The Seal King Murders (2 page)

Still, he never ceased to regret not having
met his grandmother, selkie or no, a legend that his mother wasn’t in the least proud to accept. A decent religious woman couldn’t lay claim to such a heathen creature.

As he grew older, questions about his grandmother’s whereabouts became more remote, and any hopeful reminders were fielded sharply aside by his sensible, less excitable father with the brief comment, ‘Don’t you be listening to such things, lad.’ Magnus had a short list of answers: ‘drowned while out fishing’, ‘died giving birth’, ‘ran away with a sailor’, ‘took consumption’.

All very glib and plausible, seeing as these were the most common causes of sudden death or disappearance from the island. Only the more reliable citizens achieved respectable immortality on the kirkyard’s tombstones.

Returning to his bleak police lodging that evening, Faro had a quick scan of the reports. What was the Claydon man doing anyway, by getting a boatman to row him out to meet the Leith ship and being picked up beyond the bar?

The boatman who was interviewed gave vague answers, admitting that passengers and crew who missed ship did this quite frequently, and more often than not were seriously drunk and desperately hiring assistance in the form of a willing boatman for what was an illegal
procedure. The conclusion was that Claydon, jumping across, had missed his footing on the ship’s ladder and, falling into rough sea, drowned.

It was a night of fog and mist, the boatman explained, but he had remained circling the area, shouting and calling, to no avail. Regardless, the ship headed out to sea, the captain firmly ignoring the incident which, had it been reported, might have cost him his command.

Now, as the ship’s anchor attached the vessel firmly to the quay, its arrival heralded by the flashing wings and shrieking calls of seabirds, Faro set aside his list of questions and composed his expression to meet his mother who would have her apron strings ready starched. Bracing himself for a greeting, he had the words and the smile all ready.

‘Just come to see you, Ma.’

As his foot touched dry land, Faro realised that the only other person he had the slightest wish to see again at that moment was Inga St Ola, his first love. During a night on the moonlit beach, she had given him his first initiation into the mysteries of the female body, always so well hidden underneath layers of clothes and consequently a never-waning magnet for boyish curiosity.

Searching the faces of those on shore, heads raised, eagerly awaiting passengers, of course Inga would not possibly be there. She had been absent, he knew not where (on another part of the island perhaps?) on his previous brief visits, so why expect her to appear now? She
might be any one of the head-shawled women – would he even recognise her after ten years? She was older than himself, past thirty and no doubt much changed from the captivating girl he remembered. Married, her lovely face lined, her luxuriant tresses grey-threaded, all ruined by the harsh island life and years of childbearing.

He had seen it so often, the natural result of time’s ruthless progress, and he could hardly bear to imagine Inga’s transformation. And he had changed too. But a man of twenty-seven in Orkney terms was in his prime, and Edinburgh had had a hand in changing the tall, coltish boy into a tall, strong man. His thick, flaxen hair tamed, the cheekbones beneath the soft contours of his face hardened, his gentle expression matured into deep-set blue eyes, straight nose and wide, sensual mouth. Still the ultimate legendary Viking, enthusiastically acclaimed by artist acquaintances who had never met one.

A stir from the midst of the head-shawled women, but it was not Inga St Ola who ran towards him. The diminutive figure that pushed her way forward was attired in a neat grey cape and straw bonnet, the modest attire of an
upper-class
servant.

Laughing, his mother almost tearful, clasped him in her arms, kissed him, but could not resist saying, ‘So you’ve come back home at last!’

This hint of reproach, all his sins of omission remembered. It wasn’t his fault, either: he felt, often indignantly, that he was the one abandoned and not the other way round. Distraught by memories of the death of his policeman father in Edinburgh, she had returned to Orkney and left him alone and uncertain among strangers in desolate police lodgings, when he would have most welcomed her presence.

Feeling misunderstood, he groaned as she added, ‘And what brings you here, lad, so unexpected? Not much warning to prepare for you. Here, let me take that,’ she said stretching out a hand for his luggage as if he was a small boy again.

‘No, Ma, please,’ he said, snatching it from her, ashamed that she was making him look a fool, a great big man resisting this small determined woman. He looked around for where the carriages and carters waited to take passengers to their destinations.

She smiled. ‘You won’t need your legs to carry you all the way to Kirkwall this time. Andy the carter, over there, has things to deliver to the big house at Scarthbreck. He’ll take us. Hold on while I check the goods.’

Faro found a seat alongside a mountain of packages, watching her tick items off a list.
As she joined him, he said, ‘I’ll need a place to stay.’

She laughed. ‘A place to stay. And so you shall. That’s all been taken care of. There’s plenty of room in the servants’ lodge. I’m housekeeper there, didn’t I tell you?’ she said, adding proudly, ‘I have my own quarters, much grander than our place at home.’

The journey spoke to his senses as always, calling him back to the world he had lost, winding past the Loch of Stenness and the standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar, older than recorded time, looming against the horizon through the margins of the dark peat fields, where a solitary kestrel hovered in a bleak grey sky, sweeping out of sight for its prey.

Then sudden habitation, a group of houses, knitted tightly together, and a grey, straight street with contours more akin to a city than an island, set down temporarily by an architect who, defeated by its ugliness, had abandoned an uneasy struggle with an unwilling landscape.

‘That’s Spanish Cove,’ said Mary.

‘What an extraordinary place and where did it get that fanciful name?’

She laughed. ‘It is supposed to be the exact spot where that galleon went down, so they say, all that long time ago.’

Faro knew the story well. So this was the
actual birthplace of one of Orkney’s popular legends,
El Rosario
, in flight after the defeat of the Armada, pursued by Queen Elizabeth’s superior fleet aided by storm and ‘the wind of God’.

Spanish Cove’s one long street perched uneasily close to the cliff edge undeterred by sudden storms and wild seas, with a small landing stage far below.

‘In the kind of wild weather we get, the cove has provided a refuge for foreign fishing boats. I’m told,’ said Mary, ‘that the herring catches are very good in these waters. Probably accounts for the houses in the first place.’

Its forbidding aspect suggested smugglers arriving at the dead of night rather than fishermen with their daily catch and Faro said, ‘I’m glad it’s not our destination.’

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Mary Faro agreed. ‘But the folk who live there don’t seem to notice, all crowded together like that. Not like our houses in Kirkwall, with their bits of land. Although these ones do have peedie gardens to grow a few vegetables.’

As he glanced back over his shoulder, she added, ‘There’s a shop and stables for folk wanting to hire a horse or a gig for Stromness and Kirkwall. The Scarthbreck servants find having such amenities very handy.’

Bewildered, Faro asked, ‘I wonder whose idea it was – and when?’

She shook her head. ‘Goodness knows. Been there a long time. Look, we’ll be seeing Scarthbreck soon.’

And suddenly the horizon was dominated by a distant glimpse of sea, and on the hilltop a fine new house.

Overlooking the vast expanse of Scapa Flow, on closer contact Scarthbreck also seemed to perch in an alien landscape as if aware of its transience, settling uncomfortably above evidence of earlier habitations. The builders had uncovered several skeletons, which confirmed the archaeologists’ theories that the original house had been built over a Norse burial ground.

For Faro, the area awoke echoes he had encountered in ancient buildings like St Magnus Cathedral. An awareness of a past unwilling to be obliterated by an aggressive present and completely hidden by this determinedly modern house with building operations still evident in a three-sided courtyard to house stables and the servants’ quarters.

Mary Faro said, ‘Not only skeletons outside either. The house is haunted,’ she added with a shudder.

Faro laughed. ‘Surely not, Ma. Can’t be more than fifteen years old.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ she said grimly, ‘but as the flagstones were being replaced by wooden floors, for extra comfort and warmth – they do like nice things, like a lovely Turkish carpet – well, they found another skeleton just inside the front door.’

That got Faro’s attention. An unsolved murder always had immediate drawing power.

‘An elderly man, they thought, but they’ve never found out anything more about who it was or how long it had lain there.’

Faro gathered that the original Scarthbreck had passed through many different hands in the course of its centuries-long existence, so there was no possibility of tracking down the identity of that particular dead man.

‘No one knows anything about him, but they couldn’t get a servant lass to live in again, after the first one said she’d seen his ghost. You know what it’s like, gossip of that kind spreads like wildfire. That’s the main reason for the lodges outside. They need servants. Of course, I don’t believe in such things,’ she added, but her anxious glance revealed otherwise.

‘Who are “they”?’

‘The Prentiss-Grants, you’ll have heard of them even in Edinburgh. Shipbuilders on the Clyde, made an absolute fortune. He got a knighthood for it. Sir Arnold he is now, has a
wife and one lass. Right bonny she is.’

A few scattered stones was the only evidence of the original Scarthbreck, once the house of a Viking wolf lord, built when habitations were not intended for comfort, but for the grimmer business of defence and survival.

The servants’ lodge, a long, low building with one long corridor, had rooms linked by a succession of doors. The human equivalent of a horse stables, he thought and laughed. In this cheerless, box-like structure, with its no-nonsense courtyard, there was no place for ghosts and skeletons of ancient dwellers.

When he said so, his mother looked grave. ‘Folk are so superstitious, I can’t be doing with it, talk of a lot of heathen savages, going on about that seal king legend they’re all so scared of.’

He laughed. ‘I dare say you’ll be glad to be back in your safe little cottage again, come the short days, the long, dark nights.’

‘I will that. It’s all so smart, neat and clean but it doesn’t feel like my peedie home. I’m only here for the summer, I made that quite clear. Lots of posh folk coming, from the mainland and from England, for the shooting and fishing. I told them I wasna’ interested in staying all year. At least not at the moment. I might change my mind later, but I’d dread the
winter up here. It’s too isolated for me.’

Far below them, away to the west in a great horseshoe of sand dunes set against a bleak sea, in the outcrops of rock the archaeologists had unearthed a Neolithic settlement.

What had conditions been like for those early dwellers, he wondered. Had they decided to settle there because the dunes offered hollows scooped out on the landward side, shelter from the wind and rain sweeping in from cruel winter storms? Built unwisely upon the sand, despite stone from the outcrops which took shape as walls, roofs and connected cells, they were doomed. No match for a succession of storms, obliterated by blown sand. The occupants gave up the struggle and moved elsewhere, all evidence lost until a decade ago when another violent storm stripped off the top sand, soil and turf to reveal a four-
thousand-year
-old housing estate.

Archaeologists had moved in immediately but made little progress in a site exposed to all weathers. Of interest to them were the stone furnishings, shelves for beds and storing, and an occasional bead, Stone Age implement or arrowhead, causing a furore of excitement and bringing to the wearied team renewed enthusiasm, brief satisfaction that frozen feet and hands and aching backs were well
worthwhile in the cause of the island’s story.

Mary Faro was proud of the housekeeper’s quarters in the newly appointed servants’ lodge. A parlour-cum-kitchen, two rooms with beds, all very spartan accommodation, somehow a continuity of that transience Faro was beginning to associate with Scarthbreck, as if a sudden strong puff of wind might blow the whole place away and leave nothing behind but a few strands of coarse grass and heathland, lost for ever like the Neolithic dwellings.

Suddenly he longed for his old room in Kirkwall and, briefly, in St Margaret’s Hope, with their comforting associations of a happy secure childhood. This was all so new, so impersonal, as if the painted walls were not yet dry. There was no feeling of warmth, the welcome of returning home had been denied him – furnishings shabby but with precious associations in rooms full of memories.

Perhaps aware of his thoughts, his mother said, ‘At least you won’t have to sleep on the couch. I’m fortunate. My position entitles me to a spare room.’

She insisted on unpacking his case. He could not deny her that, and as he watched his meagre possessions vanishing into a cupboard and chest of drawers, he fielded a succession of questions. He considered the situation and wondered how
he was to keep at bay his mother’s curiosity regarding the true reason for his visit.

He was only mildly interested in the fate of the vanished treasure trove of artefacts. ‘Priceless’ was not a word in his vocabulary. Gold, silver and jewels were, after all, mere material objects, waiting to be tagged by the museum authorities and set in glass cases. In Faro’s opinion, their acquisition could not be compared with what was truly beyond price in his estimation, one man’s life or needless death.

Before being interrupted by his mother appearing to tell him that a meal was ready on the table, and lured by the delicious smell of frying bacon, he was already compiling a list.

First, an interview with the boatman and the divers sent to the scene who had found neither treasure, nor Dave Claydon. In the absence of a body there was conveniently no indication whether he had drowned by accident or design.

It was a start, and already Faro had a sense of doom that this was fated to remain one of those unsolved cases which would go down in the annals of Orkney.

Consoled by the fact that it should not take long, he could salve his conscience by enjoying – or should it be enduring? – a bit of home life,
the indulgent kind an only son expected, and one he had almost forgotten. As his mother hovered over him, always urging him to eat a little more of that, try some of this I made, or some of that, he put an arm around her, kissed her.

Perhaps the gesture alarmed her for, teapot in hand, she looked momentarily taken aback. The kiss was everything. How could he find the right words to tell her that suddenly he realised that, although she drove him mad sometimes, he loved her? She was all the close kin he had in the world, much as he deplored her treating him as a small boy. Often he wondered, did only sons ever become grown men in the eyes of doting mothers?

It would be different if he had a wife, and as the conversation slanted slyly but inevitably towards that subject, of whether he had a young lady back in Edinburgh, he smiled.

This was one good reason for marrying his faithful Lizzie. He was very fond of Lizzie, told himself regularly that this was the love he had waited for. He was certain that she loved him. He had no doubts about that.

But there was an old saying that in every relationship ‘there is one who kisses and one who is kissed’. He had to confess that he fell into the latter category. He had never experienced,
perhaps never would, the kind of love poets like Burns wrote about or lovers like Romeo and Juliet died for.