Marsali Taylor returns with the eighth enthralling mystery in her gritty and thrilling Shetland Sailing Mystery series.
'This series is a must-read for anyone who loves the sea, or islands, or joyous, intricate story-telling.' Ann Cleeves
As summer draws to a close in Shetland, indomitable sailor Cass Lynch is preparing to look after eccentric, outspoken Tamar, who is returning from hospital following a fall. Recuperation should involve a peaceful week in Tamar's isolated cottage but, on arriving at the house, Cass finds there has been a break-in . . . curiously, only some old papers are disturbed.
Then the body of a man is found in a cove close-by and while it looks to be an accident at first glance, suspicions are quickly aroused - and soon the police have a murder on their hands.
At the same time, Cass begins to suspect Tamar knows more than she's letting on about her family's ties to the local laird. As the family start to gather, secrets won't stay buried for long . . .
This eighth novel in the series brings Cass back to her home waters, where she becomes entangled in a family saga of greed, inheritance and hidden truths.
(P)2020 Headline Publishing Group Limited
Release date:
October 1, 2020
Publisher:
Headline
Print pages:
352
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ben-end: the bedroom of a two-roomed cottage, or the ‘best’ room, if there are bedrooms upstairs [Scandinavian, ben, the inner or better room of a house]
‘I was wondering,’ my friend Magnie said, ‘if you’d mebbe come and check oot me cousin Tamar’s hoose wi’ me.’
It was a bonny late summer afternoon at the marina. We’d checked over the red-sailed Mirrors for the bairns’ next practice for the Junior Interclub, which was to be held here at Brae a week on Saturday, run simultaneously (just to keep things interesting) with our own Pico regatta. Now we were sitting on the slatted-wood benches in the cockpit of my Khalida, having a three-o’clock cup of tea.
It was good to be home in Shetland, and back aboard my own boat. Sørlandet, the Norwegian tall ship I worked aboard, was based in Kristiansand, but since we were sailing all over the place I’d decided it was easiet just to keep Khalida in Brae, where Magnie could keep an eye on her for me. She was the smallest yacht in the marina, and the most old-fashioned, but I looked with satisfaction at the neatly folded mainsail above us, and the gleaming wood and brushed navy cushions in her cabin after this morning’s clean-out. Cat was up on the foredeck, washing his white paws after a foray along the ebb, and the marina seal was sculling along the sterns of the yachts opposite us. It was all beautifully peaceful after four months of being second mate aboard a ship filled with up to seventy trainees.
I wriggled my back into a more comfortable position against the wire guard rails, and put my feet up on the opposite bench. ‘Do I ken your cousin Tamar?’
‘She’s the lady o’ the Ladie,’ Magnie said, and chuckled to himself at the joke.
I nodded southwards towards the narrow channel between Brae and the ‘White City’ of Aith. ‘The Ladie down at Houbansetter? The crofthouse looking over the sound?’
Magnie nodded, and settled into yarn mode. ‘My cousin Tamar, she’s the last o’ the older generation o’ the Irvines o’ the Ladie. Her mother’s mother was first cousin to me grandmother, but she’s a piece older as me.’
Given that Magnie was now in his seventies, although you’d never have guessed it from the spryness of him, that made her a good age. Magnie’s pause suggested he was working it out. ‘Yea, she’ll be into her nineties.’ He waved that away with one hand. ‘Sharp as a tack, though. There was never any doiting in the Irvine side. Anyway, she had a fall twartree weeks ago, getting up in the night, and broke her hip. She’s in Wastview, but she’s champing to get oot o’ there.’
‘Wastview?’
‘The Care Centre over at Walls. The hospital threw her out two days after the accident, but they said she couldna come straight back to the house on her own, so it had to be Wastview until they had the Occupational Therapy and Physio set up, coming to visit her, and that takes a bit longer, apparently, for folk “outwith central areas”.’ He went momentarily from Shetland dialect into English as he quoted some doctor. ‘But they need the bed now, and one of the lasses that works there said she had the dentist in Brae, and she’d put her home on the way. Tomorrow. I said I’d go over and check everything was ready for her.’ He gave me a sideways look out of his pebble-green eyes. ‘I thought maybe you might come alang. A woman’s eye, all that.’
Given that I’d lived on a series of boats for the last fifteen years, since I was sixteen, I didn’t see why just being female qualified me for the post of Chief Inspector of Housework, especially since Magnie’s crofthouse was kept as spick and span as it ever had been when his mother was alive. ‘When were you thinking of going over?’
‘No time like now, if you’re no’ busy.’
‘Nothing happening here until the bairns in the evening,’ I agreed, and rose to rinse the mugs. Ten minutes later, I was jolting along in Magnie’s mustard-yellow Fiat, around the head of the voe, along the broad road south to Voe, and onto the single track towards Aith. We drove past the loch where we’d met the njuggle last winter, past the little cluster of houses at Gonfirth, turned right onto the South Voxter road, and stopped to open the gate to a road going into the hills, rich with royal purple heather. We squeezed past a red hire car belonging to some tourist walker who didn’t quite understand about passing places, and round a double corner to the view over the Sound o’ Houbansetter.
It was a stretch of water I knew well. It looked wider from up here than it felt sailing through it. Before us was the sound itself, the narrow passage between Busta voe to the north and Aith voe to the south. From the opposite shore, the Blade of Papa Little beckoned, a long, crooked sandbank waiting to catch the keels of unwary yachts. The tide was three-quarters out; the shore glistened with dark orange weed. The Hippopotami, a jagged pair of isolated rocks on the other side of the sound, stood out dark against the grey-blue water. It looked a lovely spot, with the Ward of Papa Little green against the blue sky, but the wind funnelling through the sound flecked the dancing waves with white. It would be a cold, exposed place in a flying northerly gale.
Magnie parked the car behind a scarlet runabout that I took to be Tamar’s. I got out and looked around. There had once been a community in these few acres of land, with three families scraping a living from the croft and the sea. There was green pasture below the houses, and rough grazing above; the heather moor, studded with great boulders, began at the hill dyke. Only the Ladie was still intact. The other two had regressed to bare walls, with gaping doorways and gables stretching to the sky, and the remains of stone dykes enclosing them. A flock of Shetland sheep grazed around them, black, grey, rust-brown. Quiensetter, that was the house on the other side of the jetty, and Houbansetter was beyond Tamar’s, all three fine and handy for the Eid or Voe shop in the days when everything was done by water, but left stranded at the end of a rough track when the world turned to wheels.
The substantial stone-built jetty was recent, and still in use. The tarmac road stopped level with Tamar’s house, but a wide gravel track ran on down to the pier area. There had been several salmon cages in the voe through my childhood; they were gone now, but there were three lines of mussels on this side of the sound, and another five opposite, at the opening to Eid voe. The jetty area had been tidied up to just one Portakabin and two metal containers, several boats in different stages of repair, salmon feed bins of mussel ropes, and a workhorse aluminium motorboat tied to the pier. A tawny cat disappeared quickly under the hut as we approached.
There was a trodden path to Tamar’s door, leading across a stone-slab bridge over the burn that trickled down beside the gate into the garden. A brown Shetland wren landed on the drystone dyke that enclosed it, bobbed at us, chittered indignantly, then flew into a cranny between two grey-lichened stones.
Tamar’s house had been refurbished within an inch of its life. It still had the bones of a traditional crofthouse, with house, barn and byre all in one long line, but there was an extension on the back, dormer windows looking out over the sound, and a glass sit-ootery running along the front. It was whitewashed so thickly you could have steered by it on a moonless night – Magnie’s doing, I’d have betted, for his own, just visible diagonally across the voe, was equally eye-blinding. A wheelbarrow sat by the front door, ready to be pushed back and forward to the road.
‘Does your cousin really manage to barrow her shopping back from the car?’
‘Oh yea.’ Magnie put the key in the back extension door, turned it, and pushed the door open. ‘She’s kept herself spry. She’ll be itching to be walking along the banks again. She has a niece and a nephew an’ all, the bairns o’ her late brothers, and twa sets o’ great-nieces and nephews to do the heavy fetching and carrying for her. There now.’
He snicked on the light, and we came into the back porch. This bit of the house had the usual refurbished crofthouse arrangement, a toilet and utilities room tacked on to the back of the house below, a bathroom above. There were shelves of tins and jam jars above the washing machine worktop, an upright fridge-freezer, and a row of coat hooks on the wooden v-lining.
Magnie led me through into the kitchen/living area – the but-end, you’d call it in Shetlan. Tamar had resisted change here. The cream-coloured Rayburn still squatted in the middle of one wall, with a china sink beside it. There was a dresser with rose and white plates and a pine table and two chairs by the window, with the usual on-land clutter at one end of the table: opened letters, a mug of pens, a china pillbox, a whistle on a lanyard. One chair was pushed in under, as if it was never used; the other stood aslant. There was no sign of tidying up needed: the worksurfaces were clear, the clean dishes stacked in the draining rack by the sink, and the pans in a tripod rack, lids upturned on each one.
‘Twartree weeks?’ I said. ‘We’d likely need to check the fridge and the breadbin.’
‘I suppose,’ Magnie said, without enthusiasm. ‘There’ll be black bags under the sink.’
I dug a bin bag out, and opened the fridge door. It said a lot about the way modern food was filled with preservatives; even after three weeks, there was very little that would have been condemned on board a boat. The pack of mince had to go, there was a touch of mould on the opened cheese, and I didn’t even try opening the milk, but the red and orange peppers were still remarkably firm, and the yoghurt was within its sell-by date.
Magnie rustled a carrier bag at me. ‘I’m brung milk and fresh bread.’ He handed it to me to be put away, then gestured slantways through the door into the house. ‘Her bedroom’s upstairs. Her folk were at her to move down, make a new bedroom in the sitting room, but she said she’d slept in a right bedroom all her days, and she was over old to change. Go you, lass, and see if you can find clean sheets and a nightie for her, while I get the Rayburn lit.’
‘She’s never still working with peats!’ I said.
‘Na, na, oil, though the Highland Fuel lorry’s no’ exactly enthusiastic about coming over this road.’
I could imagine it wouldn’t be. I went out into the passage between the two sides of the house, and saw straight away why Tamar’s family were worried about her upstairs bedroom. The stairs were best grade traditional crofthouse, with a gradient similar to a ladder’s, going straight up between wooden walls. Someone had added a sturdy bannister opposite the usual hand-rope. The stairs ended in a two metres by one landing. The middle door was the upstairs bathroom over the extension, and the bedroom on the left was obviously a guest room, neat and bare, with twin beds covered with camberwick bedspreads. I went into the one on the right, Tamar’s room, feeling like an intruder. I didn’t even know her - but I suspected Magnie felt it wasn’t proper that he should be making her bed, or handling her nightie.
It was a bonny room, painted white, with the ceiling sloping down to a metre from the floor. That last metre was lined on this first wall with three long shelves of older paperbacks. Above them was a traditional skylight, with an iron rod sticking out from it. I pushed it open for some air, and looked around. There was a bareness about the room that pleased me; the mantelpiece had only two scaddiman’s heids on it, with a little metal tripod between them, and the room’s one painting above it, an unfinished drawing of a horse. My policeman lover Gavin would like it, I thought, going over to look. His family farm in the remote Highlands included two Highland ponies, gentle enough beasts, he’d assured me, but I was still wary of large animals that had a bite at one end and a kick at the other. The picture was about thirty centimetres square, red chalk on yellowed paper, a fiery, impatient charger with a strong, arched neck and flared nostrils, like the warhorses in medieval paintings. The muscles were so beautifully shaded you felt you could run your hand over the satin skin, but the legs were only sketched. One front hoof pawed the air.
Otherwise, there was the bed and a chest of drawers beside it, with a jug and basin and a businesslike reading lamp on top. A potbellied stove crouched in the fireplace, and a pile of clothes waited on the chair in the far corner. The dormer window had a padded seat, with a seriously expensive long-lens camera set at one side, and spyglasses on the sill. Tamar could sit there to watch the stars, or the northern lights, or the sun dipping down behind Papa Little and rising again half an hour later at midsummer.
It looked all as she must have left it: a book tumbled from the bedside table, the bedcovers pushed sideways, the mattress hauled to a slant, as if she’d caught at it as she fell. The medics must have had an awkward job manoeuvring their stretcher down those stairs. I found a clean downie cover with matching pillowcases in the bottom drawer of the chest, and a pair of warm pyjamas in cheerful colours. I was just coaxing the last downie corner in when I heard Magnie give an exclamation, followed by, ‘Lass, come you here and look at this!’
I abandoned the downie, and went downstairs. Magnie was in the sitting room below the guest room, the ben end. It was obviously the ‘good room’ where Tamar brought the minister, should there still be one for this area, should he or she come to call, with an armchair on each side of the open fireplace, a mahogany desk with brass handles, and an old-fashioned china cabinet set in one corner of the room. Magnie had pulled down the lid of the desk, and opened both drawers, as if he was looking for something.
‘What’re you lost?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I’m lost nothing.’ He spread a hand round. ‘This is how I found it.’
I looked around and saw what he was seeing: the two desk drawers pulled right out, and the door of the china cabinet swinging open. The woman who’d scoured her kitchen before going to bed wouldn’t have left it like this.
We stared at each other. I felt sick with rage at the idea of someone taking advantage of an old lady’s accident to raid her house, and Magnie’s face mirrored my feelings. ‘Someone’s been in here,’ he said. He turned on his heel, looking around. ‘But how . . . ?’
He went out into the glass porch which ran along the front of the house. I watched through the sitting-room window as he rattled the door and checked the windows. He returned, shaking his head. ‘It’s all locked up tight. They’d have done that, the ambulance folk. She had her keys in the hospital with her.’
‘The bedroom window was locked,’ I said. ‘I opened it for air. And what were they looking for? Money?’
‘I suppose,’ Magnie said dubiously. ‘It’s kinda out o’ the way for an opportunist thief.’ We looked at the neat piles of papers in the desk drawers, the letters docketed into pigeonholes above. In the china cabinet, there was a selection of ornaments that looked to have been brought back by a seaman ancestor, Chinese plates, a coloured pheasant, an irridescent shell, and a wooden box, with the lid ajar. ‘They looked in the box too.’ He picked it up in his gnarled hands, shook his head, and gave another look around. ‘The TV’s still there, and the DVD player. Her laptop’s in the sit-ootery.’
‘It’s not how I’d imagine an opportunist burglary to look,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s all very tidy, as if someone was frightened of making a mess. Frightened of making a noise. Searching silently. For loose cash?’ My eyes returned to the desk, then to the wooden box. ‘Papers?’
‘Let’s make a cup o’ tea,’ Magnie said, ‘and think about it.’
We took the mugs out into the sit-ootery. It ran the length of the house, with the afternoon sun streaming full in on the pots of geraniums and vine with its bunches of grapes. I tried one; it was surprisingly sweet. There was a couch along the wall, where we sat down. Just thirty metres away, the sun glistened on the crinkled leaves of oarweed revealed as the tide ebbed. Three herring gulls stood on patrol on the Blade.
‘I didn’t ask Tamar how she’d come to fall,’ Magnie said. ‘I just took it that she’d got up to pee and tripped. But she’d never a locked the back door during the night. None o’ us old folk do that.’
I gave him a questioning look.
‘In case o’ you taking ill or dying in the night,’ he explained, with hard-headed realism. ‘So that folk could get in without breaking the door.’ He nodded over to our right, up towards Brae. ‘Since we were both living alone, we kinda kept an eye on each other.’
I looked across the water at his house. ‘Lights on and off, that kind of thing?’
He nodded. ‘Easy enough to just give a phone call if there’s no sign o’ life when there should be.’
‘So, maybe,’ I said, ‘she heard someone in the house, and got up, and then fell, and the noise of that scared them away.’
Magnie was silent for a moment, staring out across the glinting water. ‘I dinna like it. It’s no’ what we’re used to.’
I agreed with that. Burglars coming in at dark of night to ransack an old lady’s papers . . . it didn’t happen in Shetland. Oh, yes, in Lerwick, there was a bit of opportunistic petty thieving, usually with drugs involved, but not here in the country. Not in a remote cottage like this. I thought about being a burglar. You could open drawers more quietly than you could close them. You’d open each one, check it, and then, just before you left, you’d close them with silent care, and leave – with what you came for? Without it? And if he, she, hadn’t found what they wanted, would they be back, once the house was open again?
‘I don’t suppose . . .’ Magnie and I both began together. I gestured him to continue. ‘I don’t suppose you’d think about maybe bringing your Khalida over to the jetty here for a start? Just to keep an eye on things?’
‘That’s what I was thinking too. Is there nobody else who could stay for a bit? Family?’
‘She won’t have them. She says they worry her quite enough on visits, and Loretta cleaning, and to have them in the house wi’ radios playing and the TV blaring non-stop, would fret her into a decline.’ He gave me a sideways look from his pebble-green eyes. ‘But she might have you, if you’d consider it. She’s aye interested in what you’re up to. She was never a conventional one herself.’
‘Oh?’
He didn’t need encouragement. ‘Yea, yea, you ask her all about it. She left Shetland at fifteen, and worked to a big hoose south for a bit, then drave a taxi in London. After that she travelled all over, taking photographs for the newspapers. She came back to London in the Swinging Sixties, got taken on by the BBC, worked wi’ David Attenborough for a start, then she did a wildlife book travelling through Canada. She musta been well over seventy when she came back here. Now she’s settled down watching otters.’
It all sounded very interesting, but not a life that would lead to incriminating papers. I glanced over my shoulder at the opened drawers. ‘If they’d got what they came for, wouldn’t they have closed the drawers again, so that nobody knew they’d been?’
‘Unless she disturbed them just after they’d found it.’
I made a face. ‘I dinna like it. What’s the depth at that jetty?’
‘Deep enough for you, I’m pretty sure, though you’ll need a fender-board, to keep you off the stones.’
‘I have one.’ I looked at the jetty for a moment, assessing; rough built of stones, but with several workmanlike bollards, for the salmon boats to moor to. It looked like I could lie there comfortably, with a gangplank. ‘You ask her if she’ll have me. If she thinks I’ll be useful, I’ll sail over tomorrow.’
ness: a headland [Old Norse, nes]
It would be dark quickly this evening. The light clouds on the horizon had gathered in until the sky was overcast with large, black cumulus. We got the bairns out as soon as we could, three pairs in Mirrors, and another four in the neon-pink sailed Picos. As racing practice it was a failure; they seemed not to have a watch between them, and buoys were rounded leaving a gap you could drive a yacht through. We had several shots at starting, until they all managed to get over the line within twenty seconds of the hooter, then a bit of mark work, setting the skippers to go close enough for their crews to pat the buoy as they rounded it.
By quarter past seven the light was already thickening, the water darkening. The four white lights of the astroturf pitch blazed out; the sun lit the windows of the houses facing the water and made a pale gold path across our triangular course. Below the houses, there was a cropped field, the short new grass vivid green.
We did two more triangles to get spinnaker practice in, nagging those who couldn’t be bothered to fly their little balloons of green, orange, and blue. It was an uphill struggle. Still, they’d get competitive (too late) when they saw their fellow sailors at the Interclub. Next week we’d need to put Magnie out in a Mirror, to give them something to race against. He’d been my sailing teacher twenty years ago, and a mean competitive skipper in his day. Even single-handed he’d have been round that course and over the line before the first of them had finished the triangle.
We got them ashore just after eight, and left them washing the boats while Magnie and I retrieved the buoys. The gold flush along the bottom of the eastern cumulus faded to grey, and the clouds jostled over the sun, leaving only a chink of bright sky. The wind was soft, the water warm as I reached over to catch the nylon stem of the neon mooring buoys. Then it was time for drinking chocolate, and a bit of rope work, and signing off log books. It was black dark by 9, though the sky still showed chinks of duck-egg blue, and the water gleamed between the hills. I gathered up the books and pieces of rope, poured the last of the chocolate into a mug for myself, and headed for the bar. ‘They’re going to have to wake up next Saturday, against Sandwick and Walls and Lerwick. I thought the modern bairn was supposed to be keen and competitive.’
‘Na, na,’ Magnie said, ‘no’ these days. It warps their psyches, or something. It must be very discouraging for their teachers, especially the sports ones. Kinda hard to be non-competitive in hockey or on sports day.’
‘They can give everyone prizes, like Alice in Wonderland.’
‘Well, we’re going to do that wi’ the Picos,’ Magnie said. ‘I printed out the list dastreen. Skipper prize, crew prize, hat-trick prize, standing start prize, they’ll surely all get one of the medals by the end o’ it.’
‘Do our best,’ I agreed, mindful of modern thought. ‘But the Junior Interclub is old-style one prize only for the best club.’ I set my mug down, and was just about to go and wash it, then head for Khalida, when the club door opened, and a stranger came in.
One look at him said ‘crofter’. He was in his fifties, wearing jeans and a gansey in brown stripes of Fair Isle pattern on a white ground, but he gave the. . .
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