Something caught his eye. He looked back at the house and saw the paraffin lamps glow into life on the kitchen windowsills, casting oblongs of light on to the lawn. Inside Father Wingate, dressed in a baggy jumper, crossed the kitchen and disappeared from Magnus’s sightline.
Magnus found a foothold on the rough stone wall, and boosted himself upward with the help of the gate’s wrought-iron curlicues. The first time he lost his grip and fell on to the damp grass. But the second time he made it on to the top of the wall. He sat there for a moment hoping to spot Raisha, but the belt of trees restricted his view, nodding and bobbing in the twilight. Magnus dropped down on to the other side. There was slim chance of finding anyone in the woods, but he might catch a glimpse of her in the open fields beyond.
Magnus jogged into the knotty pine scent of the wood and went from gloaming into night. There was a path of sorts, but the men who had husbanded the trees were all dead, no one had cleared it for a while and it was littered with twigs and fallen branches. Magnus slowed his pace, careful not to trip. His death might be waiting here, far from the sea, in a foreign landscape of tree trunks and waving branches, but there was no anticipating death, not unless you took the path his cousin Hugh had followed. ‘The road less travelled,’ Jacob had said, after he shot the driver of the yellow Audi.
Magnus had thought the evening silent, but things moved everywhere in the wood, rustling the undergrowth, creaking in the treetops above. There could be people here too: canny survivors who hid in the troll darkness instead of making a show of themselves, cutting harvests that weren’t theirs, burning barns, lighting lamps in windows and inviting murder. Magnus had assumed someone from their community had done the killings, but what if it was an outsider, some silent watcher picking them off one by one like a bogeyman in one of the video nasties he and Hugh had been thrilled by as teenagers? Something big shifted up ahead and Magnus froze, catching his breath, until whatever it was — a deer, badger, escaped jaguar, all claws and hunger — moved away. Magnus forced his breaths into an even rhythm and walked steadily into the not quite pitch-dark. Ghosties and ghoulies were stories for children. Orkney was short on trees, but the islands had their own legends, stories of seal folk, beautiful selkies who beguiled mortals into the sea.
‘Do you think something drew him there?’ his sister Rhona had asked, not long after Hugh drowned. The two of them were in the Snapper Bar, both three sheets to the wind, though it was not yet dinner time. ‘Hugh was always sensitive, maybe something called to him.’ Magnus had walked away, out through the bar and down to the harbour for fear that he might slap her face.
There had been other nonsense spoken. ‘The sea demands her due,’ an old soak had said, his Guinness almost down to its last dregs of foam; low tide. Magnus had seen photographs in Tankerness museum of barrels of beer taken down to the shoreline and axed open. Men with waxed moustaches, flat caps and collarless shirts grinning as if the tradition was simply that and not a precaution; a nod to the old gods that they were not forgotten. When Magnus was around seven years old, his father had told him that in his grandfather’s time it had sometimes been a sheep they had foregone, rowing the poor beast out too far for it to swim back. Magnus had imagined the scene too well. The creature’s legs scrabbling as it was dropped over the side, the men careful not to upset the boat, the sheep trying to swim to shore, its head a speck of white above the water until the waves dragged it under. Magnus’s father must have enjoyed the effect of his story because he had gone on to say that in the days of the ancestors the sacrifice had been more vital; a girl or a boy taken out and drowned. The prospect had given Magnus nightmares for years after.
‘The sea demands her due,’ the old soak had said and Magnus had pulled back his fist.
‘The sea was not due my cousin.’
The quality of the light up ahead was different, the branches of the trees at the edge of the wood shifting against the brighter dark of the night sky. Magnus tripped in his haste to put the trees behind him. He righted himself and emerged into the edge of a field of yellow rape, looking down on to a low valley. Now that he was out of the shelter of the trees he could see the outline of the moon, a dim silver glow disappearing behind the clouds. He smelled rain on the air again and cursed himself for not stopping to grab a jacket. The crop of rape was beginning to rot. It added a sharp edge to the gunpowder scent of approaching storm. Raisha was somewhere ahead of him. Magnus started to walk. The fields beyond his were dark, but there was a patch of light further down the valley that might be a house. He would make for it and then, if Raisha was not there, turn back. The night boomed and he cursed again. When he was a young boy he had pictured thunder as giants’ feet pounding across the islands, flinging standing stones this way and that in a mighty game. It would be easy to return to the old suspicions now that the comfort of electricity was gone. Another rumble sounded. Magnus felt a drop of rain and picked up his pace. He dreaded the prospect of the house up ahead, the chance that he might interrupt Raisha in the act of tending some dead bairn. A fork of lightning jagged across the sky and he saw clearly for an instant the overgrown fields divided by neglected hedges and the white-painted house halfway down the valley. Magnus hurried on. Twice, three times he staggered and once he fell his full length. Rain stabbed his face, single drops that swiftened into a torrent, soaking through his T-shirt and jeans. Another bolt of lightning reived the sky and he knew that to turn back and make for the shelter of the woods would be foolish. He thought of Jeb listening to the thunder in the dungeon deep beneath the house and knew that the chance of proving him innocent was next to zero.
‘A fool’s errand,’ he whispered into the rush of wind and water, his face streaming with raindrops. ‘A fool’s bloody errand.’
The house was bigger than Magnus had thought from the glances the lightning flashes had granted him. It was more modern too. A barn expanded and converted into someone’s grand design. There were houses like it on Orkney, some of them barely used holiday homes, walls of glass juxtaposed with stones cut by the ancients and plundered from their sacred sites by Christian farmers. His father had made fun of them, but Magnus would have been happy to live in one; daylight streaming through an expanse of double glazing, a view of the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before him. There would be stylish homes for the taking now. The thought was no comfort.
The building was in darkness, his drowned face a miserable reflection in its glass wall. Magnus put his face to the glass, shielding his eyes. He could make out a long dining table, edged by chairs. Something moved within, or perhaps it was just a reflection of the driving rain.
‘Raisha?’ He tried to slide one of the doors open, but it was locked tight. ‘Fuck.’ Another lightning flash illuminated the night and Magnus saw his reflection again: slick-haired and wild-eyed; a seal-man. He stumbled to the front door and tried its handle. The door was made of heavy oak and Magnus thought it was not going to shift, but then it swung open and he lurched into the hallway. The floor was tiled in marble more suited to a metropolitan hotel. His feet slipped, but Magnus righted himself against a table, almost upsetting the withered remnants of an extravagant orchid display. The house smelled musty, but there was none of the foulness Magnus had feared. He shut the door gently behind him, feeling a sense of trespass. Water pooled from his clothes on to the expensive floor tiles. He was shivering and his jeans were waterlogged, but he resisted the urge to strip them off.
‘Raisha?’ Somewhere deep in the house he heard a sound. It was dark in the hallway and Magnus wished he had had the foresight to bring a torch with him. ‘It’s Magnus.’