Death at a Shetland Festival

by Marsali Taylor

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

'This series is a must-read for anyone who loves the sea, or islands, or joyous, intricate story-telling.' ANN CLEEVES

Crowds are gathered for a concert at Shetland's renowned folk music festival when there's a shocking discovery - international folk legend Fintan Foley has been stabbed backstage.

Sailing sleuth Cass Lynch and her partner DI Gavin Macrae are in the audience and must untangle a complicated case where nothing is quite what it seems. Cass soon discovers that Foley's smiling stage persona concealed links with Shetland. He'd worked here in the 80s, the days when oil brought wealth to the islands.

Has a long-buried secret risen to the surface - and will it make Cass a target for a cold-blooded killer?

Atmospheric and gripping, Death at a Shetland Festival is the latest instalment in the much-loved Shetland Mystery series by Marsali Taylor. Perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves and Elly Griffiths.

Release date: May 9, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Thursday 28th April

LW 02.04 (0.63m);

HW 08.15 (1.92m);

LW 14.32 (0.34m);

HW 20.52 (1.88m)

Moonrise 04.17; sunrise 05.09; moonset 16.46; sunset 20.54.

Waning crescent moon.

I found the diary while I was sorting out books for the parish sale.

I didn’t realise at first that it was a diary. It was in a box along with Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, a sheaf of pony books and exactly the same hardback edition of Shadowed Valley which I remembered reading at school. I was taking them out, flipping pages to dislodge the dust, and stacking them on the table we’d allotted for children’s books. The diary was in a dull gold slipcase, back facing outwards, and it was only when I got to it that I realised what it was: an embossed hardback with 1981 on the spine.

I withdrew it from the slipcase and held it a moment, looking at it. The gold continued in an elaborate border on the red leather of the front. Whoever’d given the writer this Christmas present had inconsiderately failed to get the name stamped on the cover.

I could see straight off that it’d been kept for half of the year, unlike any diaries I’d ever been given, which had trailed to a halt in the third week of January. The edges of the pages were bubbled with memorabilia stored inside.

I looked up and around at the other folk working: Brian organising the raffle, Celia among cakes, Ritva and Kay laughing as they unwrapped bric-a-brac. I couldn’t remember who’d dumped this particular box of books among the heap of boxes. Given its position at the back of the stack, it could easily have been there already when I arrived, sent into the Parish Rooms by anonymous hands as someone passed on their way to work. There wasn’t anything on the box to help me: no name and house name scrawled in thick black marker on the outside, as if it had been a delivery from a local shop.

I turned the diary over once more in my hands, feeling the smoothness of the red binding, then reluctantly opened it. The inner cover had a 1981 year planner, unhelpfully blank. Public holidays, 1981. Personal Notes, blank; this writer hadn’t felt the urge to fill in their full name, address, phone number and shoe size. Profit or return tables, it added at the bottom of the page, were included at the back of the diary. I tried the back. The accounts were blank too.

I put the diary back into its slipcase and laid it on top of my jacket. Privacy mattered on board ship, where there were so many of you squished into a small space, and interfering with someone else’s possessions was taboo. I absolutely couldn’t read someone else’s diary, even to find out who to return it to. Maybe I’d find the name in among the books it had come with. I flipped through several, and found Angie in Ballet Shoes, Karen in A Pony for Jill and Peter in Wonders of the Universe. As I’d suspected, Shadowed Valley was stamped BRAE JHS, my old school. I betted S4 English pupils were still reading it. I set it with the diary to return sometime I was passing.

I waited till the three o’clock pause for tea, then buttonholed Father David, the diary in my hands. ‘I found this in among a box of children’s books. You don’t have any idea who brought them in?’

‘Which box, and where was it?’

I bent over and picked the box up, turning it to show him, then put it down. ‘The books had names written inside: Angie, Peter, Karen.’

He considered the names for a moment, then shook his head.

‘I think it might have arrived earlier today, or even yesterday – it was at the back. There’s no name on the information page, so I don’t know who to return it to.’

He took the diary from me, slid it out of its case as I had done, felt the weight of it and nodded. ‘I’ll ask around. You keep it for the meantime, so it doesn’t get lost in among this chaos, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.’

I told Gavin about the diary that evening, as we were driving up over the alps towards Voe, Brae and beyond to Hillswick Hall for the opening night of the annual Shetland Folk Festival. It was a blast from the past for me, because Maman, Dad and I had gone to the Folk Festival every year throughout my childhood, and after Maman had left for France, Dad and I had still gone to all four nights. There were concert dances out in the country for Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then on Sunday night all the visiting acts played one after the other in four venues in Lerwick. Dad had liked the Irish fiddlers and singers, which took him back to his Dublin roots; Gavin was looking forward to hearing Scottish players.

‘Father David’s going to try and find out who brought the box in. Somebody’ll know. Then I can put it back to its owner. I wouldn’t want my teenager heartburnings to go public.’

‘I can imagine them,’ Gavin teased. ‘Dreamt of Robin Knox-Johnston. Up, breakfast, took boat out. Picnic on board. Interesting sail including several capsizes but nothing broken. Pizza for tea before watching sailing at the Olympics on the telly.’

I changed gear carefully and went around the blind corner at a suitable speed. ‘You must be joking.’ I gave a quick glance sideways, and managed to spot the pointed bill of the nesting raingoose on the little island of the loch. ‘She’s there, the raingoose. On the island.’

Gavin leaned back to see. ‘Good. Did you ken we have sixty per cent of the world’s red-throated divers nesting here?’

‘Really?’ I thought about that for a moment. ‘So when we think there are plenty, we’ve got what there is?’

Gavin nodded. ‘I was talking to one of the RSPB folk. It’s rather frightening what percentage of marine birds are right here. One major pollution incident at Sullom Voe oil terminal would be a disaster for the world’s populations.’

‘They have booms and things to contain it if it happened.’ I negotiated past the loch and round the slalom curves to Voe, and added, ‘They didn’t televise the sailing of the Olympics, just endless gymnastics and ice skating.’

‘Going back to your diary,’ Gavin said, ‘you could read the first couple of pages, and see if that gives you any clues.’

‘It probably wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Her family’s first names, her friends, the TV they watched or boys they fancied. Besides, I can’t. I really can’t. It’s an invasion of privacy. You know what it’s like on board ship – you can’t do anything without the whole crew knowing. The space in your head is all you have.’ I slowed to get the car smoothly round the blind corner before Lower Voe and got us safely onto the main road north before finishing, ‘I have names from the books in the box. Angie, Karen, Peter. Probably from Brae – there was a school book among them.’

‘Well, it’s a mystery for you to get your teeth into,’ Gavin said. ‘After all, now your boat’s all ready for the season and you’ve sailed everywhere worth sailing to, you’d have to be twiddling your thumbs or doing housework to keep you busy for the last week of your leave, unless you fancy trying to create an escape-proof run for the hens before we start planting the vegetables.’

‘I’ll give it a go, but they’re first cousins to Houdini. It might be easier to fence the vegetables. How high can hens fly?’

‘Six to eight feet, even with their wings clipped. Particularly the bantams.’

‘Six to eight feet? Two metres?’ I thought of the aerodynamic shape of our little flock, and found it hard to believe. ‘How about a low fence with a net over the veg?’

‘Wire, maybe. I wouldn’t want them to get their feet tangled in it while I was at work.’ He relaxed into silence, and I concentrated on textbook driving: along the main road to Brae, past the marina, between the North Sea and the Atlantic at Mavis Grind, where my retired fisherman friend Magnie remembered men rolling their boats across the narrow neck of land on wooden rollers, exactly as the Vikings had.

It was a bonny evening, still light in spite of the fleece-grey sky, and with the first grass bright in the parks of grazing sheep and attendant lambs. When we got further north we were into scattald, with the hill sheep taking advantage of the richer grass at the side of the road. I slowed down again, keeping a sharp eye open for lamb on one side of the road, ewe on the other, which usually meant that at the last minute the lamb would panic and dash right in front of us.

‘Did you manage to get in touch with Will?’ I asked. Gavin’s Vancouver cousin was in a band at the Folk Festival, playing at Hillswick tonight, and I was looking forward to meeting him: he was supposed to be ‘so like Gavin he could shave by him.’

Gavin nodded. ‘A text this morning. See you tonight.’

I smiled. ‘The usual effusive Scottish male interaction.’

‘I’ll get all the news in person.’

We came through Urafirth in good order, past the curve of sea with the sword leaves of siggies showing lime green against the dark, glossy marsh marigold leaves, past the school. I slowed down to approach Hillswick Hall. They’d had works done since last I was here, a new access road fifty metres short of the building which opened into a spacious car park with red gravel underfoot. It was already three-quarters full, partly due to the bus with a Folk Festival banner in the window – the transport for the visiting artistes. A cloud of smoke beside it highlighted a couple of band members topping up their nicotine before heading into the hall. I backed into a space by the fence and switched off the engine with a sigh of relief. It was the furthest I’d driven our shared new car, a sky-blue Ford Fiesta, and though it was easier to drive than Gavin’s Land Rover, and much lighter on fuel, it still needed far more concentration than sailing Khalida, where my hands and feet moved automatically. I flexed my shoulders, gave the keys to Gavin for driving home, and got out.

We’d arrived in good time. The Shetland habit was to be fifteen minutes early for a concert, if not twenty, and another half-dozen cars arrived in the time it took us to walk to the wooden porch at this end of the hall. It was a spacious building, refurbished with community fundraising topped up by the Council grants made possible by the oil fund, and further refurbished by EU grants. The porch was plastered with Shetland Folk Festival logo posters.

I was waiting behind Gavin as he got the tickets out of his sporran when a voice I recognised gave an uninhibited shout in French from behind me: ‘Hé, Cass! What the devil are you doing here?’

I spun round to face the Folk Festival bus and saw Olivier and Alexandre grinning at me. They’d been the musician duo on board my own tall ship, Sørlandet, for the Tall Ships race five years ago. It was Olivier who’d shouted. He had the most heart-stoppingly Byronic looks ever granted to a fiddle and vocals man, which he used to good effect in sentimental ballads, but he was of solidly Cape Breton fisherman ancestry and two months spent on board with him had taught me that he had the sensitivity of a long-keeled yacht in reverse gear. It was Alexandre, tall, plump, lank-haired, the band’s joker, guitar and keyboard player, who had the romantic soul; who arranged the meltingly loving ballads which Olivier sang so beautifully, while Alexandre got landed with jokey stuff about soldiers going to war or playing tricks on each other. Olivier had flung himself up the rigging at every opportunity, and Alexandre joined him there to sing when we were in port, but he’d preferred learning the mathematical intricacies of sextant navigation. I opened my arms and hugged them both, then added a kiss on each cheek for Alexandre. ‘Quelle surprise! I wasn’t expecting you either.’ I cast my mind back to the brief glance I’d given the brochure as we’d booked our tickets back in February. I’d registered the French-Canadian band that Gavin’s cousin was in, but not looked at the rest of the line-up. ‘You’ve made the big time at last, then. Congratulations!’ I gestured at Gavin. ‘My partner, Gavin.’

Olivier’s mouth dropped open. Alexandre stared, glanced back at me, at Gavin again, then gave a disbelieving oath in thickest Canadien, which I hoped Gavin wouldn’t understand, as I’d learned on board Sørlandet that most of them were variations on sacred things. Gavin raised an eyebrow and waited. I could see he guessed where this was leading. Alexandre and Olivier looked at each other, then began laughing. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ Alexandre explained. He nodded to Gavin, held out his hand to shake and went into English. ‘There’s one in our band who looks just like you.’

‘He’s there.’ Olivier made a beckoning gesture towards the side of the hall, where there was a fire door standing open, with a cluster of musicians around it, and shouted again. ‘Hey, Will, come and see, we’ve found your twin.’

The man who turned had hair exactly the same russet as Gavin’s, but tipped with blond in a stripe down the centre. Will had Gavin’s level brows and long mouth, and Gavin’s nose as it would have been if he hadn’t benkled it by playing rugby in his youth. He smiled and called a greeting in Gaelic. Gavin was already walking forward, kilt swinging, hand out to clap him on the shoulder. I got ‘Welcome to Shetland’, then his Gaelic became too fast for me to follow. They both laughed, and Gavin swung round to me. ‘Cass, meet my cousin Will Macrae.’ He put an arm around my shoulders to draw me forward. ‘Will, my partner, Cass, who’s Acting First Mate on board the Norwegian tall ship Sørlandet.’ His arm tightened; he smiled at me. ‘And lined up for actual mate on board Shetland’s Swan, once she’s worked out her notice.’

I couldn’t help staring as much as Alexandre and Olivier. You really would have taken them for twins, except that Will was in his late twenties to Gavin’s thirty-six. Brothers, no question. ‘It’s incredible,’ I said. ‘What’s your exact relationship?’

‘We worked it out when you were over,’ Will said, looking at Gavin. ‘Third cousins once removed. Your great-grandfather was my great-great-grandfather’s brother, is that right?’

Gavin nodded. ‘Both born in the 1880s, and yours emigrated to Canada after the Great War.’

‘And the likeness carried over a hundred years,’ I said, marvelling.

Gavin nodded. ‘I’m the image of my grandfather, and he was the image of his. We have a photo of the family, and all the boys are peas in a pod. My father was the odd man out, tall, with dark hair, like my brother Kenny.’ He turned back to Will. ‘You’ll need to come and have lunch with us while you’re here, and we can catch up on all the family gossip.’

Will grinned. ‘Oh, man, I know all that. Your mother writes to my mother, beautiful old-fashioned letters with the news of the entire clan. My mother treasures them. But I’d love to come and visit. Let me get this concert over, then we can look at the schedule for when we’re free.’

‘And you must come too,’ I said to Alexandre. Olivier had wandered off, his fleeting atttention span already on something else. ‘And Olivier. Come and see my land life.’

His hand enclosed mine in a warm clasp. ‘You’re happy?’

I nodded.

‘That’s good. I’d like to, very much. But now, we’d better get backstage where we belong.’ He swung an arm round Gavin’s cousin and steered him off towards the fire door. We showed our tickets, hung up our coats on the line of pegs in the lobby and went into the hall proper. The entrance was at the side of the stage, and it was surprisingly intimidating to walk into a hall of people sitting with their faces turned towards us. I straightened my spine and headed for chairs in the middle of the middle. We squeezed past the woman in the aisle seat who’d come there first and prepared to enjoy ourselves.

My first thought was that it was all more professional than I remembered from twenty years ago. Most of the stage back wall was covered with a printed Shetland Folk Festival banner, black with blue writing and the fiddle logo. A keyboard, several chairs and microphones on stands stood in front of it, and a snake’s wedding of black cables led off the stage and along the floor to a seriously expensive mixing desk. The chairs were in rows, instead of set up in tables, as I remembered them – but then, in those days the country events were dances, with the artistes staying on to enjoy themselves, and lodged in local houses, where the partying continued all night. This was a plain concert and the rows were already three-quarters filled. Given the length of the queue at the bar, a mix of visitors and locals in best ganseys, I reckoned the whole audience must be here already.

Gavin had picked up a programme on his way in, neatly pocket-sized. I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through it. Local artistes, advertisements, visiting artistes, directions to country venues and a pull-out at-a-glance guide to the weekend. He stopped at that page. ‘Here we are: Hillswick. The local act is Ethan and Debs Gifford.’ He flipped back a couple of pages. ‘A mother and son duo from Mangaster, traditional fiddle with a modern twist.’

‘Ethan Gifford,’ I repeated. ‘I know the name . . . oh, he’s one of our sailors, of course he is.’

The woman next to me saw me looking and nodded, with that unmistakeable air of a proud parent who was determined to talk. ‘Yea, yea, he’s been going to the sailing for twartree years now. That’s my daughter and grandson.’ She didn’t look old enough to have a grandson going on stage professionally, but now I looked I realised I should know her, for she’d come along to fundraising events, taken her turn at the barbecue and clapped loudly at prize-givings. With an effort, I even managed her name: Jennifer. ‘It’s Ethan’s first Festival as a proper performer, though of course he’s been joining in sessions at the Festival Club in Islesburgh for years, but they’ve been talking about him doing a proper session ever since he won Fiddler o’ the Year. That was a year ago, when he was only thirteen.’

I was impressed, and showed it. I hadn’t realised Ethan played the fiddle. Shetland bairns took their music seriously, and the Young Fiddler winners were very good indeed. A boy who’d won the top prize at only thirteen was headed for stardom. Jennifer nodded again, in approval. ‘Yea, he’s aye been talented, and he’s wanted to turn professional since he went to secondary school, and the teachers started to ask what he wanted to be in life. His mam, she learned the piano at the school, she’s musical too, and so she vamps for him.’

There was a stir on the stage, and an announcer in black began the air-steward bit, emergency exit and muster points. Then Ethan and his mother came on. His granny sat up straight and focused her attention forwards, pausing only to murmur, ‘Now you’re in for a treat,’ as they did a quick tune-up, nodded to each other and launched into a series of reels, played fortissimo and at breakneck speed. He got the applause he deserved, and lowered his fiddle to give us the names. ‘That three was aa’ Shetland reels, ‘Faroe Rum’, ‘Andooing at da Bowe’, and the last een was ‘Da Forfeit o’ da Ship’.’ Nerves sent his voice back to falsetto in the last name, to his embarrassment. His mother was small and dark-haired, but Ethan was a young Viking, blond, with sky-blue eyes and fair skin that showed every blush as a tide of scarlet from throat to ears. He forced his voice downwards and kept speaking, giving the names of the next set of three, and once he’d tucked his fiddle back under his chin he was as assured as Cat on his own foredeck. His confidence was in his playing, and every finger movement on the strings, every beautiful drawn-out note, showed his own certainty in his talent. Around me, older folk who’d heard three generations of young players were nodding in approval, and his granny next to me beamed with justified pride.

‘He’s very good,’ I whispered to her.

The third set was tunes of his own composition, traditional with a twist, as the programme had said, and a quirky sense of humour. How could music do that, I wondered, three notes and you laughed, or three more made you want to weep for the sorrows of the world. I remembered Maman singing through my childhood, and wished for a moment that I’d inherited some of that talent – the talent that had made her leave us.

I knew why I kept thinking about Dad and Maman. I’d had eight weeks at home, the longest time I’d spent ashore since I’d run away to sea at sixteen, and the happiest. Gavin had had to work for most of it, but I’d taken my boat out and explored the territory I’d sailed as a child. I’d had fun cooking interesting meals for him to come home to, and I’d worked in the garden. We’d spent evenings peacefully in front of the crackling fire, with Cat purring on my lap, or upstairs on the window-seat in our bedroom, watching the growth of Cat and Kitten’s own kitten, young Julie. Now, in a week, I was going to sea again, away from all that had become familiar – away from Gavin. Just as Dad had been after Maman had gone to pursue her singing career, Gavin would be left in a suddenly-empty house. Dad had had me; Gavin had the animals, but because of them, he couldn’t even go and visit his family at weekends, as he used to when he worked in Inverness.

I was asking a lot of him. I knew it, and this was my last spell on Sørlandet. Eight weeks in the Indian Ocean, and then I’d come home, ready to take up my post as mate of Shetland’s own Swan, a converted Fifie fishing boat which took groups of twelve around Shetland, down to Orkney, to Scotland and across to Norway. My first trip aboard would be to St Kilda, in July. Between trips and all winter, I’d be home.

Ethan acknowledged the applause for his own tunes with a ‘thank you’, then poised his bow above his fiddle once more. I knew the tune he drew out from it straight away: Da Full Rigged Ship, filled with the stately dipping motion of a tall ship at sea. I listened and felt my heart sore for the life I was giving up.

Ethan and his mum were on for half an hour, and went off to the applause they deserved. Jennifer leaned across the aisle to get his praise from the folk sitting there. The compère lost himself in superlatives and for some reason the second he’d finished, the soundmen stuck on a country and western tape while the next artiste was setting up. Gavin turned his head to me and rolled his eyes. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ he complained. ‘They do it at the theatre too, stick on a totally incongruous CD when you want to talk to your neighbour about how good the show was.’

‘You’re a theatre-goer?’

He gave a sheepish grin. ‘Freya took me to the pantomime, so I took her to the Drama Festival. It was the week before you came home.’

Freya was his sidekick, DS Peterson to me. She was blonde, imperturbable, and one of the reasons I felt I needed to stay home more – theatre visits, indeed. ‘And was either of them any good?’ I asked politely.

My voice gave me away, Gavin had told me once, back in the Longship case, when I’d been a suspect myself. He grinned at me. ‘The panto was noisy, over the top, colourful and great fun, and we went back to being seven-year-olds, yelling out “Oh no he didn’t!” and buying tubs of ice cream at the interval.’

I felt my lower lip sticking out, teenage fashion, and pulled it back in quickly. ‘And the Drama Festival?’

‘That evening was one play with children, one with teenagers and one with adults, and they were all good in different ways.’

There’d been a drama group in Brae, Splinters. I’d never been involved, but my school pal Inga was one of their actors, and I’d gone to see her. ‘The Brae group used to be very good.’

There was a stir in the audience as a blonde lass slim enough to wear a painted-on dress with horizontal stripes came on, followed by a man carrying a guitar. I glanced over Gavin’s arm at the programme. Ceitidh Macleod.

She spoke as Gavin did, that soft lilt of the Highlands, lingering on the ssss sounds. ‘I’m so excited to be here in Shetland for your famous Folk Festival. I’m going to start with a song in my native Gaelic.’

She nodded to her guitarist, and he went into a strumming, thrumming melody like the pipes calling the clans to battle. Beside me, Gavin nodded and straightened, his grey eyes intent, his mouth set into a harder line. I settled beside him and waited. Though I couldn’t understand the words, I could catch the urgency of the tune. What interested me more was the relationship between the singer and her guitarist. There was none of the obvious partnership Debs and Ethan had shown, no sense of friendship between them at all. I kept watching, and wondered. She was firmly in charge, starting each song without so much as a glance at him, so that he had to watch her for the timing, and I thought he resented it. Maybe he was a session musician who’d been hired for the weekend, and she was treating him like a hired hand instead of a fellow musician, or maybe he was normally a singer/songwriter in his own right, talked or trapped into being her sidekick. I thought there was suppressed anger in the occasional glance he shot at her, like a fully-qualified captain having to work as a watch leader.

Like Deb and Ethan Gifford, they did half an hour, a mixture of Gaelic songs written by the singer and Scots traditional songs about the Bonny Prince. Gavin’s mouth tightened. He would have liked to have romantic views of Charlie, the Young Pretender, because a far-back ancestor had led the prince through the redcoats to a cave for the night, and had been rewarded with one of his buttons, which Gavin wore on his dress jacket, but his own good sense and reading showed him that the prince and his ill-starred venture was as much to blame as the English for the ruin of the Highlands which had sent his cousin’s ancestors to Canada.

There was a short interval while they changed microphones about and people went to the bar. Jennifer turned back to me, and I asked hastily where the toilets were. I was expecting to be pointed down to the back of the hall, but she indicated forward. ‘It’s back out there and round the back of the stage, you’ll easy see it. On the right, go past the steps up to the stage, and then the door’s at the end of the corridor, past the pegs where folk hang their coats.’

Several other women seemed to have the same idea, for I soon found myself in a queue going through the doors and filling the hallway. The next act had retreated into the porch, where he was chatting to the blonde Gaelic singer. I glimpsed the back of the guitarist, going back out into the night and turning left, the direction Olivier and Alexandre had gone. There must be some back door to the club room where the musicians were hanging out, tuning up and waiting for their set.

A couple of the women in the toilet queue were kitchen workers in short-sleeved t-shirts and checked pinnies with the hall name embroidered on the front, Shetland’s community nod to hygiene at work, as they could be boiled in the hall’s own washing machine, which Health and Safety deemed better than everyone bringing their own immaculately washed, ironed and possibly starched apron. My thoughts went straight to eight o’clocks, which in Shetland was a cup of tea with a sandwich or a muckle biscuit with cheese, followed by a fancy. We’d had two acts so this was half-time – except, I reminded myself, it was a concert, not a dance. No eight o’clocks. I listened idly as they washed their hands and grumbled gently about the hall layout. ‘I ken they need a disabled lavvy,’ one said, ‘but they coulda put it somewhere else, and left the pa. . .