Authors: Lin Anderson
None but the Dead
For DI Bill Mitchell
None but the dead are left to tell the tale.
Music, chatter and laughter spill from the Nissen hut to follow them. Her hand is hot in his as they run, her breath coming in small gasps. Reaching the top of the dune, he
jumps down onto the beach. Turns and lifts her.
She is light as a bird in his hands. The smallness of her excites him as he lays her on the white sand. Pushing up her dress he finds the warm smooth skin of her inner thigh.
She halts his hand and anger sparks, though he strives to quench it.
‘You do love me?’ she says, her lovely eyes questioning.
In that moment, he does, as he loves everything he desires.
She releases his hand and offers up her mouth to him. It is soft and sweet and deep.
She smothers a cry as he enters her, and he knows now for definite that he is the first. This excites him even more. He has lost sight of her now, drowning in his own pleasure.
Realizing this, she suddenly shifts, emptying herself of him.
Her cry of ‘No’ is swallowed by his big hand.
‘Yes,’ he says and tries to re-enter.
But she fights. Oh, how she fights. His surprise at that gives her the chance to momentarily escape his clutches.
He cannot allow this.
His anger explodes, like the surge of water through the nearby channel.
When he surfaces it’s still dark, his mouth is thick with whisky, the skin on his bare thighs rubbed raw by grains of sand. She lies beneath him, half buried. Her eyelids are veined
blue, the smudged lipstick distorting the shape of her mouth.
Her eyes, which he thought beautiful, are now as glassy-eyed as a dead fish.
He stands up, adjusts his clothes. For a moment he feels pity. Then it becomes annoyance and anger at her for spoiling the moment.
The sand will shift, he thinks. I cannot bury her here.
He could definitely hear the sound of children’s voices.
Mike threw open the kitchen door. The area which would have served as a playground was empty, the supposed cries of children replaced by the wail of the wind.
He’d read all about the gales that swept these northern isles before he’d decided to move here, and had thought himself immune. After all, he’d been brought up next to the
North Sea.
But I didn’t know an Orkney wind.
At this point the object of his thoughts tried to wrestle the door from his hands. Mike stepped back inside and closed it. The summer had been windy, but there had been occasional days when that
wind had softened to a breeze and he’d been lulled into a false sense of security as he’d worked on the renovation of the hundred-year-old building.
Wait until winter
, had been the most common response from the locals. Mike had smiled each time that had been said, indicating he wasn’t afraid of bad weather. It wasn’t as
though the temperature dipped dramatically. Snow was almost unheard of. Frost too. What could be so bad about winter here on the island?
He stood for a moment, listening to the wind whistling through the eaves.
That was what I heard. Not children’s voices.
‘I was a teacher for too long,’ he said out loud as though to convince himself.
Leaving the kitchen area he went to check on the stove, touching the wall behind, feeling the warmth absorbed by the stones. The conversion of the big room that had been the main classroom in
the island primary school had created his living space. Open plan, it was his kitchen and sitting room combined. His bedroom was a smaller room off one end, which he thought had been the
teacher’s office. All this had been his spring and summertime task. Now autumn was here he was planning to break up the tarred area behind the house and prepare it for his garden, or more
properly his vegetable patch, to be ready for next spring.
Mike put the kettle on. It would be dark soon. The nights had drawn in swiftly. That was the other warning he’d had. The long dark nights when day ended by mid-afternoon. That hadn’t
worried him either. If he was deep in a book, it didn’t matter if it was night or day. He would read in the dark months of the year and work on his painting during the long summer days. And
there were other jobs he could do when the weather was bad. Such as sorting out the loft.
Mike glanced upwards. The rafters above this room were exposed, so no loft here, but the yet-to-be-renovated half of the building, which had been the teacher’s living quarters, had a
sizable loft. He’d opened the trapdoor and stuck his head in to take a look. Even fitted a light, but he hadn’t got round to checking the loft space out properly. Maybe now was the time
to do that. After all, the digger wasn’t coming to break up the playground until tomorrow.
There were thirteen of them. Placed at regular intervals among the rafters. Finding the first one had excited him. Flower-shaped, the intricately tied greyish strip of muslin
resembling a rose – like something fallen from Miss Haversham’s wedding veil. It was obvious by the colour and texture of the material how old it was – as old as the schoolhouse
that stood resolute against the winds that stripped bare this northern isle.
Intrigued by one, Mike found himself disturbed by thirteen. All as intricately tied, all distinctively different as though each referred to someone or something unique. He had removed only one
from the thick layer of dust and ash that lined the loft, carefully bagged it, and taken it to the tiny island heritage centre.
The curator, Sam Flett, who wasn’t an incomer like himself, had welcomed Mike and asked what he could do for him. When Mike placed the muslin flower in its clear plastic bag on the desk,
the result had been unexpected. The weather-beaten face had openly blanched, but worse was to come when Mike attempted to remove the flower from its bag.
‘Don’t handle it,’ Sam had said sharply, causing Mike to let go of the bag in surprise.
Sam, who’d appeared to be avoiding even looking at the flower, had asked, ‘Where did you find it?’
‘In the loft at the schoolhouse.’
‘Then my advice is to put it back,’ he’d said. ‘As soon as possible.’
‘But what is it?’ Mike had asked, apprehensive now.
Sam had hesitated, before saying, ‘On death, the hem of a child’s smock was torn off and fashioned into a magic flower.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘The flower represents the child’s soul.’
Mike had expected him to add
of course, that’s just superstitious nonsense
. He hadn’t.
‘There are another twelve of them in the loft,’ Mike had told him.
‘Leave them there, and put this one back.’
I didn’t follow his advice.
He hadn’t disturbed the others, but thinking to investigate further, he’d left the single flower in its bag on the kitchen table, where it still sat. After all, he’d reasoned,
what harm could a muslin flower do him?
Hugh Clouston was an island man born and bred. Owning the only resident small digger had made him invaluable, a treasured part of the community, and oft required in all
weathers. Hence his confident yet relaxed demeanour.
He gave Mike the thumbs-up as the metal teeth finally broke through the compacted surface and the bucket scooped at what lay beneath. The filled shovel rose, then swivelled to the right and
released its load.
Low sunlight caught the cargo as it fell, a shower of sandy soil mixed with small stones, and something else – white, solid, shapely.
Mike didn’t register what looked like a bone at first, not properly, but the next scoop brought something he couldn’t ignore. The skull rose and, as the digger turned and the bucket
released, it fell earthwards again, landing on top of the mound of displaced earth as though to watch its own grave being excavated.
Hugh, earplugs in place, didn’t hear Mike’s initial shout, nor did he appear to register his frantically waving hands indicating something was wrong. The noise of the digger seemed
to rise with Mike’s distress, as though the sudden and obvious presence of death had resulted in a crescendo.
‘Stop!’ Mike screamed.
This time it worked. Hugh emerged from whatever daydream he’d been having. The engine was shut down. Mike dropped his waving arms and pointed at the white object sitting atop the pile of
earth and stones.
Hugh Clouston hadn’t seemed perturbed by what he’d unearthed.
‘Orkney’s covered with Neolithic graves, but we’ll have to report it. The Kirkwall police will want to take a look.’
The call to the police station made, Mike watched as the digger and its unfazed driver departed, trundling out of the school gates. Back now in the kitchen he immediately went for the whisky,
his hand shaking as he poured himself a glass.
I had no choice
, he told himself again.
Not with Hugh here
.
Now the police would come to Sanday. They’d visit the schoolhouse. Ask him questions. They’d want to know who he was. And why he’d come here.
Detective Inspector Erling Flett had taken the rather garbled call as he sat in his office contemplating the fallout from the weekend in Kirkwall, which had included a couple
of fights in the town centre and a domestic, all three fuelled by alcohol. Orkney wasn’t a hotbed of crime, but it had its problems as all communities do, and consumption of alcohol and its
related activities was one of them.
That wasn’t to say that the islands had never featured in high-profile cases. Barely months had passed since mainland Orkney had formed part of a major murder enquiry when a young
woman’s body had been discovered in the Ring of Brodgar. Fortunately, the perpetrator had not proved to be local, although the notoriety of what became known as the Stonewarrior case had
certainly put Orkney and its Neolithic stone circle even more prominently on the map than it had been before.
