Red Bones Page 13

  ‘I don’t know. If they were sold at auction to a collector perhaps they would.’

  She seemed uncertain; the whole concept of private collection and trading in artefacts was strange to her. Perez felt a rush of sympathy. She seemed too frail and innocent to be living alone here in Whalsay. Sophie the Sloane Ranger was no sort of guardian. How would Hattie survive in the big world outside? He wanted to ask if she kept in touch with her parents. He imagined a protective mother who’d had to find the courage to let her daughter go, but who had sleepless nights about her, who held her breath every time the phone went in case there’d been a disaster. Because somewhere in Hattie’s history there must be illness or tragedy, he thought. No one got that haunted look if they’d had a happy childhood.

  Curiosity led him to form a question about her family in his head. Your parents must be very proud of you. Will they get a chance to visit the islands?

  Then he heard Fran’s voice, had a very clear picture of her tipping her head to one side, a half-smile, her nose slightly wrinkled as it was when she meant to tease. What business is it of yours, Jimmy Perez? You’re a policeman, not a psychotherapist. Let the poor child alone.

  So he said nothing. There was a moment of awkward silence at the table. Sophie picked up a piece of creamy fat which remained on her plate and bit into it with sharp white teeth. She looked around her.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘which of you lovely men would like to buy me another glass of wine? I thought this was supposed to be a party.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Outside the Pier House, Hattie and Sophie stood briefly before separating. Hattie had only drunk two halves but felt disengaged and a little woozy. She wasn’t used to eating a big meal at lunchtime.

  ‘The boys have promised me a look round one of the big ships,’ Sophie said. ‘I’d like to see what it’s like inside and they might not ask again. Don’t suppose you want to come?’

  ‘Who’s going to be there?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the usual Artemis crew.’

  Hattie shook her head. The way she was feeling a boat would make her sick, even if it were moored at the harbour. Anyway, she never knew what to say to most of the fishermen with their unintelligible voices and their stories of adventures at sea. Besides, she had other plans.

  ‘They said I could go out with them sometime,’ Sophie said, looking out towards the Shetland mainland. ‘There’s a spare cabin I could use. It’s got a DVD, everything. Do you think they’d take me for a spin today? The sea’s flat calm.’

  She turned back to Hattie, a challenge as well as a question in her look.

  ‘You should be careful,’ Hattie said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’

  Sophie laughed, her head thrown back, so Hattie could see her long neck, stretched even further, much paler than her face.

  ‘Do you think I care about that? It’s not as if I want to make my life here.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be here when Paul gets in?’ Hattie was thrown by the thought that she might have to deal with Paul on her own. She felt a return of the old panic.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t really want to go.’ Sophie grinned, so Hattie realized the woman had just been winding her up. ‘But don’t expect me back until the morning!’

  She grinned again and loped away quite steadily, though she’d had twice as much to drink as Hattie. There was a rip in her jeans and the flesh of her thigh showed through. It reminded Hattie of the fat on the steak Sophie had just eaten. Hattie watched her walking away down towards the harbour. There were times when she hated Sophie for her beauty, her easy way with men, her thoughtlessness. There were times when Hattie wanted to lash out and slap her.

  It seemed to Hattie that the walk down the island had a hallucinatory quality. Phrases and ideas came into her mind with no logic or reason.

  April is the cruellest month.

  Living in the south of England, that had never made sense to her in a literal way. Spring was a time of gentle rain and imperceptible growth. Now she thought of the last ewes lambing untended on the hill with the ravens circling above, Mima lying on the sodden ground at Setter. She repeated the phrase under her breath to the beat of her footsteps.

  She wasn’t used to drinking in the middle of the day. Perhaps that was it. She hadn’t slept the previous night, consumed by a recurring paranoia that the shot that had killed Mima might really have been meant for her. The implication of that was so shocking that now she couldn’t bring herself to consider it in any detail and she allowed her thoughts to float away from her.

  Instead she tried to relive the moment of finding the silver coins in the Setter dig, from glimpsing the first glint of metal. The scene was so close to what she’d dreamed of that she found it hard to believe in the reality of it. Still walking, keeping the rhythm of her feet on the road and the words of T. S. Eliot at the back of her mind, she took her hands out of her pockets and looked at them. Under the fingernails she saw the soil in which the coins had been buried. In that one moment, the instant of rubbing the earth from the dull silver, she’d justified the project, established a future for herself in the islands. Unreal, she thought. It’s unreal.

  She decided to walk on to Utra. She’d ask Evelyn to open the drawer of her desk and show her the coins. There was a British Museum website with images of coins and she wanted to check it out, see if there was anything similar to her find. Evelyn had a computer with internet access. Hattie thought if she didn’t do something constructive, in her present state she’d go crazy, maybe even manage to convince herself that the find was a dream; in the past after all she’d muddled fantasy and reality. She wished Mima were still alive; she’d always helped Hattie get things in proportion.

  As she walked down the track that led to Utra, she passed an elderly couple. The old man was pushing a wheelbarrow with a hoe and a fork balanced on the top. The woman carried a plastic carrier bag containing something so heavy that one shoulder was lower than the other. Hattie didn’t recognize them. They stopped; the man smiled and said a few words of greeting. He only had one tooth and Hattie couldn’t understand a word he said.

  ‘Good-afternoon!’ She grinned, lifted her hand. ‘Good-afternoon!’

  The old woman said nothing. Further along the track, Hattie swivelled back to look at them, but they’d disappeared. She told herself that they’d turned off. Perhaps they were working in one of the planticrubs, the old woman with her grey skirt and her wellingtons, the old man with his gummy smile. But she wasn’t entirely sure that they existed at all. Perhaps they were ghosts, like the merchant’s wife at Setter and her powerful husband, conjured up by her own imagination.

  Evelyn was real enough. She was standing at the kitchen table cutting meat. The knife was small with a sharp, serrated blade. There was a pile of fat and bone pushed to one side of the wooden chopping board. It made Hattie feel ill.

  ‘I thought I’d do a casserole,’ Evelyn said. ‘There was some of last year’s mutton left in the freezer. It needs using. Sandy’s taken some leave from work to help with the arrangements for the funeral. I never know what time he’ll be in to eat.’

  ‘Can I do anything towards the meal? We’re not working this afternoon.’ Hattie hoped the activity might stop the whirling thoughts.

  ‘You can peel the carrots if you like. I won’t ask you to do the onions. They’re big strong ones and they’ll have you crying like a baby.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Hattie thought you couldn’t make up tears, the stinging of the eyes, the taste of salt in the mouth as they ran down your face. But she sat at the table next to Evelyn and began to peel the carrots, aware of how slow and clumsy she was. She knew the older woman was watching.

  ‘Would you and Sophie like to come for dinner?’ Evelyn looked up from the growing pile of meat. ‘There’s plenty, and you can’t just go back to the Bod on a night like this.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Hattie set down her knife.

  ‘Of course we must celebrate! It’s a dream come true. I
wish I’d been there with you when you came across that first coin. This is just what we need before we put together a funding application for a big dig. I’m so thrilled for you. It’s much more exciting than the piece of old skull.’ She tipped the meat into a bowl and, using the same knife, cut an onion in half. A smear of blood was transferred to the white semicircle. She held it face-down on the board and chopped it very fast into translucent slices.

  ‘Would you mind if I used your computer?’ Hattie asked. ‘There are some museum websites with images. Until Val gets in, I thought I might check the coins out, see if I can identify them. And I’d like to take another look at them.’ Hattie wished she could have the feel of the coins on her fingers again; she wondered what they would smell like and imagined the sharp metallic scent of blood.

  ‘Why not? Just let me get this in the oven. I’d be interested in what you can find out too.’ Evelyn shook oil into a heavy pan and threw in the vegetables. Hattie saw her eyes were glistening. The onions must have made her cry.

  ‘Mima would have been so excited,’ Hattie said.

  Evelyn stopped stirring; the wooden spoon was still in her hand. ‘We have to make plans,’ she said. ‘When we have the information back about the skull and the coins we’ll call a meeting. Perhaps something grand in the new museum in Lerwick. Or even better we could arrange something on the island. Show the folk from town what great work’s going on here in Whalsay.’ She shut her eyes briefly and Hattie saw that this was a woman with big dreams too. She was imagining a glittering evening, with all the important Lerwick folk in Whalsay, wine and canapés and Evelyn at the heart of it. ‘We can turn Setter into a museum now, a celebration of Whalsay history. Wo uldn’t that be a fine thing? We could name it after Mima.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would be what she wanted.’ Hattie paused, remembered conversations in the Setter kitchen, drinking tea. ‘She said she wanted a young family to move into the house when she died. She was always teasing Sophie and me. “Find a nice island lad and settle down here. You can rent this place when I’m gone. The boys won’t want it. Bring up your bairns in Lindby.”’

  ‘Aye well,’ Evelyn said. ‘Mima was a great one for telling other folk how to live their lives.’

  She scattered flour over the meat in the bowl and tossed the mutton in it with her fingers until all the pieces were covered, then tipped it all into the pan. There was a smell of searing flesh and the oil hissed and spat. She pushed at the meat with a wooden spoon to stop it sticking.

  How competent she is! Hattie thought. I’d never know how to turn a dead animal into a meal. There was a sweetish smell coming from the pan, which made her feel again that she was going to throw up.

  ‘I’m not sure what plans Sophie has for this evening,’ she said. ‘The boys were going to show her around Artemis. It’s just come back from Lerwick.’

  ‘She’s a fine boat.’ Evelyn tipped a jug of water over the stew, continued stirring while it thickened and came to the boil. ‘Call Sophie’s mobile and ask her. They won’t feed her on board.’

  ‘I will.’ Hattie made no move to find her phone though.

  ‘I wonder how Anna’s getting on with the baby,’ Evelyn said. She’d put the pot in the oven and turned, her hands still in the oven gloves. ‘She wasn’t getting much sleep last time I saw her. Maybe we should take a walk down to the bungalow. Anna was talking about working on her website if she got the chance. It would be good to put something up about the coins. The folk keen on signing up for her workshops would be interested in hearing about the project. And maybe you’d like to see the baby.’

  Hattie thought that was the last thing she wanted; she’d much rather go back to the Bod and begin her plans for the project.

  ‘You could write something about the dig for her site,’ Evelyn went on, ‘It might persuade folks to book up. It’d help put Whalsay on the map.’

  ‘We can’t do that yet!’ Hattie felt anxious just at the thought of it. She looked up at Evelyn in horror. ‘We should keep the find secret for as long as we can. If word gets out you’ll have a bunch of people trespassing on the site, looking for buried treasure. It could damage the project.’ She had the image of geeky men in grey anoraks with metal detectors marching all over her dig.

  Evelyn seemed not to have heard her. ‘Maybe we should take the coins to show Anna. She has a digital camera. I’d love to have a photo of them.’

  ‘Not yet. Paul Berglund should be coming in tomorrow. I think I should wait and see what he says.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble with your boss. And it would be good to keep a bit of mystery about them, before we show them to the public.’ Evelyn put the knives and chopping board in the sink to soak. ‘Come on then. Let’s go and look at your treasure.’

  The desk was in the living room and locked with a small brass key, which Evelyn took from her jeans pocket. Hattie had put the coins into a clear plastic box. They were small and dull. They were in the box just to prevent the need for their being handled, but Hattie longed to touch them. ‘Imagine them being in Mima’s garden all the time,’ Evelyn said. ‘All those hundreds of years.’

  Hattie shut her eyes for a moment and resisted the temptation to lift the lid of the box and put in her nose to sniff the coins. ‘I can’t do any more until Paul comes in tomorrow,’ she said. She replaced the coins in the desk on top of a file containing the Amenity Trust documents and a chequebook.

  ‘I’ll need someone else to countersign the cheques for the project,’ Evelyn said. ‘Mima used to do it. If we’re going to expand the project it might make sense for you to be a signatory.’

  Hattie wondered how the woman could discuss Mima’s death so dispassionately. She still felt herself falling apart whenever she thought about it. What would it feel like to know that you were dying? To be lying in the grass in the rain knowing there was no one to help you or hold you? But perhaps a farmer’s wife who helped slaughter animals took death in her stride. It was all part of her competence.

  Later, after they had looked at the British Museum website, they walked to the Cloustons’ bungalow. Evelyn insisted and Hattie didn’t know how to stand up to her without appearing rude or stand-offish. They found Anna in the workshop, not in front of her computer. She had switched on the light and for a moment they stood outside and looked in through the long window, watching what she was doing. She had no sense that they were there. There was no sign of Ronald.

  It seemed to Hattie a terrible intrusion, to be staring in at her. The baby was in his basket on one of the big trestle tables. Next to him, some cloth was soaking in an old tin bath. Anna was carding some fleece, preparing it for spinning, combing it between the carders with strong easy movements. The process seemed very complicated to Hattie; she could work out the theory but knew she’d be useless in practice. The fleece was combed between flat hardboard sheets pierced with thin nails. Anna moved the untangled fleece from board to board, then pulled it free of the nails and curled it into a loose roll. Now it was ready for the spinning wheel. Another competent woman, Hattie thought. I can’t even peel a carrot with any sort of skill.

  Then Anna noticed them through the window. Their presence had obviously startled her. She stared at them sharply before waving them to come in. She met them at the workshop door and there was a moment of awkward silence. Hattie almost expected her to send them away.

  ‘You’ve heard about Ronald?’ She kept her voice low, though there was no one to hear except the baby. ‘The police have decided to take no further action. They’ve accepted Mima’s death was an accident.’

  ‘He’s a lucky man,’ Evelyn said.

  ‘I know that, and so does he. He’s going out fishing with Davy for the night. I told him it would do him good to get away for a while.’

  Hattie found the atmosphere in the bungalow almost unbearable. I’m going to faint, she thought.

  ‘At least we can go ahead and organize the funeral now.’ Evelyn walked ahead of An
na into the workshop. ‘The Fiscal has agreed to release the body.’

  ‘Ronald wants to be there,’ Anna said, ‘but he’s not sure what Joseph would feel about that.’

  ‘Joseph’s an easygoing sort of man. He’s not one to bear a grudge.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Anna reached out and touched Evelyn’s shoulder. ‘I hope this doesn’t change things between us.’

  There was a brief pause before Evelyn said, ‘Of course not. Why should it?’

  Hattie had the impression that suddenly Evelyn was very pleased with herself, but she couldn’t work out why. She’d never been any good at picking up unspoken communication. Sometimes she felt lost, a stranger in a foreign country, only half understanding the language. I shouldn’t be here, she thought. She had to control an impulse to turn and run away.

  ‘Have you heard about the find at Setter?’ Evelyn took a seat at the table where Anna had been sitting.

  No chance of keeping it secret then! Hattie didn’t know what to say. She thought Evelyn had used her as an excuse to be there. She wanted to make her own excuse and leave, but couldn’t think of a way of doing it with any sort of dignity.

  ‘Tell me all about it.’ Anna leaned against the trestle and Hattie could see the swelling around her belly where the baby had been. Hattie mumbled an explanation of the significance of the coins. The baby started crying, a griping grizzle as if he was in pain. Anna lifted him out of his basket, rocked him in her arms. Suddenly she held him out to Hattie, a kind of challenge. ‘Would you mind taking him while I tidy this away? He’s got colic and he’ll scream the place down if I put him back in his basket.’ She gave a tight little smile. ‘Actually he’s been driving me mad today.’

  Hattie found the baby in her arms before she could object. She held him gingerly, slightly away from her body. He seemed very light and fragile. She had a moment of panic when she imagined herself dropping him; in her imagination she deliberately opened her arms wide and he slipped from her grasp and his head cracked on the floor like one of Mima’s big white eggs. There’d be a puddle of blood. The picture was so vivid that she was surprised that there was no sound, no crying and shouting, but the two island women were chatting about the next forum meeting and seemed to take no notice of her. The baby smelled very sweet. When the time came to hand him back, Hattie wanted to protest and to hold on to him. Perhaps after all it wouldn’t be so terrible to be a mother.