The Trowie Mound Murders

Book 2: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries

by Marsali Taylor

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

‘Four people had died, and three were in custody. It was over…'
Audiobook Two in the Cass Lynch Mysteries series.
When a visiting yachting couple go missing from the Shetland oil capital of Brae, sailing skipper Cass Lynch overcomes her mistrust of the land world to ask for help from her old adversary DI Gavin Macrae. He discovers a link to international art theft and warns Cass to steer clear – but when one of her sailing pupils goes missing, she goes alone to discover the secrets of the Neolithic tomb known locally as a ‘trowie mound'... Ghosts, folklore and a nail-biting finale at the local show come together to make an atmospheric, fast-moving thriller.
“The real star of the books is the location of the Shetland Isles - beautifully described and with an evident passion for the area and a love of the people. I'm already on to the next one!” AMAZON REVIEWER

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 261

Sample

Chapter One

Monday 30 July

Tide times for Brae:

Low Water 01.08           0.7m

High Water 07.22          1.9m

Low Water 13.30           0.8m

High Water 19.39          2.0m

Moon waxing gibbous

‘I know how you got that scar,’ the boy said, eyes travelling along the ragged indentation that ran across my cheek.

I wasn’t going to let him see any reaction. He was in his mid-teens, sturdily built, with the tan of someone who’s rarely indoors, glossy black hair, and a seaman’s earring dangling from his left ear, a gold hoop with a cross. He had grey-green eyes, set close together over a beaked nose, and very dark lashes, half-lowered at the moment so that he could watch me slantways from behind them, like a cormorant keeping an eye on a dangling fish.

I was still trying to place him. I was getting to know most of the children in the area, and his face was familiar. Not one of the club’s sailors – then I remembered this face smiling insolently at me from under a helmet. He’d come to fetch his little brother on a quad. His brother was Alex, a keen sailor who was still working his way through the wind-still in the marina’s rocky entrance behind me. Olaf Johnston’s son – Norman, that was his name. I remembered Olaf from school, and wasn’t at all surprised that he’d turned into a parent who let his children charge around the roads on the quad; he likely considered that making them wear a helmet was discharging his duty to health and safety.

He wasn’t a parent who’d be much help in the present situation.

It was a bonny, bonny evening. Even though it was almost nine o’clock the sun shone steadily on above the hill to the west and glinted on the water. The tide had turned an hour ago, and was just beginning to sidle down from the warmed concrete of the slip. The silver ghost of a three-quarters moon gleamed above the eastern hills. The force 3 southerly had kept the pink-sailed Picos scudding briskly around their racing triangle, and we’d all been having a really good time until there was a high-whine engine roar from the jetty below the clubhouse, then this boy bounced out on his jet-ski, curving around the dinghies to rock them, and flipping in between them to send water glittering over them. I’d resolved to have a word with him once he came ashore again.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know this is a public slip, but there’s no need for you to be driving your jet-ski so close to these beginner sailors.’

He ignored that. ‘Your boyfriend shot at you. Then you pushed him overboard and left him to drown.’

Alain …  It felt as though he’d slapped me. He must have seen my eyes widen in shock, for his thin lips spread in a mocking grin.

‘That is enough,’ a voice said over my shoulder. There was a heaviness about the t, a guttural note to the vowels, that made the speaker Norwegian. A young man had come up from behind me to stand at my shoulder. He was half a head taller than I, and broad-shouldered with the muscles that come from spending the day hefting engines about. His silver-gilt hair was covered with a cap that sent a dark shadow across his brow, his eyes were the cold blue of the sea on a winter’s day, and his mouth was a hard line between the fair moustache and neat Elizabethan beard. He took a step forward. ‘I see you here again, you won’t be on a jet-ski for a couple of months.’

I made a protesting movement. He stepped in front of me, squaring into the boy’s space. ‘Not until the plaster comes off. You understand?’

‘You can’t –’ I began. They ignored me, staring at each other like two foredeck hands playing poker. The boy wasn’t going to show he was intimidated, but his defiant stance shifted and the eyes meeting mine so boldly slid away. He wasn’t going to take total defeat though.

‘Like she said, it’s a public pier. I can use it if I want.’ He surveyed the Norwegian, then that unpleasant smile curled his mouth again. ‘My dad’s Olaf Johnston. He wouldn’t want you to be bothering me.’ His eyes shifted to my face, then back to the Norwegian.

Anders wasn’t having it. He took a step forward, spoke very softly. ‘This is nothing to do with your father. I am talking to you. Don’t come anywhere near our dinghies.’ He gave the boy a last hard stare. ‘Or me.’ Point made, he turned to me as if the boy wasn’t there, and jerked his head up towards where our pupils had finished hosing down the dinghies and moved on to splash suits, lifejackets, and each other. ‘Shall we go, Cass?’

I could tell he wanted to get out of there while he still had the advantage. He’d taken only two steps away when his left shoulder bulged and moved; the lump travelled along his front and slid upwards. A pink nose and a set of quivering whiskers appeared in the neck of his checked shirt, then Rat wriggled out to sit on his shoulder, tail coiled around Anders’ neck. Pet rats are sizeable animals, and Rat was a well-grown specimen, nearly 60 cm long from nose to tail. His fur was gleamingly white, with one glossy black patch on his starboard side, and another over his port ear and cheek. I liked him; he was clean, agile, and generally trustworthy aboard a boat, if the ship’s biscuit container was screwed closed, and the light airs sails kept in the stern locker. All the same, I could see why Anders had wanted to keep him under cover; he would definitely have spoiled the hard man image.

Anders strode off up the slip; I paused to help haul the last dinghy up. The water was warm around my ankles.

‘We got stuck in the mouth of the marina,’ the skipper explained. It was Alex, our jet-ski maniac’s brother. He was an under-sized ten-year-old with lavender-blue eyes set in a round face, and gold-rimmed glasses held on with elastic. His fair hair was cut fashionably long, and straggled damply round his neck, like the tendrils of a jellyfish.

‘I saw you,’ I agreed. ‘What were you doing wrong?’

He thought about it. ‘Waggling the tiller.’

‘Yes.’

‘Going into the no-go zone?’

‘That was your main problem,’ I said. ‘Next time, free off a little and get your boat speed up. Never mind if it takes more tacks.’

‘Okay,’ he said. He looked up at the day-glo-pink triangle flapping above us. ‘Do I have to hose the sail too?’

‘Did it go in the water?’

‘No.’

I gave his wet hair a pointed look. ‘How come you did then?’

‘Oh, yeah, I capsized,’ he conceded.

‘Then hose the sail.’

We backed the dinghy into its place in the row below the Boating Club. The club itself was a seventies concrete cube, one of the legacies from when Shetland had suddenly found itself the oil capital of Europe. During the building phase of the huge terminal ten miles north, at Sullom Voe, there had been over four thousand men in the accommodation camp, and so the bosses had had to find ways of keeping them amused. The cinema and sports hall had long since decayed into sheep fodder stores, but the boating club had been embraced with enthusiasm by local folk. Shetlanders were traditionally fishermen with a croft. In the eighties, this voe (the dialect word for a long sea-inlet like this one) had been white with the sails of the traditional Shetland Models, or Maids; youngsters had been encouraged in the red-sailed Mirrors. Now the older sailors extended their sailing range with yachts, heading off to Faroe and Norway at the drop of a shackle-spindle, and slaking their competitive instinct with hotly contested points races. The younger sailors spent their time in the Picos, something like a flattened bath tub with a mast. I wasn’t taken with them from a sailing point of view, but had to concede that they were virtually indestructible, even in the hands of nutters like Alex, who spent as much time in the water as on it.

By the time I got up to the clubhouse, most of the children had hung their dripping blue splash-suits and scarlet lifejackets up in the drying room, and (from the noise filtering through the windows) were busy in the showers: the girls showering at length in a cloud of smelly bubbles, the boys splashing each other as much as possible. It’s worrying how predictable genders can be.

I sat down on the bench to wait for them to finish. My hair was damp; I loosed it from its normal plait and let the dark waves curl over my shoulders. To my right, the green curve of Ladies’ Mire stretched along below the standing stone that raised a rough back to the sun and cast a bulky shadow down the daisy-sprinkled field to the dark seaweed on the shore. Behind it was darker heather hill, the scattald. Crofters had been working with sheep there all day; there was a row of parked pick-ups below the hill gate, with black and white collies snarling defiance at each other through the rear portholes. Every so often I’d looked up to see a clump of indignant, nervous sheep moving across, with two or three dogs wheeling around them. Clipping, dipping, checking on feet, and spraying them purple, there was no end of things that needed to be done to sheep. These hill sheep huddled together so nervously in a multi-coloured clump were proper Shetland sheep, half the size of the muckle-nosed Suffolks that paced majestically around the green parks by the houses. They roamed the heather hills in summer, and in winter they came down to eat seaweed on the shore, and lick the salt from the roads. They were black, grey, and moorit in colour, with the occasional piebald or white one. The ‘black sheep of the family’ proverb didn’t work here.

A hay-filled Berlingo rattled along the main road between the new houses on this side and the older ones opposite, traditional croft houses built after the Viking pattern, long and low, with grey-tiled roofs and a sheltering thicket of bronze-leaved sycamores. To my left, the shore curved around to old Brae, where each house was set in its own strip of land that reached up to the rough hill grazing, and down to where the boat waited in its noost. Even the minister’s house had a stone landing point, and the former shop stood proud above a substantial jetty, from the days – not so long ago, either – when goods and shoppers all came by sea. Shetland’s history was always with us, the old patterns continued.

The shore ended in the point of Weathersta. I’d dreamt last night about the selkie wife who’d lived there, one of those dreams that left you with a sense of foreboding that clung like a dark mist for the rest of the day. I’d been that selkie wife, born a seal and delighting in the roughness of the waves, yet shedding my skin to be a woman on shore, and dance on human feet in the moonlight – until a young fisherman had hidden my skin and kept me for himself. In the dream, I’d loved him, and melted into his arms. I wasn’t going to give the face a name, not even to myself. But my selkie wife had grown gnawingly, achingly, heartsick for the sea, and I’d searched for my skin in the bare house with its driftwood furniture, in the cluttered byre under the old dogskin buoys and tangle of lines, until I’d become frantic, thinking he’d destroyed it, and I’d be trapped on this heavy land until I died of longing. I’d run into the sea, leaving my baby wailing in its cradle, and awoke gasping as my mouth filled with water –

I knew where the dream had come from. My friend Magnie had been telling ghost stories, and one of them had been of the wailing baby, the selkie wife’s deserted child, which had sickened and died without her. I knew why too. It wasn’t hard to analyse. After a dozen years at sea, as yacht skipper and dinghy instructor, I’d decided to go for a commercial qualification at the North Atlantic Fisheries College in Scalloway, Shetland’s ancient capital. I knew it was a sensible idea – no, better than that, it was what I really wanted, to be eligible for a paid job aboard a tall ship, instead of being volunteer crew for my bed and board. All the same, I was dreading it, a year of school, of being trapped day after day ashore, stuck in this northern climate, with no chance of tiers of white sails above my head, and the southern cross bright before the prow in the blue-black night. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it, that the call of the sea would be too strong; that I wouldn’t know myself in a classroom, with my hair neat in its plait, and a shore-patterned jumper, and shoes instead of sailing boots or flip-flops.

My brooding was interrupted by movement at the end of the voe: a motorboat coming in. I ran an eye over the pontoons, looking for gaps. The yellow one belonging to the noisy young couple was missing, but this wasn’t them returning, thank goodness. This boat was white, with a high bow. At the speed it was coming down the voe, it’d be with us in five minutes. I was just wondering if they’d phoned ahead to book a berth when there was a scrunch of tyres on the gravel slope from the main road down to the slip. An ancient mustard Fiesta spattered past me and halted at the metal gate. It was Magnie himself, the marina’s guardian, come to take their warps and give them a key to the club-house.

He’d dressed for the occasion. The sun picked up the dazzling white of his traditional Fair Isle gansey, knitted by his late mother and patterned with upright lines of cable and anchors on a dull-blue background. His reddish-fair hair was sleeked back, and his ruddy cheeks shone as if they’d just been shaved. They had to be visitors; Shetland residents enjoying a fine evening would have got the traditional blue boiler suit and yellow rubber boots.

The motor-boat was a forty-five footer, with a long foredeck for sunbathing in port, and a high wheelhouse opening into a sheltered cockpit. The engine roared as she curved round outside the marina, then quietened to a purr as the driver brought her round to the pontoon where Magnie was waiting.

Below me, on the slip, Norman watched open-mouthed as she gleamed her way across the water. There was a churning of water at the bow, then she stopped dead. Magnie threw the aft warp and the man at the wheel made it fast; a hatch opened in the foredeck and a woman came out, hand extended for Magnie’s second warp. A pause, while they made her fast on the other side too, then Magnie clambered aboard. I wondered if he’d got a welcoming bottle in his hip-pocket.

Norman wasn’t the only one staring. Anders breathed, in Norwegian, ‘That’s a Bénéteau Antares.’

I shrugged one shoulder at him, with the sailor’s traditional contempt for power-boats.

‘She’ll do thirty knots,’ Anders added.

‘Without getting her crew wet,’ I conceded, looking at the flared bow. She looked almost half as broad as she was long. ‘She must be huge inside.’ I turned my head to smile at Anders. ‘We’ll likely get a look later.’

Having to throw your boat open to all and sundry is a perennial hazard of mooring in marinas.

‘They might want to look inside Khalida,’ he mourned.

‘Show them how the other half lives,’ I agreed. Khalida, my yacht and our shared home, was only 8 m.

A thump of feet on the stairs announced that our youngsters were out of the showers at last. Anders went upstairs to dole out hot juice and chocolate digestive biscuits, and I took a quick recce into the talc-scented air of the lasses’ changing room. It was pretty good: a minor flood on the floor, two splash-suit coat-hangers, and the perennial single sock. Then I followed Anders up to do the debriefing and sign their RYA log-books: 27 July, activity: race practice, 2 hours helming, force 2-3, Cass Lynch. At last they rode off on their bicycles, or were collected by their parents in muddied pick-ups with a barking dog in the back, and Anders and I could go home.

Norman hadn’t given up. As we came out of the clubhouse door there was a whine and a roar from his infernal machine, then he sped off in two wings of oily water. A pause, a spin to spray some of it over Khalida, with a look back over his shoulder to check we’d seen, before he roared off down the voe to make sure that nobody in a three-mile range could enjoy the quiet of a summer evening.

We watched him go. I wanted to thank Anders for sorting him out, yet I hadn’t really needed the intervention, and I wasn’t at all sure that threats of violence would improve the situation. Nor did I want to leave it there. You pushed him overboard and left him to drown … Anders and I had never talked about Alain’s death, and I didn’t want him left with Norman’s twist. I gave him an uncertain look, which he didn’t see. He was too busy drooling over the newly arrived Bénéteau.

‘It has twin 500 horse-power Cummins.’

Clearly Cummins out-ranked Khalida’s clanky Volvo Penta. I gave in.

‘Let’s go and say hello, then.’

Chapter Two

We sauntered along the pontoon. The woman had gone below, but the man was standing with Magnie on the foredeck, demonstrating a sizeable electric windlass. I felt a twinge of envy. Hauling Khalida’s anchor up could be back-breaking work, especially when the tide was pulling the other way.

Magnie nodded once we were ten metres away, and gave us the traditional Shetland greeting. ‘Noo dan.’

‘Now,’ I replied. I nodded to the stranger. ‘Hello, there. Have you come far?’

‘From Orkney,’ he said. He was in his late forties, and dark-avised, a tan that gave him a leathered hide, a glossy black moustache, and bristly brows shielding brown eyes. He was beginning to go bald on top, you could see, in spite of the peaked yachting cap, his black hair receding from the front, but still thick at the back, and worn rather long in compensation. He was hefty, too, with a thick neck running down to broad shoulders and a bulky waistline that swelled his white jersey under the navy jacket. There was something familiar about him, but for the moment I couldn’t place it; I was sure I’d never seen him before. He came forward to shake my hand with a no-nonsense grip.

‘David Morse.’

‘Cass Lynch,’ I said, ‘of Khalida.’ I jerked my chin backwards. ‘The Offshore 8 m there.’

He looked, picked her out straight away. ‘Van de Stadt.’

‘Yes, the Pandora’s big sister.’

‘He was a great designer. We had a Pioneer, oh, way back, must be twenty years ago.’ I couldn’t place his accent; educated Scots, east coast rather than west, with a corporate feel about it. Maybe a boat like this was what bankers did with their bonuses; she was split-new, and must have cost a packet. ‘Wonderful sea-boat, wonderful. Come aboard.’ He motioned me forwards, turned to Anders, held out his hand, stared, and raised the hand in the air, palm forwards. ‘Well, now, I thought for a moment I was seeing things. Your pet, young man?’ He held his hand out again. ‘David Morse.’

It was the repetition of his name that did it. Suddenly I was five again, turning the pages of a French picture book, Capitaine Morse et le Dragon de la Mer, marvelling at the detailed pictures of the green and red sea-serpent, and the fishing boat belonging to ‘Captain Walrus’. Here he was in the flesh, genial smile, moustache, cap, and all. For all the bonhomie, though, if I’d had the placing of him, I’d have given him either an older male watch leader who could pull rank, or a young, efficient woman who’d catch him off guard. Otherwise, he’d be too inclined to take charge, even when he didn’t quite know what he was doing. You could see he was used to getting his own way.

‘Anders Johansen.’ Anders raised a hand to Rat, who was whiffling his whiskers in expectation of being allowed to explore a new ship. ‘You do not mind him? He is house-trained.’

‘Not at all, but I’ll warn my wife.’ He turned and called down into the cabin. ‘Madge? Madge, visitors, including a pet rat.’

There was a muffled shriek from below, a clatter of dropped mug. ‘Oh, my.’ The voice was unmistakeably west-coast, the posher end of Glasgow. She peered round the doorway. She had hair the colour of a crab’s back, cut in a flicked-up bob, and a pink-powdered, plump face. Her grey-green eyes were fringed with mascara. Her eyes crossed me, reacted to the snail-trail scar across my cheek, moved too quickly on to Anders’ face and slid to his shoulder. Her mouth fell open. ‘Goodness me, that’s more like a small horse. It doesn’t bite, does it?’ The Glasgow accent was still strong, but, now I heard more of it, it was overlaid over something else, the north of England maybe.

Anders shook his head, and gave his best Norse god smile. ‘Rat has never bitten anyone.’

‘Well, well, that’s the first rat we’ve ever had aboard this ship. Go on up, the kettle’s just boiled.’

We stepped over the gleaming fibreglass side and into the cockpit. David motioned us upwards. ‘It’s far too fine a night to be indoors.’

The high top of the wheelhouse framed an upper level with a table and chairs upholstered in white leather-look PVC, a little sink, a pale wooden worktop, and a double-bed-sized sun-lounger. Khalida’s whole cabin would have fitted into this bit alone. Her dashboard was like a car’s, with a wheel, gears, and instruments. Just this array of screens and knobs was worth twenty thousand. I recognised a fish finder, a radar, a chart plotter, and an Automatic Identification System, along with the usual radio, echo sounder, wind instruments, barometer, tide clock, and log. I paused by the AIS.

‘I’d like one of these, particularly out at sea. If you’re single-handing, it must be great to get early warning, and the chance to call them up personally.’

Not that it always helped. That liner, Sea Princess, who’d passed us just before Alain had gone over, hadn’t responded to my call; she’d just kept on sailing away. She had a schedule to keep.

David reached over my shoulder to switch it on. ‘It has an integral alarm, too. Anything comes closer than, well, you set it, ten miles, twenty miles, it warns you.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

‘Well, well,’ Magnie said. ‘It’s amazing what they can do nowadays.’

I shot him a sideways glance. He’d been mate on a whaling ship in the Antarctic for many years before taking charge of a fishing vessel nearer home, and what he didn’t know about boat gadgetry wasn’t worth knowing. I’d ask him later why he was playing the yokel.

‘Now you just put that off again,’ Madge called from below. ‘I know what you sailors are like.’ There was a stomping noise on the stairs, then a tray appeared in the hatch, was set on the floor, and her crab-orange head appeared after it. She was wearing a jade velour tracksuit underneath a floral print apron, colourful and homely, the chairman’s wife relaxing. The hands that reached for the tray were encrusted with rings. ‘Switch one gadget on,’ she continued, ‘and you need to demonstrate it thoroughly, then the next one, and before we know it we’re back out at sea, looking for fish. No, thank you. Switch it all off, David, and let our guests drink their coffee.’

It was real coffee, the aroma mingling with the suggestion of freshly baked chocolate cake. I slid my legs under the table, sat down on the cream leather settee, and admired the array on the tray: a cafetiére, bone-china mugs, milk jug, sugar bowl, and a plate with a neat pyramid of chocolate brownies. Bone china wouldn’t last ten minutes on Khalida.

‘Milk and sugar?’ Madge asked.

‘Just black,’ I said. I waited till she’d finished pouring, then held out my hand. ‘I’m Cass Lynch, of the Khalida, the little white yacht over there. First mast on the right.’

‘Madge Morse.’ She made a face. ‘I know, it sounds awful. Not only the short sound, but the two ms together. If we were marrying now, I’d keep my maiden name. Madge Arbuthnot sounds much more dignified.’

‘What’s your Cass short for?’ David asked.

It seemed an odd question.

‘Cassandre,’ I said, pronouncing it French style. His brows rose. ‘My mother’s French,’ I explained, ‘and an opera singer. At the time she was in a production of The Trojan Women.’

‘Well, that’s exciting,’ Madge said. ‘I’m afraid we don’t listen to much opera, I’m a Radio 2 person, although we do love Andrew Lloyd Webber – has your mother ever sung in any of that?’

I smiled, envisaging my mother receiving a phone call from Sir Andrew. You wish me to take part in a musical? She’d sound like a captain being asked to scrub the decks. You have the wrong number, monsieur. I am Eugénie Delafauve … And then laying the phone down, It was some person who wished me to sing light music. I must talk to my agent.

‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s a “court of the Sun King” woman. Costumed performances in stately chateaux.’ At the moment, she was rehearsing a Rameau chief villainess, Erinice in Zoroastre, for a massive production at Chinon at the end of August. In keeping with their so-far-effective reconciliation, before Dad had headed down to Edinburgh to bully the Scottish Government into back. . .