None but the Dead (36 page)

‘Where’s Joe now?’ McNab said quietly.

She met his eye. ‘I have no idea.’

‘He hasn’t been in touch?’

She shook her head vehemently. ‘Definitely not.’

‘And if he finds out you’ve come to me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, worry creeping into her voice.

McNab thought for a moment. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Just along the shoreline from the hotel.’

‘Are there any boats beached nearby?’

She looked puzzled by the question. ‘A few, and a couple of boathouses.’

‘Could a boat go missing without anyone noticing?’

Catching his mood, she thought hard about that.

‘One of the boathouses belongs to a holiday cottage. So I suppose . . .’

‘Take me there,’ McNab said, reaching for his jacket.

‘What? Now?’ she said.

But McNab was already at the door.

‘It’s within walking distance,’ she assured him as they bent their heads against the wind.

McNab swore under his breath. Anything further than a couple of yards in this weather, to his mind, did not constitute a walking distance.

Street lights on the left-hand side of the road attempted to illuminate the scene, with little success. He hadn’t paid much heed to the route into Kettletoft before now, having always
arrived by car, with his sights strictly on the approaching hotel. Now he registered that the long string of houses, bar a few, were on the seaward side of the road, most of them single storey, a
few derelict, with some in the process of being renovated. Cars were parked alongside and some open areas between held boats on trailers, or lying on the grass.

Eventually Hege stopped and entered a gate in a wall. Tucked behind was a tiny house with a flagstone patio.

‘This is my place,’ she said.

‘It has a boathouse?’ McNab asked.

‘Yes, but no boat. It’s the holiday house next door I was talking about.’

She took him round the back. Once out of the lee of the building, the wind whipped at them again. On either side of an old stone jetty that jutted out into the surging water stood two
boathouses. The one he took to belong to Hege’s cottage was dilapidated. The boathouse and house on the other side had obviously both been renovated, and fairly recently.

‘A consultant from somewhere in the south of England owns it. He comes up in the summer with his family.’

‘He definitely has a boat?’

‘Yes.’

Hege walked down the stone jetty. McNab delayed as a wave hit, spilling its wash of water across the green surface.

Noting his trepidation, Hege urged him to follow. ‘It’s safe,’ she called back.

McNab, his memory of his recent ducking still fresh, didn’t agree, but he followed her nevertheless.

She jumped down onto the gravelly shore, and having now entered the grounds of the next-door property, climbed back up the rocky shoreline and headed for the boathouse door, where she waited for
him.

‘I’m used to the terrain,’ she said, when he finally joined her. ‘I come from a fishing village like this one in Norway.’

McNab ignored her attempts to put him at ease. ‘Did Millar know about this boat?’

‘He asked about the house next door. Who owned it. Whether he had a boat. I told him.’ She looked pained by that.

A sensor on the rear of the house picked up their presence and a light came on, illuminating the boathouse door.

‘It’s been forced,’ McNab said, noting the chipped wood alongside the lock.

He hesitated, albeit briefly, before grabbing the handle and pulling it open.

Inside, all was darkness and shadow, with the sound of the sea surging over the jetty as a backdrop. McNab felt along the inside wall for a switch and eventually found one.

He blinked as a powerful overhead light came on.

The space was large and tidily kept. All the paraphernalia for boat owners stood along the walls. Shelves were laden with tools. There were containers for fuel and water.

A trailer stood centre stage.

The one item that was missing was a boat.

Rhona had slept fitfully. The wind, hitting the small seaward window of the bedroom, had crept in around the frame, the spluttering draught chilling the air and fluttering the
curtains. She’d given up sometime during the early hours of the morning, and rising, had gone through to the kitchen, to discover the howl of the wind was even stronger here.

She doubted whether the large thick slabs of slate that covered the roof would be shaken by such a wind, but they couldn’t prevent the sound of it trying, which reminded her of the
high-pitched screech of a banshee. From the sitting-room window, she had a fine view of a tumultuous sea, whipped-up sand and madly dancing grass. The only object that appeared permanent was the
striped lighthouse with its steady revolving beam.

By dawn, a level of calm had descended. Now on her third cup of coffee, Rhona ventured outside to take a look. A film of white sand glistened on the flagstones that fronted the door, but
otherwise nothing had changed.

She went round to the back of the building and took up her place beside the stone lookout post to await her morning delivery of mail. Having downloaded last night, she found only two new
messages. One from Magnus, confirming he would arrive shortly. The other from McNab, sent in the early hours of the morning.

Rhona opened it.

Several attempts later, she still hadn’t made contact with him, which suggested McNab was either asleep or no longer at the hotel and in range of its signal.

Hearing a car on the track approaching the cottage, she abandoned her attempts and went to greet Magnus.

‘Ready?’ he said.

Rhona quickly told him of McNab’s message.

‘So you were right. He does have a boat.’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Do you want to find McNab or check for the bomb shelter?’

‘Let’s head for the camp, as planned.’

They collected a spade and trowel from the shed, scattering the half-dozen cats that had been sheltering there, then set off over the fields. The sea was still high, although
the wind had dropped.

As they walked, Magnus told Rhona some of the words in Orkney dialect for the winds that swept the islands. ‘You can have a tirl, a gurl, a gussel, a hushle, a skolder, a skuther and a
guster,’ he finished.

‘And the difference between them?’ she said.

‘The degree of strength. My ancestors regarded the weather as a personal foe with whom they had to cope,’ Magnus said. ‘My grandfather, and my father, always used the personal
term “he” rather than “it” when referring to the weather. You still hear Orkney folk saying, “He’s blowan hard,” and “He’s cleran
up.”’

Rhona regarded the sky. ‘He’s cleran up,’ she tried.

‘Not bad,’ Magnus acknowledged, ‘for a ferry louper.’

On their left flank, they spotted the large blocks of concrete that had secured the feet of the giant radar masts. Beyond them the rooftop of the Muir house.

‘Should we call in on our way back?’ Magnus said.

Rhona nodded. Derek Muir hadn’t been transferred to Kirkwall, on Erling’s orders, but his normal activities had been curtailed. Not so much house arrest as island arrest.

‘He would be the one to ask about the boat and its owner,’ Rhona said.

They took the route along the shoreline. The overnight buffeting had deposited large clumps of tangle on the sand. Behind these rose mounds of broken slate, difficult to clamber over to reach
first the machair then the fenced farmland.

On spotting the brick mortuary, Rhona stopped and, using her map, indicated to Magnus the area she judged to be halfway between the Muir farmhouse and Sam Flett’s place.

‘So how will we recognize it?’

‘The photograph suggests a long low hillock. Imagine something like the Maesry Mound, its surface just above ground, built not of stone, but concrete. The entrance would be a tunnel. I
think it was the tunnel entrance that was shown in the picture.’

Producing her binoculars, Rhona slowly swept the flat landscape.

The job had taken her to many open places like this, looking for hidden and buried bodies. Killers could go to extreme lengths to hide their victims, believing that without a body there was no
evidence of a crime. In the process, she’d had dogs set on her, been threatened by landowners and once been shot at, albeit with an air rifle. Usually because someone had something to
hide.

Here, the only curiosity came from the neighbouring field of cows.

‘Anything?’ Magnus said, peering ahead.

‘No.’

‘Could it be behind the mortuary, rather than on the seaward side?’ he suggested.

It was worth a try.

They set off towards the building Rhona had last visited in the dark.

‘Sam Flett hated this building, but he never said why,’ Magnus said.

‘No one likes a mortuary, just as no one likes the thought of a grave,’ Rhona offered.

‘I think something happened to him here as a child.’

‘That sounds like a psychologist,’ Rhona said.

The last time she’d been here, the field had housed a herd of cattle. This time it was deserted, although the scent they’d left behind was just as pungent.

Rhona glanced at Magnus, wondering if his strong sense of smell was causing a problem. Guessing the reason for her look, he shook his head. ‘Now, an abattoir would be difficult, but live
cattle, no.’

As they turned the corner of the building, a bird flew out of the mortuary, practically into their faces. Startled, Rhona realized it was the owl that had accompanied her earlier visit. As she
turned to watch its flight, she spotted an undulation in the ground.

Magnus, following her glance, registered it too.

Rhona walked in that direction.

The grass here was well churned up by her compatriots of the other night, although last night’s rain had been absorbed by the sandy underlying soil.

Approaching, Rhona took her bearings again.

‘This could be the spot,’ she said.

‘So we dig,’ Magnus said. ‘But where exactly?’

Digging up the ground always disturbed the layers. Filling it in did the same. Those who sought to hide bodies by burying them always forgot that. They forgot too that the grave sank as the body
beneath it rotted. Sunken areas in the surface often gave the game away.

But we’re not looking for a body, just the entrance to the bomb shelter.

Rhona pointed at just such an indentation. ‘Here, but let me go first.’

She didn’t use the shovel, but chose the trowel instead, scraping until the metal met a hard surface. The patch of exposed concrete grew under her hand. She could sense Magnus’s
excitement behind her, but she didn’t pause or look round until she’d exposed the top part of what she believed was a tunnel entrance.

‘That’s what was in the photograph,’ she heard Magnus say.

Below the surface the soil became predominantly sand, falling away easily to expose a corrugated sheet serving as a door. Rhona turned away as the smell of decomposition hit her nostrils. Behind
her she heard Magnus gasp.

‘Help me dig,’ she told him.

Ten minutes later, the tunnel entrance was obvious. Rhona sat back on her heels. The strong smell that had first been released had dissipated, although that might have been because of the stiff
breeze that had blown up. Despite the wind, a few flies had arrived, deserting the neighbouring cattle for the sweat from their exertions, or the scent of something rotting.

As Magnus dragged the panel free of the entrance, Rhona shone her forensic torch inside. The beam played off a concrete passage, its walls dry.

‘So what now?’ Magnus said.

‘I take a look inside.’

It felt like a replay of her entry to Maesry Mound, although this time the walls weren’t constructed with ancient flagstones but Second World War concrete. The space
between the floor and ceiling had been lessened by an infill of sand, requiring her to crawl rather than crouch. Her body blocking what little light came from behind her, Rhona had to rely on her
torch to illuminate her path. The entrance tunnel didn’t last long before she found the ground beneath her dipping and the space before her widening.

Rhona slithered inside.

A quick swing of her beam established the height and width of the place. It also illuminated a shelf of what looked like different-sized light bulbs and a collection of shells. On the ground lay
a bundle that turned out to be a blue sleeping bag and a pillow, with a soft toy alongside.

A child’s hideout?

The smell of decay still in her nostrils, she went looking for its source, eventually finding it between the makeshift bed and the wall. A mound of writhing maggots were busily stripping the
remains of flesh from the bones. Rhona got closer for a proper look, already certain it wasn’t big enough to be a human corpse, even a child’s. The scattered remnants of fur suggested
an animal, the size of a fox, though the remains of the coat weren’t russet, but a striped grey and black.

The cat’s glassy eyes had gone, leaving gaping holes, its small sharp teeth exposed in a mouth now devoid of flesh and tongue.

The remains were undoubtedly those of a large feral cat, one of the many living wild on the island.

Having scanned the entire small space, and certain now there was nothing else alive or dead here apart from the maggots and the flies that had accompanied her entry, Rhona eventually answered
Magnus’s urgent shout.

‘Come in,’ she urged him, ‘and take a look.’

His big frame eventually eased its way into the shelter. His eyes took in the scene, registering the collection of stored treasures, the bed and the soft toy.

Rhona handed him a school notebook with the name Inga Sinclair written on the front.

‘Her diary,’ she said.

‘So Inga was using this place as a den?’

‘According to Sam she was really interested in wartime Sanday. I can imagine this place was a bit of a find for her.’

Magnus was examining the contents of the shelf. ‘These look like old bulbs, maybe from the lighthouse?’

‘There’s a similar collection on the window ledge in the cottage,’ Rhona said.