The Shetland Sea Murders

Book 9: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries

by Marsali Taylor

Genres: Mystery; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

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

Marsali Taylor returns with the ninth gripping mystery in her Shetland Sailing Mystery series.

While onboard her last chartered sailing trip of the season, Cass Lynch is awoken in the middle of the night by a Mayday call to the Shetland coastguard. A fishing vessel has become trapped on the rocks off the coast of one of the islands.

In the days that follow, there's both a shocking murder and a baffling death. On the surface there's no link, but when Cass becomes involved it is soon clear that her life is also in danger.

Convinced that someone sinister is at work in these Shetland waters, Cass is determined to find and stop them. But uncovering the truth could prove to be deadly . . .

Readers LOVE the Shetland Sailing Mysteries:

'Definitely the best of the Cass Lynch series yet!' 5* Reader Review

'The beautiful descriptions of Shetland life, traditions, it's landscape and even language bring everything to life.' 5* Reader Review

'This series gets better and better' 5* Reader Review

'A beautifully written story, with descriptions so vivid you can smell the sea and beautiful countryside.' 5* Reader Review

'The perfect lockdown read for anyone who longs to be back on the sea.' 5* Reader Review

(P) 2021 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: July 29, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Saturday 19th October

Tide times at Aith

HW 00.32 (2.0m); LW 06.35 (0.9m);

HW 12.50 (2.0m); LW 19.05 (0.9m)

Sunrise 07.53, moonset 14.24; sunset 17.44, moonrise 19.48.

Waning gibbous moon

The Mayday startled me awake in the middle of the night, crackling through the speaker of the handheld radio in Swan’s aft cabin. I heard Magnie stir in the berth below me, and reach out a hand to grab it and turn the volume up.

‘–day, Mayday.’ It was a man’s voice, heavily accented, and sounding as if he was reading from a script. ‘Shetland coastguard, this is fishing vessel Dorabella, Dorabella, Dorabella, with thirteen people aboard. We on rocks the west side Ve Skerries, beside Papa Stour. We request immediate assistance. Shetland Coastguard, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.’

I wriggled forward in my bunk and snicked my light on. We were all awake now, Magnie with the handheld black by his ear and Geordie, the engineer, leaning out of his berth; all listening intently as a calm voice from Shetland Coastguard requested further details. It was a struggle to get the information. Dorabella was a thirty-metre long-liner, registered in the Ivory Coast, but with the owners in France. No, nobody was hurt. The ship wasn’t in immediate danger. There was no water coming in. No apparent damage to the engines. They were still running, to keep the fish fresh. They’d been on their way to port, with a full hold. Yes, they’d tried to reverse off, but with no success, and the tide had come as high as it was going to. They were stuck fast.

Magnie came out of his berth, pulling his jeans and a jumper on over his sleeping thermals, and I wriggled out of mine, and followed suit. We went up into the stillness of the night.

We were anchored off Vementry Isle, on the westside, round the corner from Brae, and just opposite where I’d grown up. The wooden deck below our feet belonged to Swan, Shetland’s own tall ship, a converted Fifie fishing boat which had been built here over a century ago. My friend and former sailing teacher Magnie was in charge, and enjoying skippering a proper fishing boat again. He could just remember Swan as a working boat; he’d been a boy when she’d left Shetland in the fifties. When she’d been rediscovered, half-sunk and rotting in an English harbour, he’d been one of the campaigners to bring her hull back and restore her as a living memorial of the Shetland fleet in the great herring days. Given his fishing experience and his skipper’s ticket, he was now a valuable volunteer crew.

It was a weekend trip, a charter for a Shearer man who was celebrating his sixtieth, and later than Swan would normally do, because by mid-October the weather was too uncertain. It could be a golden autumn weekend or a flying gale from the north, chilling as winter, but this was when Shearer’s birthday was, and he had a sudden fancy to take his sister and nieces on a three-island trip to see the guns of Vementry, the caves of Papa Stour, on the western corner of the Shetland mainland, and the cliffs of Foula, seventeen miles out into the Atlantic. It just so happened that Papa Stour was also hosting a music weekend, with a concert on the Saturday evening, so we were going to that while we were there. He was a friend of the Trustees – he’d wangled the Swan a good insurance deal with his firm, which took some doing with a hundred-year-old wooden boat whose remit included paying passengers and school trips – and Swan needed all the cash she could get, so the secretary had taken the booking, and crossed fingers for decent weather.

‘Besides,’ Geordie the engineer had said cheerfully, ‘it gets me out of all the work at home on Papa, with this music evening we’re going to. Every house on the island as full as it can get, and baking and boiling all day on every cooker. I’m well clear of it.’

There were four passengers: Stevie Shearer, his sister and her two daughters. Stevie had been the first to arrive, roaring up on what even I could see was a classic bike: scarlet, with those leaning-back handlebars and the chrome of the engine polished silver-bright. He’d come over and greeted us all cheerily, then gone back and spent ten minutes padlocking the wheels and draping a tarpaulin over it. There was a touch of cliché about him: the jet-black hair sleeked back, the sleeveless t-shirt, Harley Davidson tattoos on both arms (hidden, I presumed, by his shirt when he was brokering insurance), tight jeans and round-toe biker boots. He was one of those jovial characters who was too touchy-feely for me, a bit too matey in the way he’d steadied himself on the perfectly steady gangplank by putting one arm around me. He’d apologised, of course, and added a joke: ‘Why is a sailor like an uncaught criminal?’ I’d remembered I was paid crew and smiled nicely. ‘I don’t know – why is a sailor like an uncaught criminal?’

‘They both need plenty of rope!’ He laughed uproariously. I did a token-gesture smile, and invited him to make himself at home on deck.

The women were not long behind him, his sister and one daughter together, and the other in a separate car. Stevie’s sister was older, maybe ten years older, going by the age of the daughters, who looked to be in their late forties, and chalk and cheese: one dressed with the neat colour-coordination of a worker in the public eye, the other in a swirling patchwork skirt and cheesecloth blouse. Their mother had the look of an ageing hippy too, but it was the conventional daughter she’d come with, and I felt a bit of tension in the way she and the colourful daughter greeted each other, quickly smoothed over by Stevie’s exuberant welcome to them both. I hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those occasions where an attempt to patch up a quarrel by forcing people together just made everything worse.

We got them all on board, gave the safety briefing, then left the Walls pier. It was five o’clock now, and steekit mist, with the marker buoys and lines of mussels appearing suddenly from the greyness around us. The shore colours were dulled by it: ochre seaweed, charcoal rocks, olive hills with their tops hazed by cloud. The sea-stacks off the back of Vaila loomed through the mist and were swallowed again. Our passengers made themselves comfortable on deck and watched the world go by, Stevie and his sister with their backs propped against the dinghy, the two sisters one on each side of the hatch. Stevie kept coming out with awful jokes, and there was protesting laughter from the others.

Once we were out into the Atlantic, the mist thinned. There wasn’t enough wind to get the sails up, but the late-afternoon sun was warm on our backs as we came through Papa Sound, the strip of water separating Papa Stour from the mainland. We crossed the south end of St Magnus Bay into the Røna channel and anchored in the bay to the back of the World War I guns on Vementry Isle.

The clear sky gave us a long twilight, with daylight on deck until well after seven. Our passengers sat around on deck chatting under a half-moon the colour of newly polished brass while I put a pot of tatties on, and Geordie cast for mackerel, using a waand with a dozen hooks. He struck lucky straight away. They came up twisting and flashing silver-bellies below their tiger-striped green and black backs. He caught each with a hand and tweaked it free; a twist of the fingers to break the gills, then he dropped them into the bucket, still flapping. We’d eaten our supper of fried mackerel and tatties around the wooden table in the main cabin that had once been the ship’s fish hold, and I’d thought with a twinge of nostalgia that this was right home food. There was nothing like fresh-caught mackerel, the sweet flesh, and the oiliness of it sopped up by the oatmeal. Magnie had done an apple crumble and custard, and after that there’d been birthday cake and champagne under glittery ‘Happy Birthday’ banners, then we’d sat on deck watching the stars come out until the good sea air had sent our family yawning to bed.

Now the water was shifting silver in the moonlight, with the long Atlantic swell rolling over it, the hills outlined dark against the midnight sky. The wind had fallen away completely, and there was the cold tang of frost in the air. There was a ring around the three-quarters moon, sign of a warm front approaching with the changeable weather that would bring. Magnie and I stood in silence on the deck, looking at the dark headland of Vementry Isle between us and the open sea, and thinking of the boat on the rocks twelve miles beyond it.

The Ve Skerries was a horrible spot, a treachery of wicked rocks stretching out from the Ormal, the largest of them. I’d often seen the grey smudge of the white concrete tower built there far on the horizon; you couldn’t see the rocks themselves, for they lay too low. If we’d been out in the Røna we’d just have been able to make out its light, flashing white twice every twenty seconds.

The men of the Aberdeen trawler Ben Doran had died there in the 1930s; in the seventies, the last of the men of the Elinor Viking had been lifted off the same spot only ten minutes before their boat had begun breaking up. I stood there in the darkness and prayed with all my might for these men there now.

Geordie came up to join us. ‘Any news?’

A clatter of the radio answered him, the Coastguard moving Dorabella to a working channel. We changed too, and listened as the Coastguard helicopter was scrambled, and the lifeboat. Ten minutes later we heard the lifeboat’s engines as she set out from her pier down at Aith. It took her no time at all to reach us, a white wash streaming from her bows as she passed through the Røna at full speed, the roar beating out through the calm night then diminishing into the distance. Swan rocked to her passing, and the waves crashed white on the beach thirty metres from us.

Twelve miles, and the lifeboat’s top speed was twenty-five knots. She’d be there in half an hour. The fishing boat’s radio operator had said they were in no danger at the moment, and there was nothing to harm them in the weather. The lifeboat would get them off safe from that wilderness of rocks, as long as it could manoeuvre up to them. The Ben Doran had been unlucky; she’d steamed right in between the rocks in the days before lighthouse and lifeboat, and ended up stuck in the middle of them. She’d had no radio on board. By the time another boat had spotted her, the wind had risen, and the sea was a boiling turmoil around them. A number of other trawlers had braved the conditions to go out there. They’d seen seven men tied to the rigging in their oilskins, but been unable to get to them.

‘How came they,’ Magnie said, ‘to go apo the Ve Skerries on so calm a night? Thirty metres long, they said. You’re no’ telling me a boat that size didn’t have the latest sort of chart plotter to tell them within an inch where they were.’

‘A chart plotter still needs someone to look at it,’ I said. ‘It was the lights, wasn’t it, with the Ben Doran? They were gutting fish, and the glare of the gas lights blinded them. Maybe these men were busy hauling in their lines, and not looking around them.’

‘You can get good fishing around the Skerries,’ Geordie said. He was from Papa Stour, and knew the area. ‘They’ve maybe been over-keen to get a good catch, and drifted closer than they should have, and then not been able to get their lines up in time to avoid the rocks.’

‘But didn’t they say they were heading for port with a full hold?’ I asked.

‘That wouldn’t stop them wanting to take in a few more,’ Geordie said.

Magnie nodded. ‘Thirteen men. That’s short-handed on a hundred-footer. I’d’ve expected fifteen.’

‘The owners cutting costs,’ Geordie said cynically. ‘Cheap foreign seamen paid starvation wages, and no attention to health and safety once they’d got their certificate.’

The Ben Doran had had a crew of nine. The bodies of the last two had been found later, washed up with a great coil of rope between them. They’d been the strongest swimmers of the crew, and it was thought they’d tried to swim with a rope to the Ormal, to get the others across to the rock above the water. Their graves were in Sandness kirkyard: Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends.

I shook the sorrow away. The chopper had airlifted the men of the seventies Elinor Viking off. The modern Oscar Charlie was on its way. Even if the lifeboat couldn’t get to them, these men would be saved.

I glanced at the time on the plotter behind us, and became practical. Half past midnight. ‘Neap tides too,’ I said. ‘Unless they’re lucky and get a big swell at the next high tide, the boat’ll be stuck there until the new moon. Ten days.’

‘If she lasts that long. Ten days without a gale, in the second half of October?’

I made a face. No boat would last long with an Atlantic gale washing over her.

‘The forecast’s good for the weekend,’ Geordie said. ‘They’ll maybe find some way of getting the fish off, if they can keep the generator running for the refrigeration.’

‘Shame to waste it,’ Magnie agreed.

There was a distant thrumming in the air, like a far-off bumblebee. It grew closer and filled the air: the chopper on its way over. We waited, and listened, until the last noise of it had died away, and the night was silent again.

The stillness was broken by a ringing phone from the main cabin. It broke off, there was a muttered voice, and then there were steps on the companionway. Stevie Shearer came out, in a t-shirt and shorts, phone to his ear, and went straight to the bow without looking back at us. It was like him, I thought, to assume he was alone on deck, just because he wanted to be. His voice floated clearly aft, in workmanlike French. ‘What do you mean, on the rocks?’

There was silence again as he listened. ‘Okay. But the engine’s still running. Can you get the fish from the hold?’

Another silence, then he said, ‘I’ll see what I can do. Don’t make any stupid admissions. You were steaming back to port with a full hold . . . get them in, then. Cut them if need be.’ He jerked the phone from his ear, and stood for a moment, looking out.

We’d stayed still by the wheel, aft, turning our shoulders to his conversation. Now, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of something white moving in the black square of the main cabin entrance. I turned my head to look properly, and glimpsed a face, someone hovering at the top of the ladder. She saw my movement and ducked back, but I could still see the white shoulder of a t-shirt at the side of the doorway. She was still there, listening.

Stevie punched in a number with angry jabs of his fingers, and put it to his ear again. He spoke in English this time. ‘The Dorabella’s on the Ve Skerries . . . yes, stuck fast. The men are to be airlifted off. They’ve kept the refrigeration unit running, but we need to empty that hold . . . Yes, get on to it right away. And organise someone to meet the men. We’ll speak tomorrow.’ He rang off and turned to come back towards the companionway. The white shoulder vanished, but I thought I caught the soft thud of feet going hastily downwards, one metallic rattle of a bunk-curtain being drawn.

Now at last Stevie saw us standing there at the wheel, and did a double take, then came to join us. ‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’

Magnie shook his head. ‘The Mayday did that.’

He left it at that, but Stevie rushed into speech. ‘She’s one of ours – I mean, my firm insured her. If they can’t get her off soon she’ll be a total loss.’

‘But with no loss of life,’ I said.

‘Yea, yea,’ he agreed quickly. ‘That’s the important thing, of course. And if it’s possible to get the fish off her that should help.’

‘She may be lucky and float off tomorrow,’ Geordie said.

‘Let’s hope so.’ He shrugged, turned his head quickly as if he’d heard a noise in the main cabin, stared for a moment, then looked at us. ‘Well, I’ll get back to my bed.’ He gave a cursory glance round up at the star-filled sky, with the sickle of the Charioteer hanging above the Ward of Muckle Roe. ‘A bonny night. See you in the morning.’ He sketched a wave and headed back below.

‘Well,’ Magnie said. He looked around at the silvery water, the dark hills, and gave his shoulders a shake. ‘We have these folk to give a good time tomorrow. Shall we turn in?’

‘Leave the radio on,’ I said.

‘Yea, yea, I’ll do that.’

We went below, still listening as the Coastguard directed operations. The helicopter arrived at the Skerries just as we were back in our bunks, and began lifting the men off straight away. They could take all thirteen. The men would be landed at the Clickimin in Lerwick, would be checked out in the hospital, then handed over to Aubrey and his volunteers of the Fisherman’s Mission. It must have felt an age to those men, standing on their deck in the flashes of the lighthouse, but to us on board Swan it seemed an incredibly short time before the chopper was reporting that they had all the men safe, and they were heading for Clickimin. The lifeboat coxswain reported that they were standing down. Soon after, we heard the chopper drone above our heads again, with those men safely aboard, and then the lifeboat heading homewards. Swan rocked to her wash. Magnie switched back to channel 16 and turned the volume down. ‘Well, folk, I’m going back to sleep.’

He turned over and soon his snores were vibrating against the wooden walls. Geordie’s joined them. I lay awake for a bit longer. My berth was stuffy compared to my own Khalida, the eight-metre yacht that was my home, where the hatch was right by my head, and I missed my Cat and Kitten, who’d been left with Dad and Maman for this weekend. Cat felt at home with Maman’s brand of elegance, which included a glowing peat fire and a comfortable Chinese rug, to say nothing of exotic scraps from the kitchen, and Dad had installed a cat flap in the back door so that he could come and go, as he was used to. I was less sure about Kitten, who’d never lived in a house before, but given the way she installed herself on the captain’s red velvet couch at every opportunity I suspected she’d make herself at home on Dad’s Chesterfield. She looked frail and delicate, but there was an iron paw inside every one of those little white mittens.

I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon. I turned onto my back, crossed my hands behind my head, and contemplated my world. I’d done my first six weeks of life aboard Sørlandet as an A+ Academy. Sørlandet was the smallest of the three Norwegian tall ships, a three-masted, square-rigged beauty. Like all tall ships she’d been funded by a mixture of grants and paying passengers, but at last she’d found financial security as a floating college for older teenagers. They’d learn regular lessons, seamanship and life skills as they helped sail her around the world, stopping at ports where they could have time off, and their parents could fly over and join them. Her crew was supplemented by qualified teachers and we had sixty trainees on board, sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, thirty boys, thirty girls. They were divided into watches of ten, two-hour watches, and they were young and silly, and needed to play music all the time, which drove me round the bend.

I checked myself. I was being unfair. Some, of course, were already keen sailors, and fitted straight into the life of the ship; a pleasure to be with. Others, well . . . for example, the one who’d been given the choice of military college or Sørlandet. He was going to be trouble. Already he was moving from dumb insubordination to active malice – in his hands plates slipped, and ropes tangled, or were knotted in a way that meant you couldn’t release them as fast as you might need to sometimes. Nothing major, so far, but a tall ship at sea wasn’t the place for pranks. And the girl who’d been affronted, that second day on board, to find that nobody had ironed her sheets during the day; well, she was learning, and the experience of being ‘the other half’ would do her good.

I had an ulterior motive for being on board the Swan: her captain of the last ten years had just retired, which was why Magnie was officer in charge, and I’d been hauled in to help. The captain’s post would be advertised in spring. Now was my chance to get to know more about her, in case I decided to apply. I had the paper qualifications and the experience in sail training ships, but I knew less than I needed to about old-fashioned fishing boat rigs like Swan’s, and nothing about how she functioned otherwise: generators, engine, safety procedures. The post would probably go to her current mate (the one I was standing in for, currently with her leg in plaster after too enthusiastic a tackle in a hockey game), but in that case there would be a mate post free.

The thing was, Sørlandet’s Academy routine was six weeks on, six weeks off while she was in European waters, and eight weeks elsewhere. I’d had a good think about Cat and Kitten, and decided that it would be best for them to come home and live with my partner, Gavin, full-time; otherwise, it would be a nightmare of passports and vet visits and flights. I’d miss them, of course, but it wouldn’t be for long each time.

I wanted Gavin and me to work. He was a Police Scotland DI, and we’d met through his first case up here, the Longship murder, a year and a half ago – I paused to wonder at that. It felt now like I’d always known him. We’d managed a long-distance relationship so far, but then Gavin had requested transfer out of the national serious crimes squad and back to a local post. When his boss had offered a Shetland post at the same seniority level, we’d talked about living together. He’d made it clear that he wanted me to be part of that; otherwise, he’d hold out for an Inverness posting, near his own home hills.

I’d thought hard about it. I knew there’d be the usual adjustments, but the biggest for me was that it might mean me having to give up sailing oceans. We both wanted children, and for that I’d have to stay ashore, wherever Gavin’s job was. If I got a berth on board Swan it wouldn’t be full-time, as my Sørlandet post was, so I’d have to save harder during the months I was at sea, to keep paying my share of household expenses over the winter, and I’d probably need to pick up shore jobs as well, but we’d be together more. Swan would be busy all summer, including longer trips, but as her base was Shetland I’d be able to get home in between them, and early and late summer were generally ‘hameaboot’ trips: day sails with schools or charter guests, or weekends sailing round Shetland. I’d be completely away only from June to mid August, instead of the current six or eight weeks on, then the same off. I’d been asking around on Sørlandet about how couples were finding that rota, and getting mixed responses. My watch leader, Petter, reckoned it worked well, easier than being separated from Frederik for the whole summer; another officer, Jonas, said his wife hated it. ‘She’s just got used to getting along without me when I arrive and throw things out, and then we’re just getting into a routine when I go again.’

Well, I’d just have to see how Gavin and I got on with it. He was used to living on his own all week, at his Inverness flat, though he went home to the family farm for weekends. His brother, Kenny, would miss his help, especially as their mother was getting less able – not that she’d admit to it. If I was home all winter, if a job came up for him in Inverness, we could open up his cottage further along the loch, and commute between the flat and his loch together, or I could stay at the loch and help about the farm while he worked in town. I knew that he’d want to go home eventually. He’d be based in Shetland for now, but his hills would call him, just as the sea called me.

Meantime, once this trip was over, I needed to get on with getting our rented cottage ready for Gavin moving up here, in three weeks’ time. It was going to be strange living together on land.

I yawned, and went to sleep.

There was only the faintest of ripples along Swan’s green hull when I woke. I turned onto my side and squinted at my watch. Ten to six. Magnie was still snoring, and Geordie joined in with the occasional snort. The air was sour, in spite of the open hatch at the top of the ladder. I pulled my jeans and jumper over my pyjamas and climbed quietly up, socks and shoes in hand.

Yes, it was very still. Up here on deck the first clear light was a milky streak above Weathersta. As I watched, it spread along and began to brighten over Linga, to the south of east, where the sun would rise. A seal came up five metres from the side of the boat, turning his dog profile from side to side to get a good look at me and sculling with spotted flippers.

The generator cleared its throat and rumbled into life, breaking the silence. Magnie must be up, and our trainees soon would be. I headed down into the darkened main cabin and crossed it to the galley. A cup of tea all round would go down well. I kept my face turned away from the cabin as sighs and curtain noises signalled people getting up. Stevie’s sister was the first, trailing past me to the heads in a glory of patchwork dressing gown. It took me a moment to remember her name. Amitola, that was it. She gave me a friendly smile as she passed. She had long, curly hair, dark but streaked with grey, which made her brother’s gleamingly black head even more implausible. It was held back from her face by a headscarf tied like a hairband. She had that weathered complexion of someone who’s spent a lot of time outdoors, her brother’s prominent beaked nose, and startlingly white brows above her dark eyes.

I tried to remember Magnie’s character summary. ‘One o’ these causes folk, you ken. Women’s causes. She was one of the ones making a fuss for equal pay in the council, and she volunteers for the Women’s Aid folk, that kind o’ thing. She’s a regular at the Alting debates. Believes a better world can be made by working for it.’

‘If we all really worked at it, maybe it could,’ I’d said. ‘Particularly if the men worked at it too.’

‘Yea, maybe.’ He gave me a sideways look out of his pebble-green eyes. ‘You’re young yet. She’s retired now, but she had a peerie café in Sandwick for a while, home-baked bannocks, fancies, and everything made with goat milk, for folk who hae allergies.’ His tone was vaguely approving, so I gathered her baking passed muster. ‘She does this “wild swimming” too. You ken, going off in the sea in wetsuits to commune wi’ seals and the like.’

‘She’s never thought of standing for the council, if she wants to improve things?’

Magnie snorted. ‘As if that would do any good. You’d need more women than four or five to make any impression on that lot. She bides in a peerie house just out o’ Sandwick – well, it used to be out o’ town before they built all those new houses around her.’

I made a face at that, and sympathised with Amitola, who’d moved to the country and found the town catching up with her. I hoped she’d enjoy the weekend away from it.

‘Aye aye,’ Amitola said on her way back. I heard the creak as she clambered back into her berth, then more creaks as she got dressed inside it. Within five minutes she was back, just as bright in a rainbow-striped knitted waistcoat over a loose white top and red cord trousers. She sat down on the edge of the bench seat to do up her DMs, then came into the galley. She might have been seventy, but her movements were brisk and sure. ‘What can I do to help?’

‘Thanks. Can you set mugs out for everyone? Magnie was talking pancakes for breakfast, but a cup of tea first thing always goes down well.’

‘Mugs.’ She did a quick head count. ‘Four of us and three crew?’

‘Right.’

She began taking the Swan china mugs from the holder above the sink, a brisk, accustomed movement. ‘Today we’re going on to Papa Stour, ar. . .