Red Bones Page 2

  The day before, Sophie had marked out a practice trench a little way off from the main site and dug out the turf. She’d exposed roots and a patch of unusually sandy, dry soil and levelled the area with a mattock so the practice dig could begin. The topsoil had been dumped on the existing spoil heap. Everything was ready when Evelyn turned up at ten, just as she’d said she would, wearing corduroy trousers and a thick old sweater. She had the anxious, eager-to-please manner of a pupil sucking up to the teacher. Hattie talked her through the process.

  ‘Shall we make a start then?’ Hattie knew Evelyn was enthusiastic, but really the woman should be taking this more seriously, making notes for example. Hattie had gone through the methods of recording a site in some detail, but she wasn’t sure Evelyn had taken it all in. ‘Do you want to have a go with the trowel, Evelyn? We wouldn’t sieve everything in a site like this, though we might work it through the flotation tank, and every find would need to be set in context. You do understand how important that is?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And we work from the known to the unknown so we always trowel backwards. We don’t want to tread on the things we’ve already uncovered.’

  Evelyn looked up at her. ‘I might not be working for a PhD,’ she said, ‘but I’m not daft either. I have been listening.’ It was gently said but Hattie felt herself blushing. I’m no good with people, she thought. Only with objects and ideas. I understand how the past works but not how to live with people in the present.

  The older woman squatted in the trench and began to scratch tentatively with the trowel, beginning in one corner, scraping away the upper layer of soil, reaching up to tip it into the bucket.

  She frowned like a child concentrating on routine homework. Over the next half hour, whenever Hattie glanced across to her, there was the same expression on her face. Hattie was just about to check on Evelyn’s work when the older woman called over to her.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Hattie stretched and went to see. Something solid was revealed against the lighter colour of the sandy soil and the particles of shell. Hattie was excited despite herself. This was a fragment of pottery perhaps. Imported pottery would give the house the status she hoped for. They’d dug the practice trench away from the excavated dwelling precisely because they didn’t want the amateurs to come across any sensitive finds, but perhaps they’d stumbled across a midden, even an extension to the house itself. She crouched beside Evelyn, almost pushing her away, and brushed the soil away from the revealed object. It was not pottery, though it was reddish-brown, the colour of clay. Bone, she saw now. As an undergraduate she’d expected old bone to be white or cream or grey and had been surprised at the richness of the colour. A large piece of bone, round, she thought, though only a fraction had been uncovered.

  She was disappointed, but tried not to show it. Beginners were thrilled by their first finds. In the Shetland digs they were always finding shards of bone, sheep mostly; once there was a horse, the skeleton almost entirely preserved.

  She began to explain this to Evelyn, to tell her what they could learn about the settlement from the animal remains.

  ‘We can’t just dig an object out,’ she said. ‘We have to keep it in context, to continue to trowel, layer by layer. This’ll be good practice. I’ll leave you to it and come back later.’ She thought how awkward she would feel to be digging while someone was staring over her shoulder. Besides, she had her own work to do.

  Later they went into the house for a break. Mima made sandwiches for them and then came out herself to see what was happening. When Evelyn went back to work on the practice trench, the older woman stood watching. Mima was wearing black Crimplene trousers and wellingtons that flapped around her knees. She’d thrown a threadbare grey fleece over her shoulders. Hattie thought she looked like a hooded crow, standing there watching her daughter-in-law work. A hooded crow ready to snatch at a fragment of food.

  ‘Well, Evelyn, what do you look like?’ Mima said. ‘On your hands and knees like some sort of beast. In this light you could be one of Joseph’s pigs, grubbing around in the soil there. You be careful or he’ll be slitting your throat and eating you as bacon.’ She laughed so loud that she coughed and spluttered.

  Evelyn said nothing. She knelt up and glared. Hattie felt sorry for her. She’d never known Mima be so cruel. Hattie jumped into the trench beside Evelyn. The bone was protruding from the earth now, largely uncovered. Hattie took her own trowel from her jeans pocket. With intense concentration she stripped away more of the soil, then took a brush. The shape of the bone became more defined: there was a pleasing curve, a sculptured hollow.

  ‘Pars orbitalis,’ she said. Shock and excitement made her forget her earlier resolve not to show off, to keep her language simple so Evelyn would understand.

  Evelyn looked at her.

  ‘The frontal orbit,’ Hattie said. ‘This is part of a human skull.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mima said. Hattie looked up at her and saw that her face was white. ‘That cannot be right. No, no, that cannot be.’

  She turned and scurried back to the house.

  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 plac
e 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.

  Chapter Six

  Inspector Jimmy Perez arrived in Whalsay on the first ferry. He was there at Laxo, the terminal on the west of Shetland mainland, waiting on the pier when the boat arrived from Symbister. There was no one else in the queue; that time of the morning traffic was mostly the other way: folks coming off the smaller island for work in town, teenagers too old for the Whalsay Junior High, still half asleep, on their way to meet the bus for Lerwick. He watched the ferry approaching, waited for the half-dozen cars to leave and the gaggle of sixth-year students for Anderson High to walk off to the waiting bus, then he started his engine. Billy Watt was working the ferry today. The crew were all Whalsay men; that was how it worked with the inter-island ferries. Billy waved Perez’s car into position, watched while he drove slowly forward so his bumper was inches off the iron ramp, then gave a genial nod. Whalsay was known as the friendly island; it was famous for the way folk waved when cars passed on the road. When he came to take Perez’s money, Billy didn’t ask what the detective was doing there. He didn’t need to: by now most of the people in Whalsay would have heard about Mima Wilson’s accident.