Orkney Twilight (19 page)

They dropped to the ground. The car passed below the hedge. Sam quivered. Whoever this woman was, whatever information she had passed to Jim in that envelope, her secrets were so sensitive that Jim had trekked to Orkney to obtain them. Fifty-nine degrees north. And he had taken a pistol with him to protect the intelligence.

Back in the Cortina, Tom spread the map out again so they could identify the road the car had taken.

‘Well, it shouldn’t be difficult to find out where she was heading,’ Tom said. ‘Look, that road is a dead-end and there are only a couple of houses anywhere near it.’ He grinned. ‘I could enjoy this surveillance business. I’d make a good spy. Let’s drive down, take a look.’

She felt panicked by Tom’s interest in this woman. ‘No. Let’s drive back to Nethergate,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry. We could stop in Kirkwall on the way back and pick up something to eat.’

‘Okay. But we could come back tomorrow and work out where she lives. See if we can find out anything else about her.’

She was torn now between wanting to find out more about Jim’s contact, and keeping Tom from finding out too much; grappling with her need to know about Jim, and being afraid to find out.

‘Okay. Let’s come back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We could always go to the beach and the Oyster Catcher if we get bored.’ She checked the map again. Something clicked in her head. Thirty-eight, seventy.

‘Eastings and northings,’ she said.

‘What about them?’

‘Nothing. Great words, that’s all.’

Back at Nethergate, the fungi were sitting in a conspicuous pile on the kitchen counter. Sam picked up a ball, inhaled its musty scent, snapped it in half, rubbed the dense flesh on her lips, hesitated, opened the kitchen window and held the white matter out in the flat of her hand. The donkey advanced, sniffed and turned away. Very wise. She fished around at the back of the fridge for a bendy carrot to offer to him instead.

‘Who is going to eat mushrooms with me?’ shouted Jim from his room.

‘Not me, thanks. I’m too young to die.’

‘What about you, Tom? You helped pick them after all. Don’t let her put you off.’ Jim appeared in the kitchen. ‘Doesn’t know her arse from her elbow.’

‘Thanks, but we ate on the way back,’ Tom replied. He smiled in a strained sort of way.

‘Don’t know what you’re missing. Fresh mushrooms on toast. My favourite. Bit of butter, bit of parsley.’

‘Bit of poison,’ she said.

He squeezed past them to the far end of the kitchen, scrabbled in a drawer for a knife. He whiffed of whisky. He stopped mid-chop, knife in the air, shuffling his feet, squirming as if he was suffering from some kind of pain. She wondered whether the information he had found in the envelope was making him uncomfortable.

They left Jim to his frying, trudged into the front room. She spotted Jim’s Ordnance Survey map lying on the living room table. Eastings and northings. She unfolded it, narrowed her eyes, screened out the contours, the green, the grey, the coastline and focused on the grid. She reminded herself of the numbers of the turned-down pages in
The Orkneyinga Saga
: thirty-eight, seventy. Eastings first, northings second. She held her breath as she studied the map.

Stab of disappointment. The numbers didn’t work; it couldn’t be a grid reference because there wasn’t a seventy along the bottom or along the side. Her mind was creating codes to crack where they didn’t exist; so much for the Death of Rognvald. And then she thought of another possibility. Chapters. The single dog-ear: Death of Rognvald, chapter 29. The double dog-ear: Earl Sigurd’s Sons, Chapter 13. She flattened the folds of the map, located the twenty-ninth easting, traced the grid-line with her finger to the thirteenth northing. She almost yelped triumphantly. The lines intersected just below the Ring of Brodgar.

Tom glanced up from the book he had picked up from the shelf. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Nothing in particular. What are you reading?’ The Sicilian Defence, mirror his move.

‘One of those Freemasonry conspiracy books that people always leave in holiday cottages. Jesus wasn’t killed on the cross. He married, had a load of children, fled to the south of France. The Freemasons have protected the lineage and evidence of its origins. Pile of crap.’

‘So what’s your theory about the Freemasons then?’ She glanced down at the map again.

‘My theory is that no theory is necessary. The Freemasons are a bunch of middle-class blokes who hang out together and protect each other’s interests; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It’s a white-collar club. The secret signs, the rituals, they’re all meaningless claptrap.’

‘Jim would probably be on your side on that one.’ She was half listening as she discreetly rechecked the grid reference. Lord. She had read it correctly. What was he going to do at the Ring of Brodgar of all places?

‘But Jim must be a Freemason,’ said Tom. ‘He’s an inspector, isn’t he? I thought you more or less had to be a Freemason to get on in the Force.’

‘No, he’s not a Freemason.’ She looked up. ‘It’s not his kind of thing at all. I remember overhearing him tell his mate Harry that the Commander had invited him to join a couple of times. And Jim said he wasn’t interested in poncing around in a pinafore and acting like a twerp just to keep in with a bunch of boring accountants and bloody lawyers.’

‘The exception that proves the rule.’

‘Maybe. Let’s play Triv.’

Jim walked into the room, belched, made the air reek of rotten eggs, loomed over them as they played.

‘I’ve got a Trivial question for you,’ he said eventually.

They raised their heads in unison.

‘Where is Shinkolobwe?’

‘Don’t know,’ Sam said.

‘I don’t think I’ve heard of it,’ said Tom.

‘Really? I’m surprised that you two haven’t heard of Shinkolobwe.’

‘Why should we have heard of it?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Thought it was the kind of thing all you sandalistas knew.’

‘Where is it, then?’

‘Guess.’

‘Africa?’ said Tom.

‘Good start. Right continent at least.’

She was about to take a stab at a country, but Tom slipped in one of his intrusive questions first.

‘Is that where you served when you were in the Army? Africa?’

‘Yes. Africa. Among other places.’

Jim closed the conversation down with a yawn, announced he was tired so he was going to read in his room, retreated. She wondered then whether Tom had hit on a connection, a link between Shinkolobwe and Jim’s spell in the army, whether that could somehow be tied up with whatever he had found out from the woman in the café, the information in the manila envelope. But it didn’t make much sense. Then again, the lines of Jim’s strange existence never made much sense. She twiddled a stray strand of hair. She couldn’t concentrate on the game, distracted by Jim and his own trivial pursuits. Shinkolobwe. She flicked her wrist – seven – suggested they go for a stroll, make the most of the calmer weather.

They climbed up behind the house, away from Tirlsay, past a field of bullocks swatting clouds of flies with their tails. The fields petered out, replaced with bracken, heather, deserted crumbling crofters’ cottages and tumuli. More ghosts. No escaping the phantoms. Even up here, exposed on the hillside, the wind was hardly even a gentle pressure. She swiped ineffectually at the midges dancing in irritating patterns around her head, breaking up her vision, and wondered whether it was an unnatural calm before the storm. At the hill’s crest, they paused to take in the view.

‘Look up there.’ She pointed to a single standing stone, grey on the ridge. And then she spotted another solitary finger, further along to her left. They were at a crossroads; the hill’s ridge marked the intersection of two paths: tarmac and ley-line.

‘Signposts. Markers,’ she said.

‘Markers of what?’

‘The path for pilgrims. The spiritual highway.’

‘To where?

‘The Ring of Brodgar.’ She stretched her arms out and up to the sky.

‘Oh God, please spare us the bloody High Priestess again.’

She smiled. Tom smiled back.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the Ring of Brodgar.’

‘It’s a Neolithic stone circle to the west of here. It’s a strange place. It radiates ancient powers. Even you will be bewitched by its mysterious magic. We’ll have to visit it before we leave.’

‘Okay. I’ll give it a go.’ He looked down, seemingly engrossed in harassing a long, black beetle with the toe of his trainer, forcing its abdomen to curl upwards like a scorpion.

‘Sam. There’s something I want to say to you.’

Something about the tone of his voice made her want to pretend she hadn’t heard him. ‘Let’s carry on along the road for a bit longer,’ she said.

The beetle made a dash for the heather, tail still curled.

‘Hang on a minute. I want to talk.’

She wasn’t listening. She took a step, one foot on the ley-line, one foot on the road. The warning tweet of a passerine made her look up. The flecked grey underside of the raptor was just visible high in the stratosphere, hovering, resisting the upward pull of the warm thermal. Suddenly it folded its wings and dived, screaming downwards, sending out an electric shockwave as it swooped. It vanished. She checked over her shoulder. Nothing. Forwards again: face to face with the yellow blazing eyes. Glaring. Perched on a fence post on the far side of a track running out across the moorland. She blinked. It was up in the air again. Flying above the track, head down, searching.

‘Peregrine. Let’s follow it.’ She swerved off the road, down the trail, catching her feet in the coarse grass, switching between ridges and ruts, the falcon hanging in the air a few yards ahead. Feet pounding, out of breath as the track curved round a sharp corner. She came to a sudden halt, confronted by an incongruent metallic glint. The silver gleam became a recognizable shape: a silver Merc superimposed on the landscape.

‘Oh my God, it’s that car again,’ she whispered as Tom caught up with her. ‘The one that nearly rammed us on the road out of Stromness. What on earth is it doing here?’

‘Let’s find out.’

‘No. Let’s scarper.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

He strode confidently over to the car.

The Merc’s driver was leaning over the bonnet, hands either side of a map spread out below her. She was wearing a leather biker jacket and her hair was cropped quite short. But, Sam noted resentfully, her red lipsticked mouth gave her an edge of seductiveness, a clear signal of intent. A glamorous tomboy. How old was she? Late twenties possibly. She turned her large smile on Tom, almost expectantly. He smiled back.

‘Are you lost?’ Tom asked. What a ridiculous question. As if she might have inadvertently taken a wrong turning down a barely used track and driven for quarter of a mile before she realized what she had done. Anyway, she hardly looked helpless. Not to Sam anyway. Tom was obviously too stupid to see beyond her make-up.

‘I just pulled off the road to take in the view.’ She had a hint of an American accent, not the brashness of the northern states but the drawl of the south. It sounded slightly overdone to Sam, as if she was deliberately trying to soften her persona, knew that she had to disguise her hard edges.

‘I’m just trying to get my bearings.’ She gestured – the hills, the valleys, the bay, the road to Nethergate clearly visible, winding its way through the bracken moor-grass. Her explanation was about as likely as Jim’s history degree.

‘I’m Avis, by the way.’

Avis – what sort of a stupid name was that? Avis held her hand out to Tom without a glance at Sam.

‘Tom.’ He gripped her hand.

‘Let me help. I’m good with maps.’ He was standing right next to her now. Sam said nothing, fuming at Tom’s willingness to buy her obviously implausible story. She assessed Avis slyly, searching for clues to her identity, chinks in her annoyingly attractive exterior. She stared at Avis’s hands for a moment, hoping, perhaps, to catch sight of a sixth finger. There wasn’t one. She let her eyes travel up from Avis’s elegant hand to a slender wrist encircled by a silver-strapped watch. She blinked and double-checked the evidently expensive watch.

‘We’re here,’ Tom said, pointing at the map, lining it up. ‘That’s the Bay down there.’

‘Oh of course,’ said Avis. ‘Thank you.’

Tom smiled again. Like a prize idiot.

‘Are you on holiday here?’ Avis asked.

Sam assumed he would have the sense not to answer the question honestly.

‘Well, a sort of holiday,’ he said. She attempted to tread on his toe discreetly to stop him from talking but he moved his foot while hers was in mid-air and she missed, managed to crunch her own toe instead.

‘Actually, we’re here to keep her dad company.’ He nodded dismissively in Sam’s direction. ‘He wanted to take a break in Orkney and we are just trying to keep him on the straight and narrow while he works out whether or not to do a history degree.’

‘How interesting,’ she said. ‘History. And what about you? What do you do, Tom?’

Avis asked more questions than Tom did, she noted.

‘I’m a writer.’

Sam raised one eyebrow in an attempt to convey the delusional nature of Tom’s claims.

‘Well, journalist actually,’ he added.

Well, not actually.

‘Journalism? That’s my field too,’ Avis said.

‘Is it?’ Tom’s eyes glistened with interest. ‘Journalism? Which paper do you work for?’

Sam kicked her foot impatiently against a tussock of cotton grass.

‘I’m freelance. I write a lot of features for magazines – the colour supplements, women’s glossies.’

‘What are you doing here then?’ Sam said, pointedly.

Avis narrowed her glinting green cat’s eyes. ‘I have a contract with a travel writing publisher to cover the Highlands and Islands for a series of guides they are producing. So I’m doing a tour, visiting all the attractions, checking out the hotels.’

Sam had an urge to point out that it was a bit stupid to employ someone who couldn’t read a map to write a travel guide.

‘You must be doing well to be able to afford a Merc,’ Sam said, not even trying to hide her incredulity now. ‘I didn’t think freelance writers earned that much.’