A Handful of Ash

Book 3: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries

by Marsali Taylor

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Liveaboard skipper and amateur sleuth Cass Lynch is busy at marine college in Scalloway, until one night she finds an acquaintance dead in a doorway with her hand smeared with peat ash. Rumours spread of a strange ritual linked to the witches once burned in Shetland?s ancient capital, and of a horned figure abroad in the night. At first Cass believes these to be mere superstition, until there?s a second murder, and she begins to wonder if the devil really does walk in Scalloway ?

Release date: June 25, 2014

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 267

Sample

 Chapter One

You’d have heard the door slam over the sea in Faroe. Cat froze at my heels. I hesitated on the other side of the garden wall, my hand on the old-fashioned door knob. If the household was in the middle of one of those daughter/parents rows, they wouldn’t want the gardener waltzing in. Then footsteps clattered down the flagstone path. Cat leapt nimbly into the ditch and skulked among the long, yellowed grass. I stepped back just as the door flung open, and Annette tumbled out.

Yes, there had been a row. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes flashing. The wind caught her scarf as she came out of the walled garden into the sea air, and pulled one end upwards. She grabbed at it, swore, then realised I was standing there. She bit her lip, doubled her scarf with elaborate care, threaded the end through, and pulled it around her neck, grimacing as if it was too tight, then at last stood straight up to face me. Her eyes went first to the long scar running along my cheek, winced away from it and moved up to meet my eyes. ‘Hiya, Cass.’

‘Now then,’ I said, traditional Shetland style. Noo den, lass, foo’s du? How are you, what’s wrong? But we weren’t on those terms, and I didn’t want to be nosy.

She shuffled one foot, as if she wasn’t sure what to say. She was one of those china-doll girls, with a smooth complexion, groomed brows, and perfectly separated eyelashes above velvet-brown eyes. Her lipstick was glossy, a dark plum colour. She was dressed in her usual purple jacket, with a black velvet beret tipped to one side on her blonde hair. Her black skirt trailed lace like the streamers on a jellyfish. It was all too artificial for a windy morning in Scalloway.

She glanced down at Cat, slipping out of the long grass, his plume of a tail lashing, and her brow cleared. ‘He’s a bonny cat.’ She bent down to him and put out her hand. ‘Here, puss.’ His yellow eyes looked at her with disdain. He didn’t do casual caresses. She said, almost to herself, as if she’d suddenly had an idea, ‘He’s a bonny, healthy cat …’ She moved forward on her hunkers, brought her other hand forward, as if she was about to grab him, and Cat hissed and backed away.

‘He doesn’t like being picked up,’ I said.

She turned her head up with a look I couldn’t read, a mixture of defiance and apology, then stood up. The petulant frown returned. ‘You ran away from home, didn’t you? When you were much younger than me?’

‘Sixteen,’ I agreed. I didn’t want to encourage whatever daft ideas she was brewing. ‘It wasn’t thatna good idea. It’s a tough world out there.’

‘But you managed.’

‘I lived aboard tall ships, with someone else to do the cooking, and no money worries. Bed and board taken care of, at the price of climbing a mast or two daily.’ Whatever else she did, I’d bet my last shackle Annette wouldn’t run away to sea. For a start, nobody made sensible outdoor gear in her favourite Goth black with lacy frills, and her sleek hair wouldn’t last five minutes in the wind.

She fiddled with her scarf again. As it slipped, I saw there was one deep scratch and several smaller ones on her neck, as though she’d picked up someone’s cat, and it had fought to get away. No, the marks looked too big, too indented, with the shadow of a bruise around each – dog’s claws? They had two pointers, Dan and Candy, a pair of soft lumps. I couldn’t imagine them going for anyone’s throat. She saw me looking and pulled the scarf up to cover the marks. Her cheeks reddened. She looked away from me, and reached into her pocket for gloves, put them on carefully, finger after finger, then sighed. ‘They don’t understand!’ It came out as a suppressed wail. She drew a ragged breath, then continued, ‘They’re suffocating me. Why shouldn’t I go out and meet people, if I want to? If I think they can help me?’

‘No reason,’ I agreed. It wasn’t any of my business, but although what I’d heard of the rows with her parents sounded like typical teenage angst, she was eighteen, past the most dramatic stage, and well old enough to be leaving home. ‘Why don’t you get a flat for your gap year, and do what you like?’

‘I’d have to get a job first,’ she said.

From the look on her face, she wasn’t going to do that, not when Daddy was willing to keep her. She must have seen the thought, for she said, defensively, ‘It’s not that easy. My degree’s going to be research-based, so I’m waiting for something in my field, as useful experience.’

At her age I’d cleared tables and washed dishes while I waited for another ship. She drew an angry breath. ‘Anyway, I think I’m old enough to decide where I can go, and who I can see.’

And you know perfectly well, I thought to myself, that it’s someone you shouldn’t be seeing … There was something strung up about her, as if she was determined to come to what she knew full well was the wrong decision. She glared as her father’s dark-grey BMW slipped out of Ladysmith Drive and turned left towards Lerwick. Then her face smoothed to uncertain and young. She turned her eyes towards the sea, bit her lip, then looked back at me. Her hand went back up to the scarf. ‘Cass, do you ever feel as if you’ve lived before? Like, you know, another life?’

‘Reincarnation?’ I shook my head. ‘Do you?’

‘Sometimes.’ She tugged at the scarf again. ‘This – it’s choking me.’

I wasn’t thirty yet, but she was making me feel like my own grandmother. ‘It’s not any good running away,’ I said. ‘I didn’t run away from. I ran to. I needed the sea. Listen, if you’d like to come and talk, you know where I live?’ I turned and pointed along the shore, towards the marina that jutted out in front of the glass and tiles of the Fisheries college. ‘That’s my boat, Khalida, the little white one with the sails still on. Just give a shout from the marina gate, and I’ll come and open up.’

She looked relieved, as if she thought I could solve all her problems. ‘I’ll maybe do that.’

‘Any time,’ I said. ‘I’m in most evenings.’

Her eyes went from my face to over my shoulder, and flared in alarm. I turned my head. Three girls of around Annette’s age were coming along the sea road towards us. They were dressed in that steampunk style, leather and flounces mixed together, in shades of grey and black, like a Victorian photograph. The style extended to their make up of spiky eyelashes and black lipstick. I’d seen them hanging around the corner just short of the shop, indistinct through a cloud of tobacco smoke, victims of the recession. Shetland used to have jobs for anyone who was willing to work, but now the council was slashing front-line troops, and people who had jobs as home helps, care-centre workers and office staff were clinging on to them. Furthermore, the first casualty of the Education Department’s rush to save five million pounds had been the secondary department of Scalloway’s Junior High School. Now all the teenagers were taken by bus to the big school in Lerwick, and the small army of cleaners who used to meet the home-going pupils had been made redundant.

These girls knew Annette. The tallest of them was giving her a hard glare from under her dye-black fringe. Annette looked back, pleading at first, then her eyes hardened and her lips set in a straight line. The tallest girl lifted one hand, and rubbed her thumb against her first two fingers in the universal ‘money’ gesture. The other two sneered.

Annette’s chin went up. Without saying goodbye, she swung around and set off along the sea front towards the shop, shouldering through them. Her heeled boots clacked on the pavement. I watched her go for a moment, then glanced back at the other girls. The tallest girl’s hand fell slowly. Her look would have stopped a seagull in flight. The black, glossy leather, the grey frills of skirt, the poised attention of the turned heads, gave them the look of a trio of hooded crows sizing up a dying sheep. They were an ill-viket trio. If I was Annette, I’d be watching my back.

I had a garden to clear. I turned away from the sea, and pushed the heavy wooden door open. Cat slid out of the ditch and bounded in ahead of me, plumed tail held high, showing the paler grey underneath. The starving kitten I’d found on the hillside three months ago was now a glossy young cat, slate grey on his back, with darker guard hairs, and pale stripes leading down to a grey-pink belly and neat white paws. At Brae, he’d slept happily on board while I was out, because he’d had my friend Anders’ pet Rat with him. I’d tried leaving him on board alone when I’d first come to Scalloway, but he’d clawed gouges in my woodwork in his efforts to get out. When I left the hatch open for him, he’d bounded along the dock and wriggled under the wire fence to follow me. Now he charged around Kate’s garden with Dan and Candy while we worked; otherwise, he came to college. On classroom days, he curled up in my lap, and when it was an at-sea day, I left him with Nate, who worked in the college café. It was fine and warm in the cupboard off the kitchen, to say nothing of the occasional bit of fish, so I hoped he’d still want to come home to an unheated boat as the temperature dropped.

Inside the gate, the flagged path stretched up between sycamore trees to the old house, grey stone, and built with that early eighteenth century square look, like a house drawn by a child: steps to central porch, with door in the middle, two windows each side, three on the next floor, a rectangle of tiled roof, a chimney stack trailing smoke at each side. At least, that was how I’d drawn houses; I wondered if my friend Inga’s toddler, Peerie Charlie, drew houses like that, or if his drawings were of modern Shetland houses, made of coloured wood, with triple-insulation picture windows, a small turbine by their side, and solar panels on the roof.

This house had belonged to the last of the lairds, the Scott family who’d dominated Scalloway life for five centuries. It had been sold after his death to a couple from England, and I’d seen the notice in the shop: ‘Wanted, person for active gardening, through October, hours to be arranged.’

Naturally, I’d asked my pal Magnie about them. He’d phoned an old whaling crony in Scalloway, and got all the information. ‘The man’s Peter Otway, and they’re been up here for ten years or so. He’s in his mid-forties. He’s the manager o’ the RBS in Lerwick, and they rented there, then when this big house came on the market, they bought it and moved to Scalloway. The wife’s called Kate. He must be fifteen year younger as what she is. They hae just the one lass. They came up when she was just out o’ the primary school. He’s one o’ these folk who’s involved in aathing. You ken. He’s in the Rotary, and the Masons too, I’ve no doubt, though I wouldna ken meself, and he gengs oot wi’ a squad at Up Helly Aa.’

The Lerwick Up Helly Aa, the biggest of Shetland’s fire festivals, involved a thousand guizers with flaming torches.  It was men only, you needed to have lived in the town for five years, and getting into a squad was strictly by invitation.

‘The manager o’ the bank, that’s aristocracy in Lerook.’ Magnie’s voice gave the town name its full blast of country scorn. ‘He’s been right in the heart o’ organising the new museum and all.’ This, as it involved seafaring, was more acceptable.

‘The Shetland Bus Museum?’ I’d seen it from the road, a big, red-wood building, but hadn’t yet been inside.

‘The Scalloway Museum,’ Magnie emphasised. ‘It has the whole history o’ the place. ‘There’s a prehistoric ard, and a Viking bracelet – well, a replica, the Edinburgh museum took the real one – and stuff about witches, and the herring fishery, as well as the story o’ the Norwegian men.’

I should have remembered that what a Shetlander doesn’t know about his own history’s not worth knowing. ‘I must go and look,’ I said. The Shetland Bus men were my heroes, young Norwegians in fishing boats who’d run arms and radio parts into occupied Norway, and brought refugees out.

‘That you should, lass. They’re done it brawly well. So he was involved wi’ that as well. The wife doesna work, she does painting, bonny peerie pictures o’ flowers, in these bright modern paints.’ Magnie himself had a weakness for the pictures his mother favoured: Victorian prints of a child with ringlets holding a kitten. ‘So she’s decided to get the gairding in order afore the winter sets in? It’s a great, rambling area just filled wi’ trees and brambles.’

‘Active gardening, right opposite where Khalida’s moored, and at times I can fit in around the college,’ I said, and dialled their number.

‘What gardening have you done?’ was Kate’s first question, once I’d introduced myself.

I’d thought out my answer. ‘None,’ I replied promptly, ‘but spending my life at sea means I’m quick to learn and very good at following orders. I’ll do far less damage than someone who only thinks she knows about gardening.’

She laughed out at that, and we agreed on me doing as much of the heavy clearing as I could before Bonfire Night, the first Saturday in November.

Inga had found it very funny, ‘Given that you’ve done your best to stay away from the land since you got your first boat.’ In spite of that, I was enjoying myself. I was used to fresh air, and the occasional shower of rain didn’t bother me. Working for Kate got me outside, away from the strip-lighting and recycled air of the college, away from the constant admonitions-for-two-year-olds: Have you washed your hands? Don’t use two when one will do! The only notices aboard ship were serious ones, so the constant visual drivel was getting on my nerves.

Kate was standing in the doorway, a dog at each side. Everything about her said ‘county’ – the dark brown cords, the green bodywarmer over a jumper and polo shirt, the scarf held round her neck with a cameo clip, the green rubber boots. They didn’t keep horses here, but you could bet she’d grown up with them, and could back a horsebox into a tight space as easily as I’d back a dinghy trailer. Her shoulder-length hair was bright and glossy as a newly fallen conker, and held back with an Alice band, sixties style. She had an outdoor complexion, with faint red veins running under the skin, and hazel eyes. One look told you that anything she organised would run like clockwork.

Her eyes were on the gate, but looking beyond it, to where Annette had gone. The dogs saw us first; Candy, the black and white one, bounded forward from a standing start, leapt over Cat, turned in a circle, and began sniffing at his back. The male, Dan, rose more slowly, shook, and strolled forward to greet us. Then Kate turned and focused on us.

‘He’s not quite right yet,’ she said, watching Dan. ‘We still think it was food poisoning. Maybe we’re about to find a half-eaten dead sheep in the wilderness. He even refused his walk last night. Peter was talking of calling the vet out, but we decided to see how he was in the morning.’ She straightened her shoulders and came down the steps. ‘All set for another hard session of undergrowth clearing?’

‘All set,’ I agreed.

We were clearing a patch of ground where the Japanese roses, tough as herring-gulls and spined like sea-urchins, had flung their suckers up through the grass for two yards around the parent plant. I’d come to enjoy these land colours: the primrose leaves held out from the rain-black stems, the shiny damson-red hips like miniature pomegranates. Here and there a bird had torn one open to show the yellow flesh and seeds within. There was a clump of autumn crocus among the central stems, veined violet globes on transparent stems, the petals shut against the cold.

It was satisfying work: the feel of the root giving, the speed you could clear a group of suckers when first one, then another, and another came free, and you had a whole bush in your gloved hand. Cat scampered about with Candy, leaping over him, pouncing on leaves, chasing trails of grass as they pulled through with the roots, and retrieving the jingly ball that Kate had bought him. It was covered with tinsel, and flat enough for him to carry in his mouth, so when you flung it, he’d play with it where it landed for a bit, then bring it back to be thrown again, just like a dog. Candy would join in that too, and where it was a good throw she usually got it first, but Cat would be on it before her if it went only ten yards, and bringing it back while she circled round him. She’d tried, just once, to pick him up like a puppy, but he wasn’t having that one.

When we’d cleared back to the centre bush, Kate headed off with the barrowful of suckers, while I raked the brittle bluebell stems and gave the grass a last stamp, for luck. The bonfire was at East Voe, on the other side of the harbour, so she had to pile the suckers into a salmon feed bag in the back of her estate car and drive them over. The burning space was already piled high with old chairs and pallets and what looked like a shed roof. It would be a good blaze, come a week on Saturday.

‘Coffee and tabnabs,’ Kate said at last, leaning the emptied barrow back against the wall. It was part of our routine, a ten-minute tea-break and a biscuit to give us energy for the next onslaught. Cat, Candy, and I followed her into the kitchen, where the oil-fuelled Rayburn glowed gently, with the kettle tickling on the back burner, and Dan’s brown and white length sprawled out in front of it. The room smelt of warmth, coffee, and dog. Kate moved the kettle to the hotplate and fetched the biscuit tin while I got out the mugs and dished coffee into each, and Cat curled up in his bubblewrap box by the Rayburn. Then we sat down one each side of the wooden kitchen table and relaxed.

I’d taken to Kate straight away. We’d not become mates during our tea-breaks, the age difference was too wide, but I’d learned a lot about her. She’d grown up in the Cotswolds, and her mother had been very proud of her garden: ‘She had real green fingers, you just gave her a root and it’d grow.’ She’d met Peter at a function in the children’s home she’d volunteered at; he’d been one of the trustees, and they’d caught each other’s eyes while one of the other trustees was making a particularly pompous speech, and somehow that had been that – ‘Although it took him nearly a year to get over me being almost twice his age – he was just twenty-three, and I was in my late thirties.’ She’d learned to entertain businessmen, instead of the hunt set – ‘Slightly less interested in the quality of the wine, and thought a pretty presentation was more important than a quantity of good, filling, warming food.’ Her face had softened. ‘And then Annette came along. She was the most beautiful baby, with a head of golden curls –’ Nothing had been too good for their child: a black Shetland pony called Ricky, dancing lessons, the baton-twirling club, private tutoring for the subjects she found hard in school. She’d got reasonable Highers, and was waiting for her university place. ‘So we can get back to our bachelor days!’ They still seemed a pretty stable couple (in so far as you dare say that of any couple, these days), in spite of the age difference. He was out all day, of course, but made the six-mile drive from Lerwick for lunch, and rarely stayed late in the office. His evenings were devoted to the museum, or socialising at the Rotary and the Legion, while she painted in her wooden studio hut by the house. She was a regular exhibitor in Bonhoga gallery out at Weisdale, and I’d managed to hitch my way over to see her recent show. That had been flowers, as Magnie had said, and most of them had a red dot on the label.

Equally, she’d learned about me: brought up in Shetland, the only daughter of an Irish oil worker and a French opera singer. When I was a teenager, Dad was asked to oversee a new construction in the Gulf, and I’d been sent to Maman’s elegant town flat in Poitiers. I’d hated it; I was homesick for the sea, for my fellow sailors, and I’d emptied my bank account and run back to Scotland, via a berth on a Russian ship, Mir, in the Cutty Sark Tall Ships’ Race. After that, I’d wandered the high seas on tall ships, and taught dinghy sailing in Med resorts. I’d crossed the Atlantic with my lover, Alain – but I didn’t talk about that, nor about his death on the way home. My weight of guilt was lifting, slowly, but it hadn’t gone yet. Then I’d found my Khalida, lying neglected in a Greek marina, sailed her to Norway, and come home at last to Shetland, and reconciliation with Dad, with Maman, who were now themselves mending their sixteen-year separation, while I took the qualifications I’d missed as a teenager, so that I could be an officer on a tall ship.

Kate stirred her coffee and took a second Kit Kat. ‘Did you meet Annette on your way in?’

I nodded.

Kate sighed. ‘I just don’t understand it. We used to get on so well – she was such a sweet little girl, and of course being the only one she got buckets of attention. We used to do everything together. I thought she’d always listen to me, at least …’ She got up and went to the sink, face turned away from me. ‘I think it’s a boyfriend, and one we wouldn’t approve of. What really worries me, Cass, is these uneven moods, flaring out at the least thing. I’m afraid she’s taking drugs. You can see she’s not happy, guilty-looking … do you think it could be that?’

‘I don’t know much about the drugs scene,’ I said. ‘It’s not something you see much in the sailing world. Well, for a start you can’t afford them, because any spare money goes on the boat.’ I’d got £4,000 from the job as skipper of a replica longship for a film. If I could live on £3,000 for this college year, the last thousand would go on a new suit of sails for Khalida. ‘And then you have to be alert at sea, you need all the senses you’ve got, and none making you see things that aren’t there.’ On a moonlit night, alone on deck, with the sea in a great saucer all around you, it was easy to see things. Once I could have sworn I saw the ghost of a long-gone square-rigger, with tattered sails and dead men pulling on the ropes. Then the moon went behind a cloud, and I was left alone on the sea that glinted like coal, wondering what was out there, until the moon returned to show empty water.

‘There’s a big drugs scene in Shetland, among the young ones,’ Kate said. She began twiddling her Kit Kat paper into a silver cup. ‘I’d hoped Annette was too old and too sensible to be drawn into it, but you never can tell. Parents always say that: “We thought our child was too sensible.” It just takes the wrong company.’

‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, diffidently, for after all it was none of my business, ‘who the wrong company is?’

She shook her head. ‘There’s a boy from the college who seems rather keen on her, fair-haired, rather protuberent eyes, quiet. James something. He’s phoned a couple of times.’

‘James Leask,’ I said. That explained how Annette knew I’d run away to sea. He was on the engineering component of the rather mixed course I was doing. ‘He wouldn’t lead anyone astray, nor be led himself. He’s one of the quiet, stubborn ones.’

She nodded. ‘That’s the impression I got too. She met up with him a couple of times this week – let me see, on Saturday, and then they went out for a meal at the Scalloway Hotel on Monday. So I was hoping …’

I thought, but didn’t say, that maybe Annette had a reason for feeling suffocated, if she was watched as closely as this. When I’d been Annette’s age, Dad had been busy with his new oil installation, and Maman had been in Poitiers. I’d been on board Sorlandet all summer, then on a Caribbean beach teaching dinghy sailing all winter, and neither of them who knew who I met, or how often, or where. They still didn’t, but at least bridges were being built. ‘James wouldn’t do drugs, I’m sure of it.’

‘Anyway,’ Kate said, ‘she’s off to some party at Hallowe’en, and that’s what this latest row was about.’ She gave me a sideways look, as if she was trying to assess whether I was a rabid anti-Hallowe’en fundamentalist. ‘Peter thinks it’s all going too far, dressing up as devils and witches, and skulls everywhere, all that. He was disgusted with that silly Hallowe’en play – did you see it?’

I shook my head.

‘It was just a bit of fun,’ Kate said. ‘It was about this village where the dead came alive every 31st October. It was the minister’s son, Nate, that got it together for the Drama Festival, last March. He played one of the dead, a zombie, and she played one half of a honeymooning couple, and he carried her off. It was very silly, and they played it for laughs, and got a trophy for being the “most entertaining”. I thought it was harmless, but Peter was angry about it, said she should have shown us the play first.’

‘I know Nate,’ I said. ‘He works at the café in the college, and looks after Cat on days I’m at sea.’

‘Peter doesn’t like him.’ Kate sighed. ‘He’s turning into a Daily Mail reader. He says the boy has a brain that he’s wasting, and no good ever came of someone taking a job that was beneath their intelligence. Then he starting going on about Branwell Brontë, when I could have sworn he wouldn’t even have known who Charlotte was.’

‘What had Branwell to do with it?’ I asked, amused.

‘Search me. Wasn’t he supposed to be the really clever one who was going to make the world sit up, then he died a drunkard, and the unimportant girls became famous?’

‘I’ll take a good look at Nate this afternoon,’ I promised, ‘and tell you if there are signs of a neglected genius.’

‘You do that.’ She tilted her wrist to check her watch, and stood up. ‘Back to those suckers. I’m getting so excited about this garden, Cass. You know how there’s the remains of terracing? Well, I was standing at the door, yesterday evening, just looking, and the sun caught something red among the roses – a withered paeony leaf. It’s like digging on a treasure island.’

I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I did wonder how the bulbs that the suckers brought up with them would look in spring, a drift of snowdrops under the roses, a yellow ribbon of daffodils down each side of the flagged path, and bluebells making a sky haze under the sycamores.

We worked away until the click of the wooden door told us it was lunchtime. The dogs went barking forward. Peter came striding up the path towards us, a black plastic bin bag in each hand. ‘Hello, girls,’ he called. ‘You’re making good progress.’

He said that every day.

‘Peter!’ Kate said, as if she was surprised to see him. ‘Is that really the time?’ She said that every day too.

Peter didn’t look like a banker, which I supposed was just as well in the present climate, with ‘banker’ being synonymous for ‘scum’. Even with the dark grey suit and old school tie, you’d have said a naval man, or . . .