‘Why do you think she went out that night?’
‘Why did Mother do anything?’ Joseph laughed. ‘I’d known her all my life and she was still a mystery to me.’
Sandy thought that was too easy and was just about to push it, when there was a tap on the open door. He saw the two lasses from the dig standing outside. Sophie was wearing a shirt that was open at the neck and one size too tight around the chest. She had on shorts with walking boots and thick socks; that should have made her look like a geek, but her legs were long and brown and shapely. He tried not to stare. He didn’t want to get attracted to a girl with a brain. It was Hattie who spoke.
‘We wondered if it’d be all right to get on with our work. The police don’t mind, but we’ll understand if you’d prefer it if we left it for a while. I mean I suppose you might rather we stopped the project all together.’
Sandy could tell that was the last thing she wanted. He’d chatted to her a couple of times in the Pier House Hotel, when he was there visiting the boys. She was always on the edge of the crowd and her work was all she could talk about, all he could imagine her being passionate about. He remembered her leaning over the table towards Ronald Clouston, giving him a lecture about Iron Age tools. Sandy thought it was good to have the lasses in Lindby. They brought a bit of life to the place. ‘What do you think, Dad?’
His father frowned.
Sandy wasn’t sure if he’d even heard the question. ‘Dad?’
‘I don’t know,’ his father said. ‘Things are different now. We don’t know what’ll happen to the croft.’
Sandy wondered then if Joseph dreamed of selling Utra and moving back here, to the house where he’d been so happy as a child. He couldn’t see his mother going along with that! It would mean leaving behind her new kitchen and bathroom and starting all over from scratch.
‘But they can carry on with their work?’ he said. ‘At least until you decide? You know how Mima liked having them around the place.’
His father hesitated again and Sandy thought he would refuse. But at last he smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. Why don’t you show us what you’ve been doing out there?’
Perhaps Joseph just didn’t like having the strangers standing in his mother’s kitchen. Certainly outside he seemed more friendly and helpful to the young women. It was Sandy who found it weird to walk right past the spot where he’d found Mima lying in the rain. The memory of her stick-thin body distracted him and he missed most of the conversation. When he tuned in again Hattie was describing what they were doing.
‘It’s just a couple of exploratory trenches. At this stage there won’t be any more disruption than this. If we find anything really interesting we’d apply for funding to extend the dig, but of course we’d need your permission to do that. Mima had already given it in principle. The initial results have been fascinating. And Evelyn thinks it would be a great boost for the island.’
She looked at Joseph anxiously. Sandy could tell she was hoping for reassuring words from him. Of course you must go ahead with your dig. Mima’s death won’t change anything. I can see how important it is.
But the man frowned again as he had in the kitchen.
‘Is this where you found the skull?’
‘Yes, in this practice trench here. Outside the wall of the main house. It’s gone off to a lab in Glasgow for dating. I hope we can date it at fifteenth-century. That would fit in with my theory about the place. Of course it could be older. We know there’s been a settlement in Lindby since the Iron Age. But it was quite near the surface so we don’t think it’s that old.’
‘Could it be younger?’
‘I suppose so, but it seems unlikely. There’s no record of a more modern building here.’
Joseph was quiet for a moment.
‘I think it’s too early to be making any decision about the future of the dig just yet. There’s no rush, is there? We can talk about all that later.’
Sandy wondered why his father, usually so easygoing, especially if a pretty lass was around, should be so discouraging about this. There were no crops in that part of the croft and it wasn’t needed for grazing. What would it matter if a dozen people came to make holes all over it? Joseph was sociable, he loved a party, a few new folk to chat to. Again he wondered if the man had his own plans for Setter and what they might be.
Sandy’s phone rang. It was Perez calling from his mobile. Sandy walked away from the group so he could talk without being overheard.
‘I’m at Laxo,’ Perez said. ‘I’ve just missed a ferry. I wondered if it was worth bringing my car or if you’d be able to meet me in Symbister.’
‘I’ll meet you.’ Sandy felt his mood lift. He had an excuse to run away from the family for a while, even if it was just to the end of the island. It was only as he was driving down towards the pier that he thought Perez’s arrival on the island might be a bad sign and that he could be here to arrest Ronald Clouston.
Chapter Fifteen
Hattie’s feelings were spiralling out of control. She loved being in the islands but whenever she imagined Mima lying in the rain, shot by Ronald Clouston, she started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her imagination was a curse.
Perhaps she was ill again. Depression had first appeared when she was at school, but then it had been insidious, almost gentle, so for some time the people around her hadn’t recognized what had been going on. When her mother had finally bullied her into seeing her GP, he’d prescribed medication, talked about stress, said it was unlikely to happen again. But at university there’d been a major breakdown and there’d been a couple of short episodes since.
It usually started with an obsession, an inability to let go of one thought or idea. At eighteen it had all been about her schoolwork, the individual project that was submitted as part of the history course. She’d been relatively relaxed about the other subjects. She’d wallowed rather in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, but her English teacher had told her anxious mother that many adolescents did that. No, it was her work on a nineteenth-century almshouse close to her home that had taken over her life and her dreams. She’d stumbled on to the original records by chance through a friend of her mother’s, and from reading the first page of neat and tiny writing she’d been hooked.
The idea of the essay had been to set the records in their social context, to explore the conditions that had allowed the formation of the houses and how their establishment fitted in with the political debate of the time. But it was the individual stories that had captivated her. She had felt herself living under the humourless regime of the almshouse trustees, saw the world through the residents’ eyes. Before she became ill enough to need a doctor she had the sense to change her university application from history to archaeology. It was the specific and the human that fascinated her, not the political or strategic. What could be more grounded than digging in the earth?
Somehow she completed her examinations and submitted her dissertation. It was when school broke up for the summer and the familiar routine of revision and writing was over that she lost any sense of perspective. Then she heard the old women in the almshouse talking to her and couldn’t let them go.
The depression had come back big style at the end of Hattie’s first year at university. She stopped eating and her mother wheeled her off to see a specialist. But then it had been Paul Berglund rather than her academic work that had triggered the illness. At school she’d had no time for men or sex, watched the antics of her friends as if they were the mad ones with their dressing up and flirting, the parties and the desperation. Falling for a man seemed just as ridiculous to her as getting excited about food. Then in her first long vacation she’d volunteered on a dig managed by Professor Berglund. It had been a hot summer, day after day of clear skies and sunshine. They’d camped out in a barn quite similar to the Whalsay Bod. The team was full of oddballs and eccentrics and Hattie had felt wonderfully at home. Here, she was no weirder than the rest of them. In the evening they went to the pub and drank pints of beer and rolled home singing.