Sacrifice (34 page)

‘Worth thinking about,’ agreed Helen. ‘Course the mounties would have to be midgets.’

‘You’d need to rethink the height rule.’

‘Maybe special dispensation for Shetland. How many of these ponies do you have up here?’

‘Not sure anyone knows. They breed like rabbits, apparently. A lot are sold – to pet centres, model farms, that sort of place. And as children’s mounts. They’re incredibly popular. Exported all over the wor—’ I stopped, realizing what I was saying.

‘Like Shetland babies?’ asked Helen.

‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘except . . .’

‘Where are they all coming from?’ she prompted.

I nodded.

Helen frowned, appeared to think for a moment. ‘Let’s just say there are more babies being born there than appear on your register,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s say that Stephen Gair, Andy Dunn, Kenn Gifford . . . all the men whose records we checked earlier . . .’

‘It’s OK,’ I interrupted. ‘You’re allowed to mention Duncan and Richard.’

She gave me a half smile. ‘Suppose they are involved, making a whole packet of money from it, and somehow Melissa Gair found out, threatened to go to the police. That would be motive enough, wouldn’t it, to get her out of the way?’

‘I guess.’

‘But why not just kill her, stage an accident? Why fake her death and keep her alive for so long?’

‘Because Stephen Gair knew she was pregnant. He wanted his child.’ I explained Dana’s theory about the boy Stephen Gair called his stepson being, in fact, his own son by Melissa. Helen seemed to shrink a little inside herself at the mention of Dana, but managed to hold it together.

‘Hell of a risk,’ she said. ‘And why cut out her heart? Why those weird symbols on her back? Why bury her in your field, for God’s sake? Why not just dump her out at sea?’

‘Because they have to be buried in sweet, dark earth,’ I whispered, not really intending that she should hear.

She gave me a look. ‘Are we back to trolls again? I can’t do trolls right now. We need to get moving.’

She gathered up her reins and lifted her foot to the stirrup. She was mounting from the wrong side but I didn’t say anything. Henry would probably go with it. Then she stopped.

‘Do you want me to hold him?’ I offered.

‘Shut up,’ she hissed. ‘Listen.’

I listened. Soft whinnying from the ponies, gentle slurping as several of them drank, whistling of the
wind down from the hill tops. And something else. Something low, regular, mechanical. Not a sound of nature. Something insistent; something approaching.

‘Shit!’ Helen threw the reins forward over Henry’s head and started pulling him towards a steep overhang of rock at the valley’s edge.

‘Come on,’ she urged. The noise was getting louder. The ponies could hear it now and didn’t like it. Several of them kept breaking away from the group, sprinting off and then back again. Helen had reached the outcrop. I made it a few seconds later. We backed close to the rock, pulling the horses up against us. We held their heads and tried to keep them still as we waited for the helicopter to approach.

‘The farmer phoned the police after all,’ I whispered, as though people in a helicopter still half a mile away could hear us.

‘More likely they found your car,’ said Helen. ‘Does everyone know you have horses?’

I thought about it. Duncan, of course, would know immediately that the horses were missing, but he was off the islands. Gifford! Gifford knew. And Dunn, of course. In fact, pretty much the entire Shetland police force. Richard. Yes, just about everyone knew I had horses.

The helicopter was close now and we could see the searchlight, a huge beam of brightness lighting up the valley. I tightened my hold on Charles. The Shetlands, seeking security in numbers, had all followed us to the overhang. Unlike Charles and Henry, though, they were far from still: they
pushed and bustled each other, jumping around and squabbling in their efforts to stay as close as possible to the bigger horses.

‘Skit! Scram! Get out of here!’ hissed Helen. ‘Little buggers are going to draw attention to us.’

The chopper was directly above us now. The cascade of light was alien, terrifying in its intensity, illuminating the landscape in a ghostly parody of daylight. Outside the light, though, all appeared pitch black, unnaturally dark for Shetland, and for the moment the dark cloak covered us.

The helicopter passed overhead. I held my breath, hardly daring to hope. It travelled maybe half a mile to the north and then swung a 180-degree turn and headed back towards us.

‘They’ve seen us,’ I whispered again. I couldn’t help it; it was instinctive to keep my voice low.

‘They’ve seen something,’ said Helen. ‘Stay still.’

This time the chopper wasn’t lighting up the centre of the valley but had shifted twenty metres or so to the west; a small but crucial adjustment, given that this time the searchlight could hardly miss us.

‘I should have untacked the horses when we first heard it,’ I said. ‘No one would think twice about finding two untacked horses out here. Without them, we could have hidden behind rocks.’

Helen shook her head. ‘They’ll have surveillance equipment,’ she said. ‘They’ll be able to spot body heat. Actually, these little tykes might just save the day.’

The Shetlands seemed to fear the light more
than the noise. As it grew closer they broke cover, scattering across the valley, seeking the safety of darkness. The chopper swerved and followed them just as the light touched on Henry’s brown tail. The dominant stallion set off south at a gallop, most of the herd veering round to follow him, and, like a new recruit, the chopper went too, increasing the panic among the scared little animals. The herd turned, so did the chopper. It began to circle; the light edged closer. A mare and her foal that had stayed with us broke away at this point and the helicopter circled again. It rose higher in the sky and moved north. It turned back but this time kept clear of our rock overhang and headed north again.

Charles and Henry started to fidget but Helen and I hardly dared move as the noise of the helicopter’s engines faded.

‘I can’t believe we got away with that,’ I said, when it felt safe to breathe again.

‘They saw movement and probably body heat but assumed it was the ponies. God bless them.’

The ponies had calmed down but were staying clear of us.

‘Will they come back?’ I asked.

Helen shook her head. ‘Impossible to say. They’ve got a lot of terrain to cover. I think we need to get moving. We’ll hear them if they head back.’

We mounted and set off again. The tension of the last few minutes seemed to have sapped me of energy. It was all I could do to point Charles in the right direction and urge him forward.

‘How much further do we have to go?’ asked Helen.

I looked at my watch. It was coming up for three a.m. The incident with the helicopter had slowed us down.

‘Another forty-five minutes,’ I guessed.

‘Christ, my ass is sore.’

‘Wait till tomorrow. You won’t be able to walk.’

At that moment the world around us changed.

We’d been travelling through a landscape of black and grey shadows, of cliffs topped with scrubby remnants of vegetation, silhouetted against a deep indigo sky. Of subtle hues there was an endless variety, of real colour there was none.

And then a great draper in the sky unleashed a roll of finest green silk; it hung in the air, several miles high, stretching as far as we could see, shifting and gleaming, changing constantly, giving off and reflecting back a light that was all its own. The sky grew blacker around it. Trees and rock formations were thrown into harsh relief as the draper shook his cloth, the silken sky rippled, and shades of pale green I’d never dreamed of danced before us.

The horses stood, frozen to the spot.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Helen. ‘What is it?’

From the north-west came a soundless explosion of colour, as though heaven had thrown open a window, allowing awestruck mortals below a glimpse of the treasures beyond. Cascading down came beams of silvery green, of a rich deep violet, and of the warmest, softest, rosiest pink you could
imagine; it was the colour of love, of girlish dreams, of a warm and happy future that I would probably never know. It was colour so incredibly rich, and yet so fine that through it we could still see the stars.

And so we joined the ranks of the few privileged souls who, thanks to a lucky coincidence of time, geography and atmospheric conditions, have been permitted to glimpse the Aurora Borealis.

‘The Northern Lights,’ I said.

Silence.

‘Wow!’ said Helen.

‘Doesn’t nearly come close,’ I agreed.

Silence again.

‘How?’ she said. ‘How does it happen?’

I took a deep breath, ready to reel off a lengthy and extremely tedious explanation of charged particles from the sun colliding with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. Then I changed my mind.

‘The Inuits called them gifts from the dead,’ I said. Then, surprised at my own daring, let alone the sentimental depths to which my normally cynical nature could plummet, I added, ‘I think Dana sent them.’

Helen and I watched the lights glimmer and ripple for a further ten minutes before fading. We lost more time but it didn’t seem to matter. We had gained strength.

‘Thank you,’ whispered Helen, and I knew she wasn’t talking to me.

Shortly before three thirty we arrived at my friend’s livery yard in Voe. The stable-block was empty but I could see her two horses peering at us from a nearby field. I slid off Charles and ran my hands over his injured leg. It had held up but he was going to need a few days rest. I found buckets and gave both horses a long drink and an armful of hay. Then I untacked them, released them into the field and carried the saddles and bridles over to the tack room. The key was where I expected to find it, beneath an earthenware flower tub.

My friend’s tack room doubles as an office and there was a phone line. I pointed it out to Helen, closed the door behind us and headed straight for a drawer in the desk. I was in luck. Half a packet of Jaffa cakes, a nearly full box of Maltesers and three tubes of Polo mints. I divided the bounty and we ate ravenously for five minutes. Feeling slightly better but still sore and weary, we plugged in Dana’s laptop.

31

THERE WAS ONLY
room for one at my friend’s cramped desk so Helen took the chair and I lowered myself on to a straw bale and leaned against the stone wall of the tack room. I didn’t think I’d ever been on a less comfortable seat, but I knew I could be asleep in seconds if I allowed my eyes to close. From the saddlebag I retrieved Dana’s copy of
The Woman in White
. As I did so, several folded sheets of A4 paper fell out of it.

At the desk Helen broke off typing to cough and then spit into her hand. She caught me looking at her.

‘Bloody Maltesers are covered in hairs,’ she grumbled before resuming typing.

‘Dog hairs if you’re lucky, horse hairs if you’re not,’ I muttered.

‘’Scuse me?’ she said, her fingers still tapping away.

‘Something my dad used to say at mealtimes,’ I said. ‘I grew up on a farm. With horses. Food
hygiene wasn’t something we worried too much about.’

‘If I find another I’ll pass it your way. What are you doing?’

‘Staring vacantly at a sheet of paper, hoping the words might come into focus some time before dawn,’ I answered.

‘You should sleep,’ she said. ‘You should probably still be in hospital.’ She leaned to one side and spat again, less delicately this time. ‘Shit, what is this?’

‘You eat a pound of muck before you die,’ I said.

This time she let her hands fall on to her lap and turned round to me. ‘What?’

‘Dad again. He got it from his dad. It’s called a Wiltshire Wisdom. When I was young, I took it literally – you know, imagined that when I’d eaten exactly my pound of muck, that would be it – curtains – even if I was only seven and healthy as a horse. It terrified me for a while. I used to scrub fruit till I bruised it. One time I even tried to use bleach on a biscuit I dropped on the floor.’

Helen was staring at me. I dropped my eyes to the floor, feeling ridiculous.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked tentatively, as though not too sure she could deal with an honest answer.

I nodded without looking up.

‘You’re allowed to have a good howl. I did.’

I bit my lip, took a deep breath. ‘Not sure I’d be able to stop,’ I managed after a second or two. Helen said nothing but I could feel her staring at me. ‘Duncan’s leaving me,’ I said. ‘He’s met someone
else. I suppose I should be thankful, really, given everything that’s . . .’

Helen started to push herself up from the desk to come towards me.

‘When can you phone for a helicopter?’ I asked.

She said nothing for a second, then sat back down. ‘An hour or so. Not too long.’

I forced myself to concentrate on the papers in front of me. After a minute or two, I was able to blink away the tears and read them.

Right at the start of Dana’s investigation I’d given her a print-out of births on the islands. She’d transferred it all on to her laptop but had kept my original and I was looking at it now. She’d gone over several entries with a pink highlighter pen. The four highlighted entries were all births that had taken place on Tronal between March and August 2005. I’d done exactly the same thing some hours previously.

Again, I noticed the initials KT. Seven entries. What had Gifford said they abbreviated: Keloid Trauma? It had made a certain sort of sense the way he’d explained it but it wasn’t a term I’d come across before. Wondering if the entries had anything else in common, I checked the timing and found nothing; they were spread fairly evenly over the six-month period. Next I checked locality; three had been born at the Franklin Stone, another elsewhere in Lerwick, one on Yell, one on Bressay and one on Papa Stour. The weights of the infants varied but all were within the normal range, if anything slightly on the heavy
side. A couple had been Caesareans but the rest were normal vaginal deliveries. They were all boys. I checked again. Not a single girl among them.
Race of males.