Offshore: A short story collection Read online

  Contents

  The Secrets of Soil

  (featuring DI Willow Reeves)

  The Writer-in-Residence

  (featuring DI Jimmy Perez)

  The Spinster

  (featuring DI Jimmy Perez)

  Stranded

  The Soothmoothers

  (featuring DI Jimmy Perez)

  Hector’s Other Woman

  (featuring DI Vera Stanhope)

  The Pirate

  Postcard from Skokholm by Lynne Chitty

  (featuring George and Molly Palmer-Jones)

  Thin Air

  Chapter One

  About the Author

  By Ann Cleeves

  The Secrets of Soil

  The phone call from my father woke me from a deep sleep. It was past midnight and my first thought was that my mother was dead. She’d been ill for a while.

  ‘Willow, you need to come.’ A pause. ‘Please.’ He’d lived in North Uist for thirty years, but hadn’t lost the posh voice. He’d never asked for my help before.

  ‘Is it Lottie?’ We Balranald kids had been taught to call our parents by their first names. One of the many things that set us apart.

  ‘No, not Lottie.’ Another hesitation. ‘Just come. Get the first plane to Benbecula. I’ll meet you there.’

  Peter was waiting in the airport building, thin as a scarecrow with long, grey hair. Looking at his face, I saw how similar we were. In thirty years I’d have the same bony face, and my hair was already as dry as hay. We drove across the causeway to North Uist. The week before had been unseasonably stormy, but now it was sunny, so the landscape looked drenched in melted butter. Light reflected from the water that’s everywhere in the islands, and from the iris beds and the flat machair, yellow with rattle, bird’s-foot trefoil and little wild pansies. I waited for my father to speak. He’d dragged me here; let him make the first move. The van bounced across a cattle grid and towards the house where I’d spent my childhood.

  I remember the place as being full of life. People always came and went in the commune. Students arrived in the summer, attracted by my father’s writing about peace, love and self-sufficiency. Damaged, screwed-up and idealistic people drifted in, looking for salvation or a free bed. But it was hard work feeding so many people, keeping the place warm and watertight, and most packed their rucksacks and hitched to the ferry at Lochmaddy after a week or two. Now the place seemed lifeless. The tyre-swing, hanging from a rafter in the barn, was still there, but no kids played on it. Only my parents remained, held to the land by memories of its glory days, by my father’s stubbornness and their failure to make any financial plans for retirement.

  Peter switched off the engine and jumped out. ‘Follow me.’ He could be charming to strangers and journalists, but never to me. My decision to join the police service – the ultimate rebellion for a commune kid – had fractured our relationship beyond repair. We walked down the track towards the dunes, past the strip-fields where barley and oats grew. Everywhere, noise: corn buntings, snipe and lapwings protecting their young. Despite myself, I loved being there again.

  He stopped sharply where the dunes slipped down towards the bay. The shore was washed clean by the gales, and I could see where he’d been with the ancient tractor, raking up seaweed to fertilize the light shell-soil. ‘Look.’

  There was an overhang in the dunes – the recent wind had eroded them, making wave-shaped sculptures held together by marram roots. A hand reached out of the sand. A skeleton. No flesh. Peat preserves bodies, but sand allows for decay. The bones were perfect, the fingers intact. It could have been a sculpture too. There are no ground-predators in Uist to disturb a body.

  I realized that I’d been expecting this since the phone call in the middle of the night and my father’s urgent summons. If my mother wasn’t dead, then John Ash had come back to haunt me.

  He was one of the wanderers, the sad and the lonely boys who came to Balranald for comfort or escape. He turned up late one night. I think he’d walked from the ferry, which is miles away. Lottie had taken to him at once. I was her only child, and as strong and stubborn as my father. An ugly cuckoo in her nest. John was soft and brown-eyed. He was the companion Lottie had always wanted, dependent and pliable. And I’d killed him.

  I crouched on the sand and looked more closely at the hand. On one finger there was a silver ring, loose because there was no flesh to hold it. It was tarnished now, but I knew that it would be engraved with a Celtic pattern, Lottie’s trademark. She still made jewellery to sell at Taigh Chearsabhagh, the arts centre in Lochmaddy, and she’d handed out these rings to her favourites. I stood up and turned to my father. The beach was empty, but it was a fine day and soon somebody would be along to walk a dog or take photographs of the gulls. ‘Why did you call me?’

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’ Another first. My father was famous for his certainty.

  ‘When did you find him?’

  ‘Last night. I waited until your mother was asleep before I phoned you.’

  He looked at me and I saw again how old he was. When John Ash arrived at Balranald that summer, Peter had been at the height of his powers. He’d just published The Secrets of Soil and it had become an unexpected bestseller. The commune was thriving. Three families lived and worked there, beside the hangers-on. Peter was living the dream, cultivating the machair in the old-fashioned way. He was an authentic crofter who happened to be articulate, educated and good-looking. Charismatic. And, like all gurus, he had his disciples. John had travelled a long way to seek him out and worship him.

  It was humid and thundery the day of John’s arrival, midges swarming over the boggy ground near the house. I was in the kitchen with Lottie when he knocked at the door. He stumbled over the step, exhausted, and Lottie reached out to steady him. I was seventeen then and red-faced after days in the sun, difficult and desperate to fly the nest. John was in his early twenties, a frail university dropout who’d lost touch with his parents. Lottie loved pretty things, and John was very pretty. She took to him immediately, and Peter always needed admirers, so John joined the commune as wide-eyed believer, farm labourer and surrogate son.

  From the start I hated his vulnerability, the way he tried so hard to please us. I made no attempt to hide my contempt, but John seemed not to notice. One afternoon I was in the barn, swinging on the tyre like a kid, when he declared himself in love with me. He stuttered over the words. I’ve never met anyone like you. It was all I could do not to laugh. Later I wondered if his infatuation was feigned, to anchor himself into our community. Perhaps he was like all the other drifters – there for the free bed. But I don’t think he was that calculating. Recently I found one of the poems he’d written to me. It was childish, embarrassing, but strangely moving. My parents would have served him better by sending him to a shrink.

  On Friday nights I started going to the Lochmaddy Hotel. The public bar was a rough place of underage drinking and fights. The noise spilled out across the bay and I’m not sure how the tourists who stayed in the guest rooms got any sleep. John hated it, but sometimes he tagged along, an irritating shadow. One evening in late summer there was live music and the place was heaving before we arrived. Donald, the butcher’s son, was already steaming. When I went to the bar, he put his arm around me and tried to kiss me. If I’d been alone I’d have sworn and pushed him away, but suddenly I wanted to hurt John, to humiliate him, so I pulled Donald to me and kissed him again, very hard. The whole room cheered.

  ‘I think we should go,’ John said. ‘I’ll phone Peter for a lift.’

  ‘Go yourself!’ I stroked Donald’s cheek. I knew that John wouldn’t dare ask Peter to fetch him unless I was there too. Let h
im walk. I carried on drinking and flirting and laughing with the rest of the crowd.

  Donald offered to drive me home. He was with some other boys and they all piled into a second car. Donald sobered up a bit when he got outside, and we set off first. All the way down the road the two cars chased and jostled, flashing their headlights and hitting their horns. Bored young men desperate for any excitement they could get. We were almost at Balranald when we saw John walking ahead of us. As we passed him, Donald wound down the window to jeer and I joined in.

  I didn’t see what happened next. We were already round the corner near the cattle grid that led to our house. There was a horrible screech of brakes behind us, shouts. Donald stopped too and I got out and began to run, not towards the scene of the incident, but in the other direction. Home. Panicked and ashamed.

  We never saw John again. My parents didn’t seem too troubled by his sudden disappearance. He was just another young helper who’d found the island life too hard. Lottie blamed me for rejecting him with so little sensitivity: ‘You drove him away.’

  And when I imagined the incident, that was how I saw it: John, hurt by my cruelty, standing deliberately in the path of the oncoming car. The ultimate escape. I suppose it could have been an accident, but I left the island a week later to start college and never spoke to Donald or his friends about it. I didn’t want to know the details. There was no news about an injured young man on the Balranald road, so I could convince myself that John had been unharmed, that he had left for an easier life. Until now. Until the wind cut into the dunes and exposed his grave.

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘What you should have done as soon as you found him,’ I said. ‘Call the police.’

  ‘I’ve already done that.’ Peter looked at me strangely, and I thought he knew more about John’s disappearance than he’d let on at the time. Of course there would have been rumours. It’s impossible to keep secrets in the islands. ‘I called you.’

  ‘Tell the local police.’ I stood up, my feet slithering through the soft sand. ‘He might have a family. He deserves a proper burial.’

  ‘Will they be able to identify him?’

  ‘Probably. Dental records. And the ring will link him with Lottie.’

  And the soil, I thought, would tell its own story. There might be a belt buckle, buttons, hair. If Donald and his friends had used their own spades to dig the makeshift grave, there could be traces of peat from cuttings on their blackland. Their families hadn’t crofted the machair in the old way.

  My father looked at me. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What I should have done then. Tell the police what I know.’

  He frowned. ‘It seems pointless, this digging around in the past.’

  Then I saw that I’d been wrong about John’s disappearance. The boys who’d knocked him down would have left him where he was. They wouldn’t have bothered to haul his body down the track to the dunes. Once they’d realized he was dead, their instinct would have been like mine, to run. Peter had heard the racket that night and gone out to investigate. He’d buried John in the sand. A way of saving Balranald’s reputation.

  ‘I didn’t see what happened,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t in the car that hit him and I won’t speculate.’ It was the most I could promise.

  My father turned away and I saw, as a sudden revelation, that he’d hidden John Ash to protect me, not himself. He must have cared about me, after all, in those strained days of my adolescence. I reached out and touched his shoulder, then walked off through the yellow light and the birdsong to make the call.

  The Writer-in-Residence

  It started to snow as I got off the plane: a few flurries, the flakes white against the dark sky. It was mid-afternoon, but that far north, night comes early. Sumburgh airport is very small, and arriving passengers walk across the tarmac to reach the terminal. Today a gusting northerly breeze tugged at our clothes and made us hurry inside. The runway stretches out towards the sea at both ends and is exposed whichever way the wind blows. There is no escaping from the water in Shetland.

  By the time I’d picked up the hire car there was a blizzard, snowflakes as big as feathers floating against the windscreen. I hadn’t met anyone I knew on the plane or in the airport and that felt odd. In the old days, when I’d come to Shetland after a holiday or a few days away, there was always somebody who recognized me – a school friend or a neighbour of my parents. It was weird to drift in like a stranger, to collect my bag from the belt without a wave from a member of staff. I suppose that in ten years I’d changed. Who would recognize me now? I should have felt glad. The last thing I wanted was for my old life to catch up with me. That was why I’d kept away for so long. But it was strange all the same.

  When I arrived at Scalloway, the street by the harbour was white and my little hire car slid towards the wall as I pulled in to park. The skid scared me, although no damage was done, and I found that I was shaking as I climbed out. It was quite dark now and the small town was quiet. All I could hear was the suck of the tide and the splash of water where the wind caught it. The key to the Bod was still in the envelope in which it had arrived at my Edinburgh flat. I stood, shivering in the snow, to pull it out of my bag.

  Someone walked down the street towards me. A tall man dressed in a long black coat, which looked out of place here, where everyone wears anoraks or parkas. I watched him appear through the blizzard, bareheaded and apparently oblivious to the snow. Easy, loping strides. The snowflakes looked very white where they rested on his dark, untidy hair. I waited anxiously, afraid of a confrontation, scared that the old hostilities would be ignited, reinvented over time. But he seemed preoccupied by his own thoughts. He gave a distracted wave – the least that politeness dictated in Shetland – and a mumbled greeting: ‘Terrible weather for so early in the year!’

  Then he walked on.

  Something about his frown was familiar, but he was a Shetlander, so it’s possible that I knew him from my earlier life. He was no threat, and that was all that mattered. If I was going to be here for a month, I’d need to keep my paranoia at bay.

  The Bod was warm inside. Someone had been in to switch on the heating and there was a pile of peat, in case I wanted to light the stove. Once it had been a boathouse and it stood on stilts right over the water. Small and wood-lined, there was one room, a combined study and kitchen downstairs, with a small shower room attached. The bed was in a loft reached by a narrow ladder. I had been to the Bod once before, to celebrate the publication of a collection of poetry. I had been eighteen and it had seemed a rather grown-up thing to do, to attend a launch party. I’d written it up for an arts magazine, a new venture set up by John Sinclair. He’d known then that he wouldn’t stick at teaching for the rest of his career. We’d all crammed into the small space, sipping warm wine. The poet in residence then had been a small woman from the Ukraine. Old enough to be my grandmother, she’d drunk a bottle of wine all to herself and still stayed coherent. I never thought then that I’d be invited to stay in the place, that I’d be the soothmoother brought in to enrich the cultural life of the islands. I’d planned my life in quite a different way.

  I’m not a poet. It’s important to make that clear. Poets create works of the imagination. Their reality is different, more intense, not rooted in the prosaic. Their words sparkle and reflect like shards of ice in sunlight. My truth is solid and rooted in the mundane. I write fiction, but you could find my stories in any newspaper. A dead prostitute in a canal. An unfaithful wife strangled. A corrupt police officer. I have no interest in the beauty of words, only in their ability to describe clearly and accurately. And that clarity and accuracy are my trademark. It’s why I’m famous and why, even before I’ve reached the age of thirty, I’m a wealthy woman.

  So why am I here? Why have I agreed to spend a month as writer-in-residence, employed by Shetland Arts Trust (though no payment at all has been mentioned)? Because I have unfinished business in Shetland, and I refuse to let fear haunt me.
<
br />   I climbed the ladder to the loft, dragging my bag behind me. I had brought very little. Unless it has changed a good deal, Shetland is not a place where it’s important to impress with smart clothes. The Oxfam shop probably still does a good trade. And the essentials of my work – a computer and Internet access – had been provided for me. Part of the deal of the residency. The bed was low, hardly more than a futon, though it had a comfortable mattress. I lay down to try it out. There was a narrow window in the eaves, looking directly out to sea. The snow had stopped as suddenly as it had started and there was a thin moon and a scattering of stars, very bright. After living in the city, the intensity of the stars, the detail of the Milky Way, came as a surprise. In Shetland there is little light pollution.

  Downstairs again, I switched on the kettle. The kitchen was well stocked. There was real coffee and a filter machine. In the fridge, white wine, and on the table a bottle of good French red. Shetlanders have become affluent and accustomed to the good things in life. How will they adapt to poverty if the oil stops flowing altogether? On the table there was also a note from John Sinclair, the arts officer: Sorry I couldn’t be at the airport to welcome you. Please make yourself at home and give me a shout if you need anything. Then two telephone numbers – a landline and a mobile.

  The kettle switched itself off, but I ignored it and opened the wine. There were bannocks from the Walls Bakery on the bench, and Shetland cheese, butter and milk in the fridge. Smoked salmon and smoked mussels. Slices of reestit mutton. John had done all he could to make me feel at home. After I’d drunk half the bottle I set it aside, out of my line of vision. It would be very easy to finish it all. It was only nine o’clock, but I’d been up early and I was tired, yet too restless to go to sleep. I stood at the window that made up the whole of one of the downstairs walls and looked out. It was triple-glazed, but still I could feel the chill through the glass. The wind had dropped entirely. On the other side of the harbour the trawlers were covered in snow and looked ghostly in the moonlight. I turned back to the room and switched on the computer. My BlackBerry had no signal here and I wanted to check my emails. We were waiting for the TV adaptation of my first book to be given the green light, and my agent might have some news.