

  Hugh Clouston hadn’t seemed perturbed by what he’d unearthed.

  ‘Orkney’s covered with Neolithic graves, but we’ll have to report it. The Kirkwall police will want to take a look.’

  The call to the police station made, Mike watched as the digger and its unfazed driver departed, trundling out of the school gates. Back now in the kitchen he immediately went for the whisky, his hand shaking as he poured himself a glass.

  I had no choice, he told himself again. Not with Hugh here.

  Now the police would come to Sanday. They’d visit the schoolhouse. Ask him questions. They’d want to know who he was. And why he’d come here.

  2

  Detective Inspector Erling Flett had taken the rather garbled call as he sat in his office contemplating the fallout from the weekend in Kirkwall, which had included a couple of fights in the town centre and a domestic, all three fuelled by alcohol. Orkney wasn’t a hotbed of crime, but it had its problems as all communities do, and consumption of alcohol and its related activities was one of them.

  That wasn’t to say that the islands had never featured in high-profile cases. Barely months had passed since mainland Orkney had formed part of a major murder enquiry when a young woman’s body had been discovered in the Ring of Brodgar. Fortunately, the perpetrator had not proved to be local, although the notoriety of what became known as the Stonewarrior case had certainly put Orkney and its Neolithic stone circle even more prominently on the map than it had been before.

  Tourists visiting the islands, either by their own volition or via the huge cruise liners regularly docking at Kirkwall, came to view the Neolithic sites, which were plentiful. That particular case, which had become an internet sensation, had merely added a little modern-day spice to Neolithic history.

  Erling asked the man to repeat what he’d just said, a little more slowly this time.

  ‘My name’s Mike Jones. I’m doing up an old schoolhouse on the island of Sanday. I hired Hugh Clouston to break up the ground at the back of the building. He dug up a human skull.’

  ‘Is Hugh there with you?’

  ‘He is. Do you want to speak to him?’

  Erling indicated he did. Unearthing the past in Orkney was an everyday occurrence and probably something Hugh, who he knew, had met before.

  When Hugh came on the line, Erling asked him exactly what had happened.

  After Hugh had said his piece, Erling asked, ‘How far down was this?’

  ‘Maybe three feet below the tar,’ Hugh estimated. ‘I stopped when I brought up the skull. There’s another bone. Maybe a leg bone.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s human?’

  ‘I’d say so. And small.’

  ‘A child?’ Erling said.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Can you secure the area until I can get out to you?’

  ‘Sure thing. I’ll put a tarpaulin over it.’

  Erling asked to speak to Mike again.

  ‘How long have you been renovating?’

  ‘Since spring.’

  ‘Have you found anything else?’

  The hesitant silence suggested he might have.

  ‘Well?’ Erling encouraged him.

  ‘Nothing in the grounds, no.’

  ‘Inside the building?’

  Another hesitation. ‘I found something in the loft. Strips of old muslin made into flowers. I took one to the museum and Sam Flett urged me to put it back where I’d found it. He was adamant about that.’

  ‘Did Sam say why?’

  ‘He said they represented the souls of dead children.’

  Erling waited until the other passengers had climbed into the tiny island hopper, then took the last seat nearest the pilot. The woman with the fiddle case, who he recognized as a visiting music teacher, inserted her earplugs. The other passenger looked like a businessman with his briefcase and smart suit.

  Dougie, the pilot, started the engine, indicating that earplugs weren’t so much a luxury as a necessity. Particularly if you were island hopping all day like the music teacher. A few moments of loud revving saw them bumping along the tarmac past a ‘proper’-sized plane bound shortly for Edinburgh. In moments they were up, rising into a clear sky like a seagull. From the ground that’s exactly what they would look like.

  Like most Orcadians, Erling was familiar with this mode of transport. By far the quickest method of reaching the outer isles, it was wholly dependent on the weather. Mist brought the service to a halt, as did strong winds. Often he’d arrived by plane, only to return by ferry because the weather had changed.

  Today the late-October sky was clear, the wind only brisk.

  Erling turned his attention to the view.

  In truth he never tired or became blasé at this aerial sight of the archipelago he called home. Of the seventy islands, only twenty were inhabited. Sandstone formed their base, which was covered in rich fertile soil, as evidenced by the green pasture below. But mild winters didn’t mean that the cattle for which Orkney was famous wintered outside. Erling knew that well enough. On his father’s farm overlooking Scapa Flow, the kye had been housed in the big byre through the worst of the coarse winter, his job being to feed, water and clean them out. The meat they produced was second to none and world renowned. Meat, cheese and whisky, Orkney’s original exports, supplemented more recently by oil and renewable energy. And now, of course, tourism.

  Through the front window he caught sight of one of the huge liners heading out of the harbour north of Kirkwall, specially constructed to accommodate the eighty ships that called annually with 80,000 passengers and 25,000 crew. Kirkwall was now the most popular cruising port in the UK. An economic boon for the islands, but a headache at times for a mainland of only 202 square miles and its 11,000 inhabitants.

  The island they were bound for was one of the most northern ones. Its name perfectly described it. As fertile as the mainland, it had by far the best beaches. Erling had spent holidays there as a boy, staying with a distant relative of the same name who he’d called Uncle, and whose cottage overlooked miles of white sand.

  His ‘adopted’ uncle, a retired teacher and widower, now spent most of his time at the island museum, the same Sam Flett who had apparently urged Mike Jones to return the magic flower to the schoolhouse loft. Once off the phone with Mik
e, Erling had given Sam a call. Getting his answering service, he’d left a message to say he would be on the island today, and would try and call in at the museum.

  Sam wasn’t one for flights of fancy, so Mike’s story about being warned to put the magic flower, as he’d called it, back in the loft, didn’t sound like Sam Flett. Unless, of course, Sam had merely been teasing a gullible incomer.

  As the plane dropped towards the small airfield at Hammerbrake, north of the strip of water called the Peedie Sea, Erling spotted the jeep parked alongside the hut that served as the waiting area. Then they were down and trundling along the hard-core runway. As the step arrived together with the fire safety equipment, Erling was first out to allow the others to escape the confined space behind him.

  He exchanged pleasantries with the two fire crew, then headed for the jeep.

  Erling was in little doubt that at least half the island would already know why he was here. There had been little point in asking Hugh Clouston to say nothing until he arrived. That would have had less chance of success than asking the tide not to come in. Besides, the more people who knew about the discovery, the more likely he was to acquire information.

  The schoolhouse had probably stood there for a century and the police weren’t interested in hundred-year-old remains. His intention was to confirm that they were human remains, then to bring in a team to establish just how old they were. He could have a murder enquiry on his hands, or simply another piece of Orkney’s history to interpret.

  Derek Muir, the resident Ranger, greeted him with a firm handshake. Employed to take visitors round all the island sites, he was an authority on the past and the present. He knew everyone, their forefathers, their children and grandchildren. Back in the fifties, Muir had been the most common surname in Orkney, and it still was.

  Short in stature, bristle-chinned, his face chiselled from granite, his eyes Viking blue, he could tell a tale, yet also keep his counsel when required.