Chapter One ANNA OPENED HER EYES AND SAW a pair of hands, streaked and shiny with blood. No face. In her ears a piercing squeal. At first she thought she was at Utra and Ronald was helping Joseph to kill another pig. That would explain the blood, the red hands and the terrible high-pitched sound. Then she realized the noise was her own voice screaming. Someone rested a dry hand on her forehead and murmured words she didn’t understand. She spat out an obscenity at him. More pain. This is what it is to die. The drug must be wearing off because she had a sudden burst of clarity as she opened her eyes again to bright, artificial light. No, this is what it is to give birth. ‘Where’s my baby?’ She could hear the words slightly blurred by the pethidine. ‘He was having problems breathing on his own. We’ve just given him some oxygen. He’s fine.’ A woman’s voice. A Shetlander, slightly patronizing, but convincing, and that mattered most. Further away a man with blood to his elbow grinned awkwardly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Retained placenta. Better to get it out here than take you to theatre. I thought you wouldn’t want that after a forceps delivery, but it can’t have been very comfortable.’ She thought of Joseph again, the hill ewes lambing, the ravens flying off with placenta in their beaks and on their claws. This hadn’t been what she’d been expecting. She hadn’t thought childbirth would be so violent or so raw. She turned and saw Ronald; he was still holding her hand. ‘I’m sorry I swore at you,’ Anna said. She saw he’d been weeping. ‘I was so scared,’ he said. ‘I thought you were dying.’ Chapter Two ‘ANNA CLOUSTON HAD HER BABY LAST night,’ Mima said. ‘A difficult birth apparently. She was in labour for twenty hours. They’re going to keep her in for a few days to keep an eye on her. It was a boy. Another man to take on the Cassandra.’ She shot a conspiratorial look at Hattie. It seemed to amuse Mima that Anna had had a difficult labour. Mima liked chaos, disorder, other people’s misfortune. It gave her something to gossip about and kept her alive. That was what she said, at least, when she sat in her kitchen cackling into her tea or whisky, filling Hattie in on island events. Hattie didn’t know what to say about Anna Clouston’s child – she’d never seen the appeal of babies and didn’t understand them. A baby would just be another complication. They were standing at Setter, in the field at the back of the house. A wash of spring sunshine lit the makeshift windbreak of blue plastic, the wheelbarrows, the trenches marked with tape. Seeing it as if for the first time, Hattie thought what a mess they’d made of this end of the croft. Before her team from the university had turned up, Mima had looked out over sloping low meadow to the loch. Now, even at the beginning of the season the place was muddy as a building site and Mima’s view was interrupted by the spoil heap. The wheelbarrow run had scored ruts in the grass. Hattie looked beyond the disturbance to the horizon. It was the most exposed archaeological site she’d ever worked. Shetland was all sky and wind. There were no trees here to provide shelter. I love this place, she thought suddenly. I love it more than anywhere else in the world. I want to spend the rest of my life here. Mima had been pinning towels on to the washing line, surprisingly supple despite her age. She was so small that she had to stretch to reach the line. Hattie thought she looked like a child, prancing on tiptoes. The laundry basket was empty. ‘Come away in and have some breakfast,’ Mima said. ‘If you don’t put on a bit of weight you’ll blow away.’ ‘Pots and kettles,’ Hattie said as she followed Mima across the grass to the house. And she thought Mima, trotting ahead of her, did look so frail and insubstantial that she might be swept up in a storm and carried out to sea. She’d still be talking and laughing as she went, as the wind twisted her body like a kite-tail until it disappeared. In the kitchen a bowl of hyacinths was in bloom on the windowsill and the smell of them filled the room. They were pale blue, streaked with white. ‘They’re pretty.’ Hattie sat at the table, pushing the cat off the chair so she could sit down. ‘Spring-like.’ ‘I can’t really see the point of them.’ Mima reached up to lift a pan from the shelf. ‘They’re an ugly kind of flower and they stink. Evelyn gave them to me and expected me to be grateful. But I’ll kill them soon. I’ve never kept a houseplant alive yet.’ Evelyn was Mima’s daughter-in-law and the subject of much complaint. All the crockery and cutlery in Mima’s house was slightly dirty, yet Hattie, usually so fastidious, so fickle in her appetite, always ate whatever Mima cooked for her. Today Mima was scrambling eggs. ‘The hens are laying well again,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take some with you back to the Bod.’ The eggs were covered in muck and straw, but Mima cracked them straight into a bowl and began whisking them with a fork. Translucent white and deep yellow yolk splashed on to the oilskin tablecloth. Using the same fork she scooped a lump of butter from a wrapped packet and shook it into the pan on the Rayburn. The butter sizzled and she tipped in the eggs. She threw a couple of slices of bread directly on to the hotplate and there was a smell of burning. ‘Where’s Sophie this morning?’ Mima asked when they’d both started eating. Her mouth was full and her false teeth didn’t quite fit, so it took Hattie a moment to understand what she was saying. Sophie was Hattie’s assistant on the dig. Usually Hattie did the planning and the preparation. It was her PhD after all, her project. She was obsessive about getting things right. But this morning she’d been eager to get on to the site as soon as possible. It was good to get away from Sophie sometimes, and as much as anything she was glad of a chance to chat to Mima on her own. Mima liked Sophie. The season before the girls had been invited to a dance at the community hall and Sophie had been the life and soul of the party, so the men had been queuing up to swing her around in the eightsome reel. She’d flirted with them all, even the married ones. Hattie had watched, disapproving and anxious, but jealous too. Mima had come up behind Hattie and yelled in her ear above the noise of the music: ‘That lass reminds me of myself at that age. I had the men flocking around me too. It’s all just a bit of fun to her. It means nothing. You should lighten up a bit yourself.’ How I’ve missed Whalsay over the winter! Hattie thought. How I’ve missed Mima! ‘Sophie’s working in the Bod for a while,’ she said. ‘Paperwork. You know. She’ll be along soon.’ ‘Well?’ Mima demanded, bird-like eyes bright over the rim of the mug. ‘Did you find yourself a man while you were out? A good-looking academic maybe? Someone to keep you warm in bed in those long winter nights?’ ‘Don’t tease, Mima.’ Hattie cut a corner from the toast, but left it uneaten. She no longer felt hungry. ‘Maybe you should find yourself an island man. Sandy’s still not found himself a wife. You could do worse. He’s got more life about him than his mother, at least.’ ‘Evelyn’s all right,’ Hattie said. ‘She’s been good to us. Not everyone on the island supported the dig and she’s always stood up for us.’ But Mima wasn’t ready yet to let go of the subject of Hattie’s love life. ‘You watch yourself, girl. You find yourself the right one. You don’t want to get hurt. I know all about that. My Jerry wasn’t the saint everyone made him out to be.’ Then, lapsing into dialect. ‘Dee can live without a man, dee ken. I’ve lived without a man for nearly sixty years.’ And she winked, making Hattie think that though Mima might not have had a husband for sixty years, she’d probably had men enough in her life. Hattie wondered what else the old woman was trying to say. Immediately after the plates were washed, Hattie went back on to the site. Mima stayed inside. It was Thursday, the day she entertained Cedric, her gentleman caller. Thoughts of this place had been with Hattie all winter, warming her like a lover. Her obsession with the archaeology, the island and its people had become one in her mind: Whalsay, a single project and a single ambition. For the first time in years she felt a bubbling excitement. Really, she thought, I have no reason to think like this. What is the matter with me? She found herself grinning. I’ll have to watch myself. People will think I’m mad and lock me away again. But that only made her smile some more. When Sophie arrived, Hattie set her to preparing a practice trench. ‘If Evelyn wants to be a volunteer we should train her to do it properly. Let’s clear an area away from the main excavation.’ ‘Shit, Hat! Do we really have to have her on site? I mean, she’s kind enough but she’s a real bore.’ Sophie was tall and fit with long tawny hair. She’d been working as a chalet maid in the Alps over the winter, helping out a friend, and her skin was bronzed and glowing. Sophie was easy and relaxed and took everything in her stride. She made Hattie feel like a neurotic drone. ‘It’s a condition of our work in Shetland that we encourage community involvement,’ Hattie said. ‘You know that.’ Oh God, she thought, now I sound like a middle-aged schoolteacher. So pompous! Sophie didn’t answer. She shrugged and went on with the work. Later, Hattie said she’d go to Utra to talk to Evelyn about training to work on the dig. It was an excuse. She hadn’t had the chance to revisit her favourite places in Lindby. The sun was still shining and she wanted to make the most of the good weather. As she walked past the house, Cedric was just driving away in his car. Mima was at the kitchen window waving him off. When she saw Hattie she came to the open door. ‘Will you come in and have a cup of tea?’ But Hattie thought Mima just wanted to prise more information from her and to give her more advice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve no time today. But Sophie’s due a break if you want to give her a shout.’ And she walked on down the track with the sun on her face, feeling like a child playing truant from school. Chapter Five SANDY WILSON CROSSED THE FIELD UNSTEADILY. It was a few weeks after Hattie had found the skull, one of those thick black nights that often came in the spring. Not cold, but the island covered by low cloud and a dense, relentless drizzle that hid the moon and stars and even the lit windows of the house behind him. He didn’t have a torch, but he didn’t need one. He’d grown up here. If you lived on an island six miles long and two and a half miles wide, by the time you were ten you knew every inch of it. And that internal map stayed with you even after you’d left. Sandy lived in town now, in Lerwick, but he reckoned if he was dropped blindfold anywhere on Whalsay he’d be able to tell you where he was after a few minutes, just by the way the land lay under his feet and the touch of the nearest dyke on his hand. He knew he’d had too much to drink, but congratulated himself on leaving the Pier House Hotel when he did. His mother would be waiting up for him. Another couple of drinks and he’d be steaming. Then he’d get the old lecture about self-restraint and about Michael, his brother, who’d given up the booze altogether. Sandy thought maybe he’d call in to his grandmother’s house on the way and she’d make him a cup of strong black coffee so he’d be quite sober when he got home. She’d phoned him earlier in the week and told him to call at Setter next time he was home. Mima never minded seeing him a wee bit worse for wear. She’d given him his first dram, one morning when he was on his way to the big school. It was a chilly sort of day and she’d said the whisky would keep out the cold. He’d spluttered and choked like it was the worst kind of medicine, but he’d developed a taste for it since. He thought Mima had had a taste for it from the cradle, though it never seemed to affect her. He’d never seen her drunk. The field sloped down towards the track that led to Mima’s croft. He heard a gunshot. The noise startled him for a minute, but he took no notice. It would be Ronald, out after rabbits with his big spotlight. He’d talked about going when Sandy had gone to see the new bairn and it was a good night for it. The rabbits, dazzled by the light of the torch, stood like statues, just waiting to be shot. Illegal, but rabbits were such a nuisance in the islands that nobody cared. Ronald was his cousin. A sort of cousin. Sandy began to figure out the exact relationship but his family tree was complicated and he was drunk, so he lost track and gave up. The rest of his walk to Setter was peppered with the occasional noise of a shotgun. There was a bend in the track and Sandy saw, just as he knew he would, the light in Mima’s kitchen window. Her house was tucked into the hill and you came on it very suddenly. Many of the islanders were pleased that it was hidden from view by the land curved around it, because it was a scruffy sort of place, the garden overgrown with weeds, the windowframes bare of paint and rotting. Evelyn, Sandy’s mother, was mortified by the state of Mima’s croft, nagged his father about it regularly. ‘Will you not go and sort the place out for her?’ But Mima would have none of it. ‘It’ll last me out,’ she’d say, complacently. ‘I like it fine as it is. I don’t want the fuss of you around the croft.’ Joseph took more notice of his mother than he did of his wife, so Mima was left unbothered. Setter was the most sheltered croft on the island. The archaeologist who’d arrived last year from a university in the south said people had been living on that land for thousands of years. He’d asked if they might dig a few trenches in a field close to the house. A project for a postgraduate student, he said. One of them had an idea that there had been a grand dwelling on the site. They’d put the land back the way they’d found it. Sandy thought Mima would have let them on anyway. She’d taken to the historian. ‘He’s a fine-looking man,’ she’d said to Sandy, her eyes glittering. Sandy had seen what she must have been like as a girl. Daring. Shameless. No wonder the other island women were wary of her. There was a noise from the field next to the track. Not gunshot this time but a muttering, ripping and stamping of feet. Sandy turned, saw the silhouette of the cow just a few feet away. Mima was the only person left on Whalsay who milked by hand. The rest had stopped decades ago, put off by the work, and the hygiene regulations, which prevented the milk being sold. There were people though who still liked the unpasteurized milk and fixed Mima’s roof or slipped her a bottle of whisky in return for a jug of the yellow liquid every morning. Sandy wasn’t sure they’d be so keen if they saw Mima milking. Last time he’d seen her do it, she’d blown her nose on the filthy tea-towel she went on to wipe the udders with. As far as he knew, though, no one had gone down sick as a result. He’d been brought up on the stuff and it had done him no harm. Even his mother scooped the cream off the top of the churn and put it on her porridge for a treat. He pushed open the door into the kitchen, expecting to see Mima in her chair by the Rayburn, the cat on her knee, an empty glass by her side, watching something violent on the television. She was never one for going to bed early, hardly seemed to sleep much at all, and she loved violence. She was the only one of his family who’d been pleased by his choice of career. ‘Fancy,’ she said, ‘a cop!’ She’d had a kind of dreamy look in her eyes and he’d been sure she’d been imagining New York, guns, car chases. She’d only been south once, to Aberdeen for a funeral. Her pictures of the world came from the TV. Policing in Shetland had never been much like that, but she still enjoyed hearing his stories, he exaggerated them, just a touch, to make her happy. The television was on, the sound horribly loud. Mima was going deaf, though she refused to admit it to the family. But the cat lay on its own in the chair. It was large and black and vicious to everyone but its owner. A witch’s cat, his mother called it. Sandy turned down the sound, opened the door to the rest of the house and shouted. ‘Mima! It’s me!’ He knew she wasn’t asleep. She’d never leave the light and the telly on, and the cat shared her bed as well as her chair. Mima’s husband had died in an accident at sea when she was still a young woman. There were rumours of her being a wild young widow, but since he’d known her she’d lived on her own. There was no answer. He felt suddenly very sober and walked through to the rest of the house. There was a corridor which ran along the back of the three rooms and led into each one. He couldn’t remember ever going into her bedroom before. She’d never been ill. It was a square room taken up with a heavy dark-wood wardrobe and a bed so high that he couldn’t see how Mima could scramble on to it without a step. There was the same thick brown lino on the floor as in the kitchen, a sheepskin rug, white once, now grey and rather matted. The curtains, faded and tatty, cream with a design of small roses, weren’t drawn. On the windowsill stood a photo of her husband. He had a thick red beard, very blue eyes, was dressed in an oilskin and boots and reminded Sandy of his father. The bed had been made and covered with a quilt of crocheted squares. There was no sign of Mima. The bathroom was a more recent addition, built on to the back of the house, though it had been there as long as Sandy could remember. The bath and the basin were an improbable blue, though there was still brown lino on the floor, partly covered by a bright blue shaggy rug. A smell of damp and wet towels. An enormous spider crawled around the plughole. Otherwise the room was empty. Sandy tried to think rationally. He’d dealt with missing-person inquiries and knew that families always panicked unnecessarily. He’d made fun of the anxious parent or partner once he’d put down the phone. ‘There was a party at the Haa last night. That’s where they’ll be.’ But now he felt the shock of the unexpected, the unknown. Mima never strayed from her house at night these days, unless there was a family do at his parents’ house or a big island event like a wedding, and then someone would have given her a lift and he’d know about it. She had no real friends. Most Whalsay folk were slightly afraid of her. He felt his thoughts spinning out of control, tried to keep calm. What would Jimmy Perez do in this situation? Mima always shut her hens up at night. Maybe she’d gone out to do that and tripped and fallen. The archaeologists had dug their trenches on some land right away from the house, but she was getting on now and it was possible that the drink was at last clouding her judgement. If she’d wandered down that way it would be easy enough to lose her footing. Sandy went back to the kitchen and collected a torch from the drawer in the table. It had been there from the time when every house had its own generator, which only ran for a couple of hours in the evening. Outside, he felt the chill of the mist and drizzle, biting after the heat of the Rayburn. It must be nearly midnight. His mother would be wondering where he was. He walked round the house. Here was the shed where Mima brought in the cow for milking. Once his eyes adjusted to the dark there was enough light spilling from the house for him to see quite clearly where he was going. He’d left on the bathroom light and the window faced this way. No need yet for the torch. The hens were already shut up. He checked the catch on the wooden henhouse and could hear the rustle of movement inside. Earlier the day had been fine and Mima must have done her washing. The line stretched away from the house down towards where the archaeologists had set up the dig. There were still towels and a sheet pegged to the nylon rope. They hung lifeless and heavy, like the sails on a becalmed boat. Other island women would have taken down the washing as soon as the weather closed in, but Mima would probably not have bothered if she’d been eating her tea or reading a book. It was this fecklessness that so irritated some of her neighbours. How could she not care what people were thinking of her? How could she keep such an untidy house? Sandy walked past the washing to where the students had been working. A couple of poles with string stretched between to mark out the search area, or maybe for measuring. A windbreak made of blue plastic strung on to metal stakes. A pile of turfs, neatly stacked, and another of soil. Two trenches cut at right-angles. He flashed the torch into them, but they were empty apart from a couple of puddles of water. It occurred to him that the area looked like a crime scene in one of the programmes his grandmother liked to watch. ‘Mima!’ he shouted. He thought his voice sounded very thin and high-pitched. He hardly recognized it. He decided he should go home, switched off the torch and started back to the house. He could phone Utra from there. His mother would know where Mima was, she knew everything that happened on Whalsay. Then he saw that a coat had fallen from the line and lay in a crumpled heap on the grass. He recognized it as one of the students’ waterproofs and thought Mima had probably offered to get rid of all the mud for them. He was going to leave it: wouldn’t it need to go through the machine again anyway? But he stooped to pick it up and take it inside. It wasn’t just a coat. It was his grandmother, looking very small inside the yellow jacket. He thought she was hardly bigger than a doll, thin, her arms and legs like twigs. He touched her face, which was cold and smooth as wax, felt for a pulse. He supposed he should call for the doctor, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen, paralysed by shock and by the need to take in the information that Mima was dead. He looked down at her face, chalk white against the muddy ground. This isn’t Mima, he thought. It can’t be. There’s been some terrible mistake. But of course it was his grandmother; he looked at the ill-fitting teeth and the wispy white hair and felt sick and very sober at the same time. He didn’t trust his judgement though. He was Sandy Wilson, who always got things wrong. Maybe he’d fumbled for the pulse and she was really alive and breathing fine. He picked her up in his arms to carry her indoors. He couldn’t bear to leave her here out in the cold. It was only when he had her in the kitchen that he saw the wounds in her stomach and the blood.