‘It was me.’
Something in his father’s voice stopped Sandy short. He’d started to move down the track, but now he turned back.
‘What are you saying?’ Sandy was still wearing his jacket and felt bulky, huge even, looking out at his father.
‘I set fire to your grandmother’s house.’
They stared at each other. Sandy knew he should make sense of this, but he couldn’t. Even when he was sober as a judge he would never make sense of it. The drizzle had stopped and there was a faint fat moon showing through the mist.
‘I don’t want to go inside,’ Sandy said. ‘Not with the kitchen the way it is.’ He walked round to the back of the house, past the dig to the dyke looking over the loch. The moonlight was reflected on the water. He didn’t look behind him but he knew his father was following. They leaned against the dyke to talk, not looking at each other.
Sandy had questioned suspects in his time. It was a part of the job he enjoyed. When he was taking statements from offenders or witnesses he was the boss, in control. It wasn’t like that for much of his life. Now he wished his father would take the lead, but Joseph just stood there in silence.
‘Why would you do that?’ Sandy asked at last, not loud, not in his bossy police voice, but with a kind of desperation. ‘Why would you set fire to your own house?’
‘Because I couldn’t face anyone else living here.’
‘Is this to do with that Norwegian?’ A sudden idea. If he weren’t still a bit pissed Sandy didn’t think he’d have had the nerve to bring the subject up.
‘What do you know about him?’
‘I know that your father found him in bed with your mother, took him outside and shot him.’
‘There isn’t much else to know,’ Joseph said, and then, in a quiet voice. ‘And I’m not even sure that story’s true.’
But Sandy wasn’t ready to listen to that. ‘How did you find out about it?’ he demanded. ‘Did Mima tell you when you were a boy?’ He wondered what it would be like to discover that your father was a murderer. How would Mima pass on that bit of information? Would she tell it as a bedtime story along with the tales of the trows?
‘She didn’t tell me at all.’
‘Who did then?’
‘It was always going to come out,’ Joseph said. Sandy shot a look at him. The moonlight turned his beard and his hair to silver. ‘You can’t keep a good story like that a secret on a place like this. It was while I was at school. The little school here in Whalsay. There was a scrap. You know how boys are. Andrew Clouston came out with it then. A fit of temper, a way of hurting me. He was never much of a fighter when he was young. He was a good bit older than me but a coward. He must have got the tale from his father, old Andy. I ran straight out of the schoolyard to ask Mother if it was true.’ Joseph paused. ‘She was out here, planting neeps, her skirt hitched up and big boots on her feet. I’d been running and I was red, my face all covered with tears and snot. “Why didn’t you tell me my dad was a murderer?” I shouted it out at her. She straightened her back and looked at me. “I’m not sure that he was.”’
Joseph looked up at Sandy. ‘I was angry. As angry as you are now. I started screaming at her, asking what she meant. She stayed very calm. “They took the man away,” she said. “I was never certain what happened to him and your father would never discuss it. I hoped they took him across to Lunna, maybe beat him up a bit. I never knew he was dead. Even when the stories started. I should have told you. But I hoped you wouldn’t have to find out.”’ And she carried on shaking the seed down the row, her shoulders bent and her eyes on the soil.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about it properly?’
‘Later that evening. She’d had a couple of drams. She talked about the Norwegian: “They called him Per. I never knew his second name. He was tall and blond and he treated me kindly. Your father was an exciting man, but he was never kind to me.” That was what she said.’
‘Where did they bury him?’ Sandy asked.
‘I don’t know. I told you, she didn’t even know he was dead. We didn’t discuss it.’
‘You must have thought about it.’
The mist had cleared even more and now there were just a few threads of cloud flying in front of the moon. It was so light it felt like the simmer dim of a midsummer night.
‘When I was a teenager I got it into my head that the Norwegian could have been my father,’ Joseph said. ‘I heard things about my real dad I didn’t like so much. There were stories he beat Mima up. But the Norwegian couldn’t have been my father. The dates don’t work. I wasn’t born in the war.’
And you look so like Jerry, Sandy thought, remembering the photo that stood in Setter. You couldn’t be anyone else’s child.
‘Do you think your father was drowned at sea?’ Sandy asked. The question came into his head unbidden.
Now Joseph turned. ‘That’s what I was always told,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand why you have to get rid of Setter,’ Sandy said. Was he being stupid? Too thick to understand? ‘Why now? When you were so set against selling it, when you hate the idea so much that you’re prepared to set fire to it, to get the insurance instead of selling it on?’ Because it seemed to Sandy that money must come into it somehow. Money was always important in Whalsay.
‘That’s not my story to tell,’ Joseph said. ‘You’ll have to ask your mother about that. Now come home. You can’t stay in Setter the state that it’s in.’
‘I’ll tell Mother it was me,’ Sandy said. ‘A chip pan. She knows I was drinking.’
Joseph didn’t say anything. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder and they walked together back to Utra.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Sandy had to suffer a lecture from Evelyn the next morning about the evils of drinking and frying chips in the middle of the night. ‘You could have been killed. You could have burned the house to the ground!’ He thought about his father and made a pretence of looking contrite.
He hadn’t slept well. The amount he’d had to drink, you’d have thought he’d be out like a light, but ideas had been churning round in his head all night. He’d tried to rerun the conversation with his father. The earlier part of the evening he remembered fine: drinking in the bars in Lerwick, his arm round the shoulders of that fat lassie, the one married to the soothmoother who worked in the canning factory. Then turning up like a fool on Perez’s doorstep. He’d been pretty sober by the time they got back to Whalsay. At least, he thought he had been. But the details of finding the fire, standing with Joseph in the moonlight by the loch, all that seemed harder to pin down. It was as if he’d dreamed it all. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember the way his father had been last night.
Evelyn put a bacon sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of him. Joseph was already out; he’d been gone when Sandy got up.
‘Will you not sit down and have some breakfast with me?’ he asked. His mother was busy with three things at once as usual. She buzzed round the kitchen like a bluebottle trapped in a jar.
‘I had my breakfast hours ago.’
‘Then just sit down and have a coffee!’
She looked at him strangely but she did as he said.
‘Why has my father changed his mind about selling Setter?’
‘He realized it made sense. What would he want with an old house?’ Sandy recognized the tone. She was all bluster and bravado, like some teenage lad who’d stolen a car and driven it into a ditch.
Sandy shook his head. ‘He loves the place. He grew up there. He doesn’t want it full of strangers.’