Shadows of Death (10 page)

‘That someone will discover he’s an ineffectual idiot?’

Alan shook his head. ‘I think that’s too well known to represent a threat. In fact, even he knows it, poor man. Do you know, Dorothy, I feel positively sorry for him. He knows his inadequacies, and that’s why his overpowering fear is—’

‘That he’ll lose his job?’

‘Worse. He’ll lose his treasure.’

‘You lost me. Treasure? You’re surely not talking about the mythical Viking gold!’

‘No. His treasure is very real, and far older than the time of the Vikings.’ When I still looked blank, Alan said, ‘The artefacts, my dear. The glory of Ancient Orkney. Pots, axes, building stones, the lot.’

‘But that’s … oh. He thinks of it as his.’

‘And cherishes it to his bosom. You should have seen him, Dorothy. He was crooning over a rather ordinary pot like a mother over her firstborn. Truly, it was more than a bit odd, almost as if the thing were alive. I wonder if he’s quite all there, to tell you the truth. But one thing I know for certain. If he’d believed Carter even thought about selling any of the artefacts from High Sanday, he would have fought to protect them.’

I took a deep breath. ‘And where was he last night?’

‘Unfortunately, just as I had worked up to that question some people came into the museum needing his attention. It’s virtually a one-man operation, except for some volunteers, and none of them were about. I could hardly press him further.’

‘Of course. It’s frustrating to have no authority, isn’t it? But speaking of authority, who has it in Norquist’s case? I mean, he’s afraid he’ll be fired. Who would do the firing?’

‘That I did manage to find out. The museum is run by a board of trustees, but the chairman of the board is also the president of Friends of Ancient Orkney.’

‘Larsen. The third person who benefits from Carter’s will, at least in a way. This is getting to be a neat little circle. And what do you want to bet all three of them will protect each other, thereby protecting themselves.’

‘We don’t know them well enough to make that kind of judgement, Dorothy.’

I glanced out the window. ‘Well, we’re about to get to know one of them better. Fairweather’s just outside the door, looking for a parking place. Quick, you go out and tell him he can park in front of our garage door, while I set out the nuts and biscuits.’

Parking is at a premium along our part of the harbour road. There’s a huge car park for the ferry, and it hadn’t seemed to be very full most of the time, since we’d been there, anyway, but it’s reserved for ferry patrons and I didn’t want a guest of ours, and an Englishman at that, to risk a clamped wheel. Besides, I hoped our friendly offer of a space for his car would soften him up.

Alan kept him talking outside for a minute or two, long enough for me to let Watson in and get at least minimally organized, and they were laughing amiably when they came in, which seemed a good sign.

‘Mr Fairweather, welcome!’ I said after Watson had expressed his greetings, volubly and with much tail wagging. ‘I’m so glad you could come. There are nibbles in the sitting room upstairs; what would you like to drink?’

When we’d dealt with that, and I’d poured some very nice sherry into three juice glasses, Alan carried the tray upstairs for me, and we settled down in the squashy furniture for what might prove to be some rather awkward conversation.

I never was much good at small talk. As a teenager I used to suffer agonies at parties, unable to chatter with people I didn’t know, and it didn’t get much better when I grew up. When I’m with friends, the trouble is getting me to shut up, but I’m not at my best with strangers.

So I raised my glass in a silent toast and started my bright, merry remarks with an apology. ‘I’m sorry about the glasses. It was pretty much a choice between these and water tumblers that hold about a pint.’

Fairweather, to my relief, smiled. ‘Ah, the joys of the holiday accommodation. My wife and I stayed once in a lovely little cottage in Cornwall. We were impressed with how spotless the electric cooker was, until we discovered that there were no cooking utensils to be found, positively not a single pot or pan in the place. We survived for a week on Chinese and Indian take-away and soup heated in the microwave. There were lovely sherry glasses, though!’

Well, of course we all laughed at that, and the ice was broken. ‘Speaking of pots,’ I said in what I hope wasn’t too obvious a transition, ‘I couldn’t believe the beauty of the ones you’ve found up at High Sanday. Some of them were almost intact, and that’s incredible after – what – four thousand years?’

‘Something like that, perhaps closer to five. We’re a long way from being able to assign accurate dates even to the structures, much less the artefacts. But it seems apparent that no one lived at the site after about 1500 BC, which was roughly the beginning of the Bronze Age, so four thousand years, give or take, is a reasonable guess.’

I was caught up in the awe again. ‘Four thousand years! Think of it! Hundreds of generations ago families lived right here, in houses, and cooked in pots and slept in beds and tended their animals and probably drank something fermented, just like us. I was never much interested in archaeology until I came to Orkney, but now it’s got a grip on me. I can understand how someone like you can spend his whole life literally digging into the past.’

‘It’s a pity,’ said Alan, topping up Fairweather’s glass, ‘that you’ll have to shut down the dig for a while.’

‘We’d not have been able to get much done in yesterday’s rain in any case,’ Fairweather said with a sigh. ‘Today would have been a good day to work, but alas! With Andersen safely in the nick, though, we’re hoping we can get started again soon. Summer doesn’t last forever, and even aside from weather considerations, most of our crew are students, and once university takes up again, they’ll be gone.’

‘You think Mr Andersen did it?’ I asked oh, so casually.

But not casually enough. Fairweather stiffened and put his glass down. ‘That seems to be the general opinion.’

‘How do you think it happened, then?’ asked Alan. ‘I can’t imagine what would have taken Carter to the island in the middle of the night. It’s not the easiest journey, and there’d have been nothing to see in the dark.’

‘None of us have been able to work that out,’ Fairweather admitted. ‘He was a strong-willed man, and when he took a notion to do something, he’d do it, no matter who or what stood in the way. But he was also a man who liked his comforts. I’d have expected him to go straight back to his expensive room at the Ayre Hotel after the meeting broke up.’

‘Ah, yes, when did the meeting end? Dorothy and I left rather early.’

‘Andrew pulled you away, didn’t he?’ Fairweather unbent a trifle and picked up his sherry again. ‘Not a great fan of Carter’s, our Andrew.’ He took a sip.

‘We gathered that,’ I said primly. ‘In fact, was anyone a great friend of Carter’s? No one seemed to have a good word to say for him, except on the score of his generosity.’

Fairweather sighed. ‘He was no worse, and no better, than any other very rich man. He knew what he wanted and he had the money to get it, whether it was things or influence. It’s no secret that not everyone approved of his goals for High Sanday.’

‘Would he really have insisted that you dig down as far as you could find anything interesting, no matter how much you destroyed on the way?’

‘It’s a vexed question, Mrs Martin.’

‘Dorothy, please.’

Fairweather nodded in acknowledgement. ‘The best archaeologists in the world can’t agree on proper procedure in a case like this, which is not as rare as one might think. When a site is a good place for building a city, or even a village, it’s easy to understand how successive generations might go on building there, especially when early settlements are destroyed by earthquake or fire or storm or warfare or simply the passage of time. Hence the Troy phenomenon. It’s natural to want to know what’s at the very bottom of the heap. It’s also natural to want to preserve what’s on top. There’s no good way to do both, except by a kind of terraced dig, and that’s possible only when a site is very large.’

‘Like High Sanday.’

‘Exactly. But there, little matters like the water table create other complications. How far down can we, in fact, dig before hitting water?’

‘But surely, if people lived there—’ I began, at the same time that Alan said, ‘I suppose sea levels have changed over the millennia.’

‘Exactly. We think it has risen a good deal, in fact. Studies haven’t been completed, but we’re reasonably certain that there were far fewer but bigger islands in the Neolithic period, before the sea rose and covered most of the lower land. So there may well be villages, indeed whole civilisations buried far under water.’

‘Atlantis!’ I said, going all dreamy again. ‘Do you suppose there are drowned bells—’

‘Since these villages would have existed millennia before there were Christian churches with bells, it’s doubtful.’ Alan’s chill voice of reason shattered my sentimental vision. ‘Getting back to Carter and his dreams of glory, how far would he have gone? Would he have pulled his money out of the project if you and the others overruled him?’

‘He threatened to do just that after the meeting, when nearly everyone had left. Norquist and Larsen and I were tidying up, putting away our gear and so on, and Carter delivered a harangue to the effect that as he was paying the piper, he intended to call the tune, and if we wouldn’t dance to that tune, he’d pull out. Then he stormed out, and … and that was the last time any of us saw him.’

‘I wish I could be sure of that,’ said Alan, and his voice was hard.

‘Now, look here!’ Fairweather put his glass down with a thump and heaved himself free of the grip of the sofa. ‘I’m not sure I like your tone.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, sit down and finish your drink,’ said Alan. ‘You agreed with Andrew that I could be of help with this mess, Fairweather. That gives me the right, indeed the responsibility, to speculate and to ask questions. Let’s stop the pussyfooting. The police may be satisfied that Duncan Andersen killed Carter. I am not. I can think of no reason why Carter would have been out on that dig in the small hours of the morning. I think he was killed elsewhere and taken to High Sanday in the hopes that his murder would be viewed as an accident, or, failing that, would be laid at Andersen’s door. It’s perfectly obvious that the Ancient Orkney triumvirate would have had powerful reasons to see the man dead. So I’d like to know all of your movements on Monday night.’

‘You’re forgetting one thing, Mr Nesbitt.’ Fairweather was still standing, looming over us. ‘The triumvirate, as you are pleased to call us, stood to lose everything, rather than to gain by Carter’s death. Without his funding the dig could not have continued.’

‘And with his funding,’ Alan said grimly, ‘the dig could have continued only under his terms. So the important question at the moment is, who knew the terms of his will?’

There was a long pause. Fairweather sat back down, or rather collapsed into the sofa. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I did.’

A
lan simply waited. As for me, I couldn’t have said a word at that moment.

When Fairweather went on, he looked and sounded defeated. ‘You see, my solicitor knows Carter’s. Carter’s is American, of course, a member of a big New York firm, and mine’s in London, but they met at some conference or something. I don’t remember the details. At any rate, Thompson, that’s my man, found out the gist of the matter one night when they were drinking, and he told me, oh, weeks later. We were having a few, and I’d been complaining about Carter, and he hinted that I’d better be more discreet about what I said. So of course I asked why, and he told me why I’d … I’d be the prime suspect if the wretched man died suddenly.’

That was when I took myself off to start the rice cooking. I’d had too much information thrown at me, and I needed to process it.

So Carter, such a difficult, demanding patron, had been worth more to High Sanday dead than alive, and the director of the dig knew it. That was a serious lapse of confidentiality on the part of two lawyers who should have known better, but alcohol had probably lubricated both the unwise conversations. At any rate, Fairweather had known.

And who else? Whom had he told? On the night of the meeting, when everyone was thoroughly fed up with Carter, had Fairweather told the others he was tempted to bash the man on the head? Or said he hoped his car ended up in a loch? Or something of the kind?

It would have been a natural enough kind of thing to say. We’ve all uttered, or thought, such sentiments about people we couldn’t stand. Reprehensible, no doubt, but there it is. Not one in a thousand of us, in ten thousand, would dream of acting on our thoughts. But what if …?

Alan was probably asking him that very thing right now. Who else knew? If he was smart, he’d say that lots of people knew, the triumvirate and others. That would share the suspicion and perhaps divert it from him. On the other hand, if the people he named then denied that they had known any such thing …

I gave up and set the table, using Andrew’s lovely wine goblets to make up for the utilitarian china. I had started the ball rolling with this probably ill-fated invitation. Let Alan take it from here. I wished I had chosen a less incendiary entrée than curry.

By the time the rice was done, however, and I called the men to the table, Alan had somehow managed to bring the conversation back to a normal level of civility. He gave me a look, as we all sat down, which I interpreted to mean ‘leave it alone for now’. I was quite ready to do that in any case, so our table talk centred on the weather, always a safe topic in the unpredictable British Isles, and everyone’s health, particularly mine. Henry Higgins would have been delighted.

I was hoping that Fairweather would take himself off when we had finished our meal. I was tired and longing for my bed, and besides I wanted to hear what Alan had gleaned after I left the room. But Alan brandished the bottle of Highland Park and suggested after-dinner drinks. That suggested that civility did indeed reign, and also that Alan wanted to get rid of me. He knows I don’t care for Scotch, and didn’t offer me the bourbon. I can take a hint. I waved them upstairs. ‘I’m going to finish up here and then go and deal with my cold. You two carry on.’