‘I’d rather you didn’t work on the dig today,’ Perez said quietly. ‘Today the Fiscal might need to visit. It’s her decision whether any action needs to be taken and how we should proceed.’
‘Will Ronald be charged?’ Hattie asked.
‘That’s not a decision for me.’
‘The weather’s so bad,’ Sandy said, his first contribution to the discussion, ‘that you wouldn’t want to be working this morning anyway.’
‘Oh I would!’ Hattie said immediately. ‘I hate it when it’s too wet to work. It’s fascinating, addictive I suppose. You understand that, Evelyn.’
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Perez thought she looked quite different when she spoke about her work. Her face lit up, and the grey shadows around her eyes seemed to disappear. Another young woman driven by her work, just like Anna Clouston.
‘Local archaeologists picked up signs of a dwelling on that site in the sixties, but nothing much happened with it. According to Mima, although most of the Setter land is fertile, nothing much would grow just there – she said her mother had called the mound there a trowie knowe. You know the myths about the trows, the little people. It was supposed to be a hole in the ground, a place where they kept their treasure. Mima explained them to me, told me some of the stories.’
Perez nodded. He’d been brought up on stories of trows too, small malevolent creatures who lived in the islands and ruled their kingdom with magic and decorated their houses with glittering jewels and gold.
Hattie continued: ‘Everyone assumed that it was a croft that had gone out of use before the first Ordnance Survey map. They thought perhaps the present house developed from it. Or that the remains composed some sort of outbuilding. Then I came to Shetland on a working holiday with Sally Walker, one of my lecturers. We took a closer look at the Setter site and thought the house looked more substantial than had been assumed. I was looking for a postgraduate project and it seemed perfect. Sophie’s taking a year out after graduating and agreed to come and help. Sally left on maternity leave and didn’t feel she could continue to supervise me.’
The words came out in a rush. Nerves? Perez wondered. Or is it just passion for her subject? ‘And now Paul Berglund’s in charge?’
‘He’s my supervisor. Yes.’
She doesn’t like the man, Perez thought. Then he saw her face freeze again. No, he thought with surprise. It’s more than that. She’s scared of him.
‘And what have you found?’
‘Well, we’ve still got a long way to go, of course, but we did a geophysical survey and there certainly seems quite a grand building on that site. The excavation we did last season bears that out. I think it could be a merchant’s house. We know that Whalsay was an important trading point within the Hanseatic League. That was a community of ports around the North Sea, a sort of medieval EU. The mystery is that there’s no record of the house, or of the man who lived there. It’s frustrating. It would be wonderful to put a name to the man who built it. We’ve just got a couple of months left here to see if there’s enough evidence to justify funding for a full-scale dig. I suppose the bones might tell us something. They’ve gone for carbon dating, but I’m assuming they’re fifteenth-century. There’s nothing in the context to suggest otherwise.’
‘Sandy told me about the skull.’
‘We found it in a trench outside the walls of the house. We ’ve found other bones there too, presumably from the same individual. It’s strange because you’d expect a body to be buried in a graveyard at that period. I’ve spoken to people at the university. They say it might be the body of a drowned man washed up on the shore. Strangers didn’t always get a proper buriaclass="underline" the superstition was that drowned men belonged to the sea. But Setter’s quite a distance from the shore, and that doesn’t really make sense to me. I’d like to think we’ve found my merchant.’ She looked up at him. ‘I hope we can go on with the work tomorrow. Time’s already running out.’
He didn’t answer directly. ‘Who’s testing the bones?’
‘Val Turner, the Shetland archaeologist, came in when we realized what we’d found. She’s sorted them out, sent them to the lab in Glasgow to date them.’
He supposed it was a coincidence. Two deaths in one place, separated by hundreds of years. Corpses growing from the same garden. Places couldn’t be unlucky, could they? ‘How was Mima when you were with her yesterday?’
‘She seemed in fine form. Didn’t she, Evelyn?’
‘Oh aye. Just the same as usual.’ Evelyn reached across the table and poured more tea.
‘She didn’t object to you digging up her land?’ Perez asked. There wouldn’t be many Shetland landowners who’d be glad of that intrusion.
‘Not at all,’ Hattie said. ‘She was really interested. And interesting. She said when she was growing up in Whalsay there’d been a legend about a big house that had once been at Lindby, built by the son of a fisherman. It’s the sort of folk tale that might have its root in reality.’
‘Aye well.’ Evelyn stood up briskly. ‘You don’t want to believe everything Mima told you. She was a great one for stories. She might have remembered a few snatches from what her grandmother told her and made up the rest. I’d never heard anything about a big house at Setter. She was a bit of a romantic, was Mima.’
‘That’s what I liked about her, I think,’ Hattie said. She broke off a piece of the scone on her plate and crumbled it in her fingers. Perez thought she’d just taken the scone to be polite. None of it had got as far as her mouth. She looked up suddenly and frowned. ‘Mima seemed shocked when we found the skull. Didn’t you think so, Evelyn?’
‘Maybe she’d started to believe her own scary stories,’ Evelyn said. ‘Maybe she thought it was the work of the trows.’
Perez thought Hattie was going to say more about the skull, but she changed the subject. ‘I hope Ronald doesn’t get charged,’ she said. ‘Mima wouldn’t have wanted that.’
Perez wondered why it seemed to matter to her so much. She’d only been here for a couple of months. Whilst she’d obviously been fond of Mima, the other people in the drama could hardly be more than names to her. ‘How well do you know him?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve seen him a few times in the bar of the Pier House Hotel. He did history at university and knows a lot about the myths and legends of the islands. He seems quite interested in the project and last season he came out to visit the site a few times. We ’ve tried to involve local people. That’s a prerequisite of work in Shetland. Val Turner insists that we explain what we’re doing to the community and include them as much as possible. Anna seems keen too.’
‘Poor Anna,’ Evelyn said. She stood up and took the empty mugs to the sink for washing up. Perez expected her to elaborate, but suddenly she turned back to Hattie. ‘Where’s Sophie? You should have brought her in for some tea. Sandy would have been pleased to see her again.’
Perez watched Sandy turn pink. Even when you’d grown up mothers had the knack of embarrassing you. His own was just the same.
‘Sophie’s gone into Lerwick for the day.’ Hattie’s voice was bland but Perez thought he could hear a trace of disapproval. ‘Paul’s going south on the ferry tonight and he’s offered her a lift into town.’
‘He didn’t mention earlier that he was leaving Whalsay.’ Perez didn’t know why Berglund should, but it seemed a strange omission.
‘We weren’t expecting him to go yet either. He said something had turned up at home.’ Now that she wasn’t talking about her work Hattie had that closed-down look again and the shadows had come back.