Shadows of Death (22 page)

Larsen was slightly annoyed. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t much time. I’ve a seminar at seven—’

‘Yes, I know. I do apologize, but this won’t wait.’ Alan looked around. There was no one nearby, no one paying any attention to us. ‘It concerns Mr Norquist, who is still missing, and whom we believe to be in considerable danger.’

Larsen stopped walking. ‘Norquist? Surely the man’s dead? Suicide, I thought.’

‘We don’t think so, Mr Larsen,’ I chimed in. ‘We believe he’s in hiding, and we think we know where he might be. We need your help to find him.’

‘My help? But my dear lady, I haven’t the slightest idea—’

‘We think he might be in one of the unmapped tombs, or cairns, or whatever you call them,’ said Alan. ‘I understand you and he are the only ones who know where they all are.’

‘That’s quite true,’ said Larsen thoughtfully. ‘The Friends have been trying for some time now to get them mapped, but it’s an expensive proposition, and the dig at High Sanday has been taking all our time and money and attention. The cairns are not at all spectacular, nothing like Maes Howe. They’re tiny. What makes you think Norquist might be there?’

‘We think he’d go to a place that’s important to him, and that means one of the Neolithic sites.’

Larsen nodded. He no longer seemed to be in a hurry. ‘That man doesn’t live in the twenty-first century, you know. His clock is set somewhere around 2500 BC. He’s only happy when he’s communing with Stone Age people, and I quite honestly believe he thinks they’re still here.’

Well, so do you, almost
, I thought,
and so in a way do I.
But this wasn’t the time to go into it.

‘So you could be right,’ he went on. ‘If he wanted to go into hiding, he might think the new cairns – newly discovered, I mean – a perfect place to go. But why would he want to go into hiding?’

I had the answer to that one worked out. ‘A great many unpleasant things have been happening of late,’ I said. ‘Mr Norquist is not a strong man, and he is, as you say, a little unbalanced on the subject of the Neolithic peoples. All of these events might have disturbed him to the point that he felt he had to get away and “commune” with the ancients, as you put it. And he isn’t at any of the big important sites, or even the smaller but reasonably well-known ones. So when we learned about these secret ones—’

‘Ah, yes. And just how did you learn of them? They’re not exactly secret, but very few people do know about them.’

‘Do you know Mrs Tredgold, wife of the vicar of St Mary’s?’

‘Ah. I understand. A good woman, that, and how she finds out everything that happens in these islands I’ll never know. She doesn’t snoop. She just knows. A bit frightening, actually. Well, now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have a seminar in not much more than an hour, and I’d hoped to get a bite to eat and look over my notes beforehand. But you feel this matter is urgent?’

‘Don’t you?’ We had arrived at our car. I put my hand on Larsen’s arm. ‘If that poor man has been out there for two or three days in all weathers, he could be ill by now, and in any case he’s probably frightened and disoriented. He must be found.’

Larsen nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll just ask the secretary to put a note on the door saying the seminar is cancelled for this evening, and then I’ll go to my office and get my rough sketch of the cairns. It’ll be light for hours yet; we can make a start, anyway. I’ll meet you here in ten minutes.’

We got in the car and Alan started it just in time. A traffic warden was approaching with blood in her eye, but Alan explained that we were just waiting for someone, and his charm did its work. She allowed us a few minutes.

Larsen was away longer than he had estimated, and I began to worry. ‘Alan, what if he’s gone off to hunt that poor man down? What if he really is the one?’

‘He’d hardly do that and leave us here. We’re witnesses. If he intended … but here he comes.’

He had a light pack with him. ‘I took the time to change, and I brought a few tools. You’ll want to change, as well. The cairns aren’t nice and tidy, and the entrances are less than three feet high. You have to crawl.’

Crawling is not something my artificial knees enjoy at all. And I could feel my claustrophobia kicking in at the very thought of crawling into an ancient tomb in the middle of nowhere. But if it had to be done, I’d grit my teeth and do it. I remembered Alan’s late wife, Helen. I’ll bet she’d explored similar places without a qualm, and I wasn’t going to show myself a coward by comparison.

We went back to the flat and changed into jeans and sturdy shoes, and then I took a few minutes to slap together some sandwiches. ‘It won’t help Mr Norquist if we starve, and I’ve made some for him, too, in case he hasn’t been eating.’

‘And bring walking sticks if you have them,’ said Larsen. ‘We’ll run out of road rather soon.’

It took a moment to remember where we’d put them, but in a very short time we were off, Watson quivering with the excitement he’d caught from us.

We headed west and north, to a part of the island I hadn’t seen. It began to be very hilly, and the road very narrow. We munched on sandwiches, getting food into us while we could, though my stomach was so full of butterflies it was a wonder there was any room for bread and meat. What were we getting ourselves into? Would we find Mr Norquist in this apparently deserted countryside? Or would we find … something else? Was this apparently pleasant man leading us to our doom? Surely not. We were three against one, after all, if you counted Watson – who had demonstrated his protective instincts. And Larsen was a decent man. Wasn’t he?

I cleared my throat. ‘I hope this isn’t just a wild goose chase,’ I said. ‘It was Mrs Tredgold who put us onto it, as we said. She was pleased to hear we were going with you to search.’

Alan recognized my motives in mentioning that someone else knew what we were doing. He also recognized my unspoken anxiety. ‘Steady on, old girl,’ he murmured, patting my hand.

‘The road comes to an end just up here,’ said Larsen from the back seat. ‘You can leave the car anywhere you like. No one comes up here except the odd farmer. From here we walk.’

Well, we were committed now. Alan got our walking sticks from the boot, and Larsen pulled on the small pack he had tossed in the car. I very much wondered what was in it.

He saw me looking at it and obligingly offered me an inventory. ‘Map, compass, torch, my folding stick, and a few other oddments like trowels and brushes. One never knows what might turn up.’

I wasn’t altogether reassured. ‘Oddments’ might easily include things like a hammer. I moved a little closer to Alan and grasped Watson’s lead firmly, and we set out.

‘Watch your step,’ said Larsen cheerily. ‘This is a pasture, you know.’

‘For cattle or sheep?’ Alan asked.

‘Both.’

‘But they’re not here now, are they?’ I asked a little anxiously. ‘I mean, I can see they’re not, but are they apt to appear soon? Because of Watson,’ I added. I didn’t intend to admit that large animals with horns terrify me.

‘Don’t know. Don’t know much about farming. I’d think that the beasts would spend most of the summer moving from one pasture to the next, as the grass grows, but I don’t really know a thing about it.’

Great. Any time now, someone might open a gate somewhere, and we’d be stampeded by a thundering herd of something or other. That was one of the few hazards I hadn’t imagined in dreading this expedition.

I reminded myself that we were trying to save a man’s life. If we could accomplish that, my petty fears were of little importance. I tried to focus on Larsen and what he was telling Alan.

‘A lot of peat hereabouts, you see, not just here, but a bit farther north, round Evie and Birsay. It’s still an important resource. People don’t use it for fuel so much anymore, but the distilleries use a lot of it to dry the malt. It’s what gives whisky the smoky flavour. Most of what’s dug in Orkney goes to Highland Park, of course.’

That was actually interesting, and took my mind off cattle and hammers for a few seconds.

We came upon the cairn with no warning. There was nothing, to my eyes anyway, to mark the little rise as anything special, but Larsen walked around it to the far side, and there, sure enough, was a small opening perhaps eighteen inches wide and high. I’d have thought it the burrow of some biggish mammal, if I’d thought about it at all. A raccoon, say, or a big groundhog. If either of them inhabits burrows.

‘It hasn’t been properly excavated, of course,’ Larsen was saying. ‘The entrance was a good deal taller when it was built, and people were shorter. But even they would have had to stoop to enter. We think it was a gesture of respect to the dead, or perhaps to the gods that inhabited the place. There’s no telling, now.’ He reached in his pack, pulled out a powerful flashlight, and shone it on the ground around the entrance opening. ‘Hmm. We can go in if you like, but it doesn’t look to me as if anything bigger than a rabbit has been here for some time.’

The ground was soft in front of the entrance, and bare of grass. I could see by the strong slanting light of the torch what the sky light hadn’t shown me, the tracks of quite a number of small animals. I recognized only a few, familiar from tracks in the snow back in Indiana. Rabbits, yes, mice, others I couldn’t identify.

Alan shook his head doubtfully. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but we’d best look anyway. I’m not sure I’ll fit, but I’ll give it a try. I’ll need a shoehorn.’

Larsen was the slimmest of us. I knew why Alan preferred to examine the cairn himself.

With some difficulty, he managed to get his head and shoulders through the opening. That was a bad few moments for me. All my claustrophobia kicked in on his behalf. What if he couldn’t get out? What if the roof caved in? What if there was something horrid in there? What if Larsen attacked him while he was helplessly on his knees, and then went after me?

He’d borrowed Larsen’s torch, and the two or three minutes seemed like hours, during which I scarcely breathed, before he backed out and got to his feet. ‘Ptthah!’ He spat out bits of mud and leaves and I didn’t care to consider what else. ‘It’s pretty foul in there. And certainly no human has been inside recently, probably not since Norquist discovered it.’

Larsen nodded. ‘Right. Shall we go on to the next? We’ve hours of daylight left.’

I left my fears behind at the third or fourth cairn. I could see them for the foolish fancies they were. I could also see this as an increasingly futile expedition. Some of the cairns were considerably bigger than the first one. I even ventured, briefly, into one myself when Alan pronounced it rather interesting inside. In none of them did we find the slightest evidence of human occupation, at least not in the last few millennia.

‘There are a few more,’ said Larsen at last, ‘but they’re even smaller than the smallest we’ve seen, and the light’s fading. You don’t want to be out here on the moors in the dark, even the twilight of a midsummer’s night. There are bogs, for one thing.’

‘You’re right,’ said Alan. ‘We’ll have to give up, at least for tonight.’

‘Mr Larsen, it’s been wonderful of you to give up your time for this.’ I shook his hand. ‘I’m sorry it’s turned out to be a wild goose chase.’

‘But it might not have done,’ said Larsen. ‘If Norquist is alive, and frankly that seems more unlikely every day, this is the sort of place we might expect to find him. If you want to continue tomorrow, I’m quite free.’

We agreed to let him know, and drove back to Kirkwall in sombre silence.

We were dead tired when we dropped Larsen off at the university, and very hungry. Those sandwiches had been a long time ago. But the state of our clothes prohibited a restaurant meal, and after eleven o’clock we probably wouldn’t find one open anyway. So Alan popped into a fish-and-chips café we spotted on the way back to Stromness, and we ate our greasy meal sitting in the car. Watson insisted on his share, and we gave it to him. ‘It’ll probably make him sick,’ I pointed out.

‘Just now I simply do not care. It may make us sick, for that matter. Never mind. Let’s get home to bed.’

M
y dreams were uneasy that night. In the morning I remembered none of the details, only the feeling of imminent disaster and my own helplessness to avert it. Alan was still asleep when I fought my way out of an especially awful dream and staggered down to the kitchen for some coffee.

My predictions about Watson had, all too obviously, come true. He was looking shame-faced, his tail between his legs. ‘Never mind, dog,’ I said wearily. ‘It’s not your fault. We shouldn’t have fed you that junk. I’m not really feeling too well myself. Out you go.’ I opened the patio door and he slunk out, still not sure he wasn’t in disgrace. I made coffee and took it upstairs to the sitting room. I was definitely not up to that clean-up job until I’d had some caffeine.

The smell of coffee woke Alan, who padded out to the sitting room looking as dishevelled and out of sorts as I felt. ‘Watson was sick all over the kitchen floor,’ I said by way of cheery greeting. Alan groaned and poured himself some coffee.

We cleaned up the kitchen in grim silence, cleaned up ourselves, and then by common consent put Watson on his leash and headed for the nearby café for breakfast. He had to wait outside, of course, but he was feeling quite a lot better by that time and was happy to receive the admiring pats and coos of passers-by.

We couldn’t talk about our problem in the crowded café, which was a real blessing. It gave us time to sort out our ideas and psyche ourselves into better moods. After we’d eaten we took Watson for a long walk along the harbour and then back up along The Street.

It didn’t come as any real surprise when we ran into Mrs Tredgold. She smiled, observed our faces, and said, ‘There’s no need, I see, to ask how you fared yesterday.’

‘Badly, I’m afraid,’ said Alan in a low voice.

‘We can’t talk here,’ Nora said. ‘Come back to the vicarage with me. That is, how does Watson feel about cats?’

‘He loves our two,’ I replied. ‘In fact, the only one I’ve ever known him to dislike …’ I trailed off, and she sighed and nodded.

‘Entirely understandable. We’re up this lane.’ She turned into a steep by-way that was signposted ‘Khyber Pass’.