Death on a Longship

Book 1: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries

by Marsali Taylor

Genres: Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

When she wangles the job of skippering a Viking longship for a film, Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived — even though it means returning home to the Shetland Islands, which she ran away from as a teenager. Then the ‘accidents’ begin — and when a dead woman turns up on the boat’s deck, Cass realises that she, her family and her past are under suspicion from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Macrae. Cass must call on all her local knowledge, the wisdom she didn’t realise she’d gained from sailing and her glamorous, French opera singer mother to clear them all of suspicion — and to catch the killer before Cass becomes the next victim.

Release date: January 23, 2014

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 250

Sample

 Chapter One

She was my longship. She floated beside the boating club pontoon like a ghost from Shetland’s past, her red and ochre striped sail furled on her heavy yard half-way up the wooden mast, her painted shields mirrored on the early-morning calm water.

  Okay, she belonged to Berg Productions Ltd., but I was her skipper. Stormfugl, Stormbird. She was seventy-five feet long, with a carved head snarling in a circle of teeth, a writhed tail, and a triangular log cabin on a half-deck in the stern. Gulls were wheeling around her, bickering among themselves, as if one of them had dropped a fish.

  I started Khalida’s engine and put-putted across the bay towards the marina. I wasn’t keen on gulls dismembering fish all over my clean decks. I’d hosed them yesterday, after filming. The cameramen, lighting operators, make-up, costume, best boys, grips, and all the hundred people that seemed to be needed for even a simple shot had squelched the path from road to shore into dusty gravel. This had clung to the sheepskin boots of my Viking oarsmen, and the shore had added a generous helping of sand-laden algae. I didn’t intend to start the day re-scrubbing them. I’d fire the gulls’ fish overboard, and let them squabble about it on the water.

  It was amazing, too, that Anders hadn’t heard them. Even someone who slept like the dead, as he did, must surely be woken by them perching on the cabin ridgepole to stretch their necks at each other. I’d have thought he’d have been out to clear them by now.

  As we entered the marina I realised that there was a white bundle lying on Stormfugl’s deck under the circle of snatching gulls. I turned Khalida in a sharp curve and brought her up on the other side of the pontoon. Damn the way Norwegians went for cheap British drink. He’d obviously gone out and got blootered, staggered home and fallen, injured himself –

  It wasn’t Anders.

  I looked at the body lying on the half-deck, one hand stretched towards the prow and felt my newly won promotion to skipper slipping away. It was Maree Baker, one of the film lot, the stand-in for the star.

  I was ashamed of myself for thinking first of me, but I couldn’t help Maree now. She lay sprawled on the larch planks like a marionette washed up by the tide, the manicured nails still gleaming like shells in the bloody mess the gulls had made of the exposed hands. There was mottled dirt on her cream silk trouser suit. The red-gold hair falling across her face was stirring just a little in the breeze, as if at any moment she’d shake it out of her eyes and leap up. I looked again at the back of her head, tilted up towards me, and saw the pool of blood spreading out from below her stand-in wig. The gulls had left footprints in it, and across the deck. I’m not squeamish about blood, but I felt sick then. I yelled at the three that had only gone as far as the pier, orange eyes watching me, then looked back at Maree. I didn’t want to touch her, but I had to. I was the ship’s Master under God; captain, minister, doctor. I curved my hand around the chilling neck and laid two fingers over the vein. There was no flutter of pulse.

  I withdrew my hand and reached into my back pocket for my mobile. 999. No, here in Shetland, 999 would probably get me some Inverness call centre three hundred miles away, where I’d have to spell out every name twice. I wanted Lerwick. I dived into the boating club for a phone book, and found the number. There were two rings, then a voice.

  ‘Northern Constabulary, Sergeant Peterson, can I help you?’

  I took a deep breath and wished I was at sea, where the procedure was laid down. Mayday three times, this is yacht name three times. ‘I’d like to report what looks like a fatal accident,’ I said. ‘On board the longship Stormfugl, moored at Delting Boating Club.’

  ‘The film boat,’ she replied, briskly confident even at this hour of the morning. ‘Your name, madam?’

  ‘I’m Cass Lynch, the skipper of the boat.’

‘Remain with the body, please. We’ll get a doctor to you as soon as possible. Have you any idea of the casualty’s identity?’

ID was Ted’s problem. ‘She’s lying face down. I didn’t want to turn her over.’

‘We’ll be with you in about half an hour. Until then, please ensure that nobody goes near the body. And don’t call anyone. We’ll do that.’

‘I’ll stay with the body,’ I said, but made no other promises.

I picked up a stone and scattered the gulls with one vicious throw.



Anders should have been on board; it was his night on watch. I went slowly up to the cabin, almost afraid to look inside, but it was empty. My breath came out in a rush. Not even his gear was there: his scarlet sleeping bag, the backpack he used as a washbag, and his thermos. There was only the lilo we used to soften the larch planks, inflated and waiting.

I didn’t have time to worry about him now. On shore, I had to answer to the production company. Was Mr Berg Productions Ltd. a captain who’d want to be called at the very first sign of trouble, or one who’d bawl you out if you didn’t let him sleep until his life-raft was launched? I slotted his shrewd eyes into my mental line of skippers, and decided the former. I didn’t see how even the film world could cover up Maree’s death. I wanted to break it myself, in my best Norwegian.

He wasn’t happy. ‘This was not to do with the filming? What was she doing aboard the longship at night?’

I side-stepped that one. ‘I have called the police. They will arrive soon.’

‘This will hold up the filming.’

‘Perhaps not by much,’ I said.

‘And your night watchman. Anders. Where was he?’

A good question. ‘He does not seem to be aboard.’

He pounced on that. ‘You think he is involved in this outrage?’

I hadn’t thought of it as an outrage. She’d stumbled and tripped, hit her head with a whack. Head injuries killed. Alain. The boom coming over, lifting with a creak then suddenly swinging, lethal … I swallowed the memory away.

‘I have every confidence that he is not involved.’ Anders had been my choice as engineer.

‘I know his father,’ Mr Berg said. He would, of course, through the Norwegian businessmen old boys’ network. ‘Thank you for keeping me informed. Phone later in the day, as this affair develops.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I didn’t hesitate about phoning Ted, the film’s director, because I knew he and his director of photography were spending the night on Ronas Hill, filming the sun dipping into the sea and rising again. They wanted the shot for the poster, the western rim of the ocean with Favelle’s face superimposed. I heard two rings, then his voice.

‘Cass?’

‘Ted, there’s been an accident here, on board Stormfugl. Maree’s dead.’

‘I’ll come over right now. Have you told the police?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And Mr Berg.’ I paused. ‘I didn’t give a name.’

‘Thanks, Cass. See you soon.’

When I’d opened up my phone the screen had said 1 New Message. Sender unknown. It was the phone call I’d ignored last night. I looked at it now, and found a message from a dead woman. ‘Must talk will come down to boat. Maree.’

A wave of guilt flooded over me. I should have answered the phone instead of telling the world to go away. Maree had come to find me in the half-dark, had tripped and fallen. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been here. Hers was the second death I’d caused.

I’d just pocketed my phone when a car scrunched down the gravel below the boating club. The brisk, elderly man who got out had been my doctor when I was a child. He felt her pulse, and shook his head. ‘Dead. What happened, Cass?’

‘I wasn’t here,’ I said. ‘I presume she tripped and fell.’

‘Was it you who moved her?’

‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘I just felt for a pulse at her neck.’

He gave me a sideways look, eyes lifting, falling again. ‘The police will need to see her as she is.’

I could feel my heart beat in the silence. ‘Didn’t she trip and fall?’

He didn’t answer, and I could see it for myself. She might have tripped on the gangplank ridges, but she’d have had her hands to save herself from coming a real cropper, and it hadn’t been a metal boom with the strength of a Force 5 gybe coming over to crack her unprotected skull, but a stationary wooden deck. It should have meant a bump, a black eye, a bleeding nose, not death.

Death meant questioning and suspicion. ‘Can you tell us exactly what happened? How do you know what the wind speed was? Who was in charge of the boat at the time?’

We were all in even deeper trouble than I’d thought.

We heard the first police car then, its engine echoing across the water as it charged north up the dual carriageway, slowed to come through the township of Brae, and speeded up again for the westward straight along to the boating club. Soon the whole pier was swarming with officers cordoning off the area with blue and white tape. It seemed, though, that they weren’t to touch anything until the forensic team and the Inverness detective arrived.

I was taken aside by Sergeant Peterson. She was younger than I’d expected, with blonde hair sleeked back in a ponytail and the eyes of a mermaid, ice-green and indifferent to human follies. She took my mobile off me – ‘Just a precaution, madam,’ – then escorted me upstairs in the boating club and made me a cup of tea. ‘The inspector will want to question you, madam. It may be a bit of a wait, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s my boat beside the longship,’ I said. ‘I could wait there.’

She shook her head. ‘We’d be grateful if you’d wait here, madam.’

She went out to join the white-coated men erecting a tent around poor Maree, and left me to more waiting, which gave me time to think about the implications.

At least I understood now what Maree was doing on board Stormfugl in the middle of the night. She’d come along the pontoons to where Khalida was usually berthed, seen the empty space and known I’d gone out for a sail. She wouldn’t have hung around openly on the quayside, but gone into Stormfugl’s cabin to wait, out of sight, discreet to the end., until someone had come on board and killed her. Anders was missing, but why should Anders want to harm Maree?

Why should anyone want to harm Maree?

In the end, I took one of the first-aid blankets, lay down on the settee by the window, said a prayer for Maree, and closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep deeply, though; I must have surfaced every ten minutes, realising each time with a shock that she was dead. Cars came and went, and the people outside talked on their radios. At tide-turn I woke to Ted’s voice protesting, and a murmur answering, and looked out. His white limo was parked at the entrance to the marina, the driver’s door left open. He was trying to talk his way through a phalanx of police officers. I could read their lips. ‘Not until the detective inspector arrives. Sorry, sir. Identification can wait. Very sorry, sir, those are our orders. If you’d like to come inside and wait, sir.’

They led him out of my sight into the club. I heard chairs scraping on the other side of the partition wall.

At last there was more movement within the boating club, a sudden rush of voices, Anders replying, startled and defensive, footsteps on the stairs, then the door opened, and an officer escorted Anders in.

He’d obviously just come out of the shower. His silver-gilt hair was darkened and combed, his tanned face shining above the neat beard. His eyes met mine, alarmed, then he looked past me, out of the window. His round eyes widened as they took in the cars, the ticker-tape, the officers, and then his whole face sagged as he saw the body sprawled on the deck. He spoke in rapid Norwegian. ‘Cass, what’s happening?’

The officer cut in. ‘No talking, if you please, sir. Just sit down. I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to wait here until the officers from Inverness arrive. Would you like a coffee?’

Anders nodded and joined me on the window seat, lowering himself like an old man. His eyes met mine again, filled with dread, then returned to our ship. I was left trying to make sense of that. Where had he been, that he hadn’t come back via the boating club drive with full grandstand view of the proceedings? Answer: the only place he wouldn’t have seen what was going on was in the windowless downstairs of the boating club itself.

For some reason he seemed to have slept in the showers.



Outside, the sea had slid away from the concrete launching slip, then begun to sidle back. At last there was a bustle and stir downstairs. The officer looked up. ‘That’s the Inverness officers arrived. Not much longer now.’

We looked below us at the two people who got out of the car. One was Sergeant Peterson, getting her impressions in first. The man was older, mid-thirties, and what I noticed most about him was his air of alertness, like a sea-eagle on its eyrie, high on a cliff but seeing every bird that flew past below, every fish that came to the surface. This man stood by the foot of the gangplank, just looking, and the busy scene suddenly focused around his stillness. He must have stood there for a good ten minutes, immobile in the middle of the bustle around him, just looking. Behind him, two local officers exchanged dismissive shrugs. I smiled to myself. They’d learn; there’d be no skylarking on this man’s watch.

He moved at last, coming out from the other side of the police car, and I realised the other reason for the dismissive shrugs. He was wearing a kilt. Shetlanders were more Viking than Scots, so the kilt up here was imported for weddings only and associated with fancy socks, ornamental daggers, and white-fringed sporrans, all considered very sissy by the Shetland male whose native dress was the boiler suit and rubber boots.

At last he turned back towards the clubhouse. A camera began flashing, and four spaceman-suited figures came forward, a white ring closing around Maree’s still form. Sergeant Peterson spoke to the inspector again; he glanced up towards the club house windows, then strolled towards the lower door. I heard light, even footsteps on the stairs, and in he came.

He wasn’t particularly tall, five foot seven or eight, and compactly built, with strength behind the slightness. Tanned – no, weathered, the complexion of a man who preferred outdoors to in. He had russet hair, cut long enough to rumple around his ears, and it stood up on the top of his head, as if he had a habit of running his hand through it. His nose was slightly skafe, as if he had fallen out of too many trees in his youth. His kilt wasn’t wedding-fancy, but a workmanlike affair in one of the sober green tartans, with a plain leather sporran. I’d have betted there was a clasp knife in there, wooden-handled and notched with use. The top button of his shirt was undone because it was missing, and the elbows of his green tweed jacket were bagged. If he hadn’t been a policeman, I’d have taken to him: a reliable watch-leader.

He paused two steps in to give a long, slow look round the room, as if he was comparing it with his local and noting things to be copied when he got home. He spotted the map of Busta Voe linoed onto the floor, and walked round it gravely. ‘We’re here, are we no’?’ His accent was pure Highland, that shushing, lilting note with a downward turn on the question that you only hear west of Inverness. One brown hand pointed. Sergeant Peterson stepped forward.

‘The club’s here, sir, at the top of the voe.’

‘Aye, aye.’ He nodded to himself, went over to inspect the whiskies behind the grilled-off bar. ‘Tallisker, Highland Park, Scapa Flow. No’ bad, no’ bad.’

Sergeant Peterson cleared her throat with barely restrained impatience. ‘Ms Lynch, sir, and Mr Johansen.’

He turned to look properly at us with disconcertingly wide-open eyes, honest-looking, a clear sea-grey. I stared, incredulous and hurting, unable even to nod.

This man had Alain’s eyes.

The inspector nodded to himself again. ‘Now you’ll be the captain of this ship. I’m Detective Inspector Macrae, from Inverness.’ He shook my hand briskly. ‘Cassandra Lynch. No, Cassandre.’ He pronounced it correctly, French-style. ‘The first thing we need is an idea of who the poor lass lying out there is. Can you help us with that?’

‘She’s the actor who doubled for Favelle last week.’ I’d leave Ted to fill in more details if it became necessary. ‘Maree Baker.’

I sensed, rather than saw, the startled look Anders gave me.

‘Maree Baker,’ the inspector repeated. ‘Sergeant, go and see what you can find out.’

‘M-a-r-e-e,’ I said. Sergeant Peterson wrote it down in her notebook and headed out.

‘Thank you for that, Ms Lynch. That lets us get started. Mr Johansen, if you’ll go with my colleague here, Inspector Hutchinson, he’ll take your statement.’

Anders gave me a look I couldn’t quite read, somewhere between puzzlement and warning, and followed the officer like a man about to walk the plank. DI Macrae opened a regulation black notebook. The writing was in dark blue ink, an untidy hand:age 29, father Dermot Lynch, ex-Sullom Voe, director Shetland Eco-Energy. He watched me read down the page. Mother, Eugénie Delafauve. Opera singer, France.

Maman. A specialist in the seventeenth-century composer Rameau: Greek costumes, and period instruments presented to small audiences in fancy chateaux.

Grew up Shetland, sailor. France with mother, ran away.

It had been a combination of luck and planning. The Tall Ships were doing La Rochelle to Edinburgh, and I’d half-emptied my bank account for a berth as a trainee aboard a Russian barque. I’d got the train to La Rochelle. Sea. Scottish soil. Sanctuary.

He lifted the notebook, turned a page. ‘You argued that you were sixteen, and independent in Scotland, if not in France. You had a British passport, and the Scottish police failed to persuade you. End of that record.’ He looked back at the notes I couldn’t see, and I braced myself. Alain’s death, on a yacht half way across the Atlantic. But he didn’t comment, simply nodded again, closed the notebook and put it back in his sporran. ‘So here you are, a teenage runaway, in charge of a film company’s Viking longship. Fill in the gap.’

‘Jobs,’ I said. ‘In the summer, any sailing I could get. Delivery crew.’ I’d begged and blagged and even slept my way on to yachts and gaffers and sail training ships. ‘In the winter, supermarkets. Waitressing. I worked my way up the RYA courses, and that got me working in sailing schools in the Med. Then I did my first Atlantic crossing.’ We’d been on the way back when Alain had died. If he wasn’t going to talk about it, that suited me fine.

 He gave a nod, as if working on boats was an entirely normal career, then looked back at his paper. ‘Local gossip is you got the job fitting out this longship through your father. Tell me about that.’

 It took serious effort to shrug. ‘Not exactly. I was working in Bergen, and met the directors of the Norwegian firm who were sponsoring the film.’



Met wasn’t quite accurate. I’d been waitressing in a fairly up-market restaurant in one of the main streets in Bergen. It did silver service for tourists and well-heeled locals. It was a quiet Thursday night, so the three Norwegian businessmen at the table by the stove were getting my full attention, especially when they began talking about Stormfugl.

I knew about her, of course. She was an exact replica of the largest of boat burials, the Gokstadt ship, and she’d been built three years previously to demonstrate that Leif Erikson could easily have gone to America. He might have; the modern-day Vikings hit bad weather coming up to Shetland, Stormfugl was blown ashore, and the whole project had to be put on hold.

Shetland. My heart tugged like a hooked fish.

‘There is another replica in America, of course,’ the youngest man said. The oldest of the three, in his fifties, with a pointed Drake beard below a lean, pink face, shook his head.

‘The American one is a warship, light and fast. Nobody would ever believe a voyage to America in something so shallow. The Stormfugl is deeper-bodied, a trading ship, with a half deck aft, and a small cabin. On top of that, Ted says that Shetland will do for Norway, for Labrador, for Iceland. It will be cheaper, he says, and he will make it look authentic.’

‘But what state is this Stormfugl in? How much will it cost to make her seaworthy?’

Good cue, I thought. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. They gave me that blankly polite look you give a waitress who interrupts an important conversation for bread rolls or more coffee. ‘I can tell you a bit about Stormfugl,’ I continued. ‘She wasn’t damaged when she went ashore, or not badly, it was a good sandy beach she was blown on to, and they re-floated her straight off. She’s only had two winters ashore, uncovered, so the rain will have kept her timbers swollen. You’d need a surveyor’s report, but I’d expect her to be sound.’

I had their attention now. The younger man gave me a narrow-eyed look.

‘What’s your connection with Shetland, Ms …?’

‘Ms Lynch,’ I said. If there was a job here, blagging might get me in. ‘I grew up there, and my father lives there still. I know the Shetland waters well. I’m a yacht skipper.’ I gave them a rueful smile, charming enough to interest them, but not so charming that they’d write me off as a dolly-bird. ‘Not in winter, of course. I was one of the crew on the Sea Stallion, the longship that went from Sweden to Dublin a couple of years ago, and that and my Shetland background made me interested enough to follow Stormfugl’s story.’

‘Ms Lynch,’ the man with the beard repeated, in a thoughtful way that would have set alarm bells ringing if I’d not been so determined to make them consider me for any job going. His eyes were shrewd, assessing me; I looked straight back.

‘I’m a qualified RYA Ocean Yachtmaster. You’ll need a skipper for your longship if you’re going to film aboard, as well as someone to oversee the repairs and fitting out in Shetland. I could do that for you too. I know folk who do that kind of work, reliable ones.’

There was one of those long pauses, then the oldest one smiled. ‘Ms Lynch, you don’t look much like a skipper right now. Why not clear the table and bring us our coffees for the moment, and, here –’ He felt in his pocket for his wallet, brought out a card. ‘This is my firm, Berg Productions Limited. Come tomorrow at ten, and we can talk about your qualifications.’



It wasn’t a propitious week, with the silver disk of the moon draining away, but at least the sea was pulsing into the Bergen channel. A flowing tide was a better omen. I was there at ten to ten, with my RYA cards in their see-through wallet, and references from a couple of Caribbean outfits. It was Mr Berg’s office I was shown into, a symphony of pearl grey and ivory. Just the depth of the carpet I waded across told me this was a megabucks outfit, and if I hadn’t been there in front of him I’d have turned tail and run, but faint heart wins no command. I straightened my shoulders inside my best navy jacket and hoped my plait was still neat.

He motioned me to a seat. ‘Let me tell you more about this project, Ms Lynch. The film is about Gudrid, the first European woman to reach America, the sister-in-law of Leif Erikson, and we are one of the sponsors. Favelle Baker will play Gudrid, and her husband Ted Tarrant is the director.’

This was big-time stuff. Ted and Favelle were one of Hollywood’s golden couples. She’d been a child star, and Ted Tarrant had been her leading man in her first teen movie. It had been love straight away. They’d got married between movies, made two more together, and then Ted had moved from acting to directing, a series of eco-aware films starring Favelle as a feisty activist taking on big business on behalf of the planet. I’d been particularly impressed by the Greenpeace one, where she’d really slung into the oil companies and fisherman who were making a desert of our seas. The way she’d scrambled over rigs and in and out of high-speed rubber inflatable dinghies had made me feel she was a woman after my own heart.

Furthermore, Ted Tarrant had been my teenage heart-throb. Before he’d become her romantic lead, he’d done a War of Independence swashbuckler where he’d played John Paul Jones, one of the world’s great seamen. That had sparked off a run of biopics: a supporting athlete in a movie about Roger Bannister, another one about cricket, and one where he was a round-the-world cyclist. The publicity was that he’d done all the stunts himself. It would be amazing to meet him.

‘Naturally,’ Mr Berg continued, ‘most of the film will be shot in Norway, but Mr Tarrant is keen to use Shetland as a location for the sailing scenes because Favelle is to do some publicity for your green energy firm there, Shetland Eco-Energy, and as we have links with them too we are happy to co-operate. You will know all about this, I am sure – there have been some objections to their proposed wind farm. Favelle is to publicise the importance of renewable energy.’

It was the first I’d heard of it. I nodded, with the air of one who regularly talked wind farms at breakfast.

‘Hence the need for a longship that is already in Shetland. If the Stormfugl is usable then Mr Tarrant will get the outdoor shots he wants, and we will be saved a good deal of time and money. Now, your brief would be this: you’d recruit the skeleton crew necessary to get the boat fitted out, hire extras for the oarsmen, and be in charge of the sailing while the shooting is going on.’

 A pause, then he looked straight at me. ‘Tell me why you think you could do it.’

 Knowing that I could do it made me confident, and this time fortune favoured the bold, waning moon or waxing. By the end of the interview I’d got my first . . .