The Seal King Murders E-Book

Alanna Knight

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Inspector Faro
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 364

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

1861. Constable Faro is heading home to Orkney, pursuing a private investigation into the mysterious drowning of an ex-colleague's relative, champion swimmer Dave Claydon. Was this an accident or does Claydon's death have a sinister connection with missing artefacts recovered from the Armada galleon sunk off Spanish Cove? At Scarthbreck his mother is determined to find him a wife and this Lammastide the legend of the seal king's annual claim of a human bride becomes reality. Faro's holiday and his original secret mission turn into a nightmare. With himself as the prime suspect in the girl's disappearance, he is in deadly danger, his life threatened by circumstances beyond his control.

Leseprobe

The Seal King Murders

An Inspector Faro Mystery

ALANNA KNIGHT

To my granddaughters

Chloe and Julia Knight, with love

Contents

Title PageDedicationFOREWORDCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENCHAPTER TWENTYCHAPTER TWENTY-ONECHAPTER TWENTY-TWOCHAPTER TWENTY-THREECHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVECHAPTER TWENTY-SIXCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTAbout the AuthorBy Alanna KnightAdvertisementCopyright

FOREWORD

There are fourteen published novels and casebooks covering the years 1872 to 1887 of Jeremy Faro’s distinguished career as Chief Inspector in the Edinburgh City Police and personal detective to Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Balmoral.

At the request of his many readers worldwide, eager to know how his illustrious lifetime achievement began, this is the second casebook of Constable Faro, dated 1861. The first is Murder in Paradise.

CHAPTER ONE

Human-eyed, beseeching, curious.

The seals, staring at the ship as it approached the quayside, took newly appointed Detective Constable Jeremy Faro back, dissolving the mist of ten years when, as a boy of seventeen, he had left the island to join the Edinburgh City Police.

The seals’ expressions resembled his mother’s, pleading and reproachful when he had returned for brief visits, reminding him that he had deserted her for that city of sin and murder.

Yes, murder. Casting in his lot with the people who had murdered her beloved husband, Jeremy’s father. A tragic fatal accident involving a runaway cab on the Mound was the verdict but Mary Faro was stubborn. She ‘knew what she knew’ and all the lack of evidence to the contrary in this world would never convince her. Someone – notably the Edinburgh City Police – had deliberately killed Constable Magnus Faro.

The ship moved slowly, carefully negotiating the harbour entrance where Stromness lay in wait. Smaller, less ancient than his native Kirkwall, with no magnificent cathedral or ruined Earl’s Palace, a scatter of grey roofs and walls spilling down the slope of a granite hill where each house seemed to stand on the edge of the roof below, tight-packed with its neighbours and the houses terraced above. A scene eternally crowned by the swooping shapes of white wings and the shrill cries of seabirds.

Faro narrowed his eyes against the sun, searching the figures gathered on the quayside awaiting the ship’s arrival for a familiar face among head-shawled women, and men heavily bearded beneath their bonnets. He touched his smooth chin; bare-faced it might make him stand out in a crowd, but this fashion for facial hair inspired by royalty had no appeal for him.

Was his mother there? He could almost hear her first words. How long was he staying this time? His reply, as always, received with a sigh of resignation, while he contemplated that a week of forced inactivity, a mite overlong for himself, was never long enough for her daily recapitulation of the finer details of his father’s last hours and the sidelong glances that implied that their only son had signed up with the enemy instead of scratching a living from an unforgiving soil or sacrificing his short life dragging fish from a reluctant sea. Such was the traditional fisherman-crofter’s existence since the Vikings beached their dragon-headed ships along the shore.

This time he must make up some convincing story as the real reason for his visit. The very hint of danger to her offspring would set his mother off on a tangent of recriminations.

This special mission had come from his old friend, Brandon Macfie, detective superintendent of Edinburgh City Police, retired. At their weekly supper in his house in Nicolson Square, he had leant over in a conspiratorial manner, ‘I have a small assignment for you, lad. Dave Claydon, my late wife’s cousin, was an excise officer in Orkney. A lot younger than Meg, they had naught in common; met him only once when he was taking part in a swimming competition here. Fine swimmer too – he won the cup. But he drowned up there boarding a ship for Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago.’

Pausing, he regarded Faro as if for comment. When Faro managed to look only mildly interested, Macfie sighed. ‘Don’t you see it, lad? Strange, isn’t it, that a champion swimmer should drown?’

Faro shook his head. Macfie obviously knew nothing about the wild, fierce seas around Orkney that could seize quite large ships and break them up like matchsticks.

Macfie frowned. ‘His body has never been recovered.’

‘Frequently happens, sir. Those wild seas scatter bodies like spindrift. Often end up in far away Shetland.’

‘That so?’ Macfie’s eyes widened, he looked amazed, obviously unconvinced, and stretching out his hand to the sideboard for the port decanter, he dragged over a file of papers which he pushed in Faro’s direction.

‘It’s all there. Reports from the Orkney Constabulary and the newspaper. No, no, not now. Read them at your leisure.’ Biting his lip, he went on, ‘Somehow, I’m not satisfied with the results, always had an instinct for this sort of thing. You have it too, lad, and I’d like you to use your observation and deduction to see what you can find out for me. Look into it, discreetly and quite unofficially, of course. Don’t want to upset our lads up there.’

But Faro knew from his experience that there never was a police investigation, nor ever would be, that did not upset a great many people, the innocent as well as the guilty.

Macfie was saying, ‘They naturally accepted what seemed obvious to everyone – to everyone except me, that is. Family, you know. A week in Orkney should give you plenty of time to ferret things out that their constabulary might have missed.’

A fond hope indeed, thought Faro, but perhaps fortuitous, as his last brief communication from his mother was a postcard saying, ‘I have taken a situation for the summer with a family here at Scarthbreck.’

Faro had smiled wryly. The little cottage in Kirkwall where he had grown up and into which she had moved as a bride seemed no longer adequate to contain the vibrant, active and restless spirit of Mary Faro.

‘Capital, lad!’ Macfie beamed at him. ‘Your little holiday couldn’t be better timed.’

Faro sighed. He was dreading this visit and he wondered why in God’s name he had allowed Macfie to convince Chief Inspector Jackson to give him paid leave? True, it was all for his own good: Macfie was anxious for his protégé’s further chances of promotion, especially as he wasn’t doing too well recovering from his first case, a successful chase and final encounter with the arch-criminal who had plagued Scotland’s police forces for years and had almost cost Constable Faro his life.

The bullet that had pierced his chest had weakened his lungs and a winter fever had resulted in pneumonia. Macfie watched over him anxious as a mother hen – even Mary Faro would have been impressed. He was all for summoning her from Orkney to nurse her lad, but Faro, even in his fraught condition, would have none of that.

Macfie, however, was determined; wily too. He had heard rumours aplenty of artefacts going missing from archaeological digs. It was claimed that priceless items of gold and jewels, a treasure trove en route for Edinburgh, had mysteriously vanished, lost when their carrier (none other than Macfie’s cousin by marriage) had met with an accident and had, apparently, drowned.

The Orkney Constabulary remained silent on the nature of the artefacts, and vague regarding their proceedings for recovering the drowned man, and this failed to satisfy grieving relatives or the authorities in Edinburgh who, according to Macfie’s theory, were not deeply concerned about the fate of the excise officer, suspecting that it was all part of a sinister plot to cheat the Treasury and retain the artefacts, which had never left Orkney.

‘You’re just the man to look into all this, Faro,’ said Macfie. ‘You know your island and your islanders. Make a few enquiries just to set my mind at rest, lad, see your folks and add a decent holiday into the bargain. Do you a world of good – come back a new man,’ he added with an encouraging smile.

And pointing again to the papers, ‘Dave left a widow, you could start with her.’ With a sorrowful shake of his head, he added mournfully that twenty years younger he would have rushed up to Orkney to investigate the case himself. But alas, years of hard living in the police force and a heavy addiction to rich food and wines had ruined his health. Too old now, he was also crippled with rheumatism.

Whatever bees Macfie had got in a well-worn bonnet, he appeared even in retirement to still possess a thumb that extended into the affairs of the Edinburgh City Police, and Faro suspected that Chief Inspector Jackson, a mild-mannered man quite unlike his predecessor, Detective Inspector Noble, was a little in awe of the ex-superintendent. And so Macfie continued behind the scenes to manipulate young Constable Faro, pressing the point of his excellent qualities, certain that he had promotion potential and would go far.

‘If he doesn’t get himself killed in his enthusiasm, that is,’ was how Jackson put it to colleagues over a pint of ale in the local public house. The guffaws that followed said plainly that they thought this extremely likely. Mrs Jackson, however, was a Shetlander, and instead of rivalry between the islands had a fellow feeling for the constable who she decided must have Shetland blood, his appearance so uncannily akin to her romantic notion of what a handsome young Viking would have looked like.

As for Jackson, his mild-mannered exterior hid a shrewd mind and even a tendency, regrettable as it was, to see far-reaching suspicions in even the mildest of offences. This weakness had produced a splendid vision of Dave Claydon’s death being more than an accident, perhaps involving drugs, smugglers and other double-dealings. Intrigued by the possibilities, and instead of sending Constable Faro, he fancied going himself, taking the missus and making it a bit of a holiday. There was just one drawback. He was a rotten sailor, sick as a dog even on the village pond to say nothing of a notoriously unpredictable sea crossing.

To Faro he grinned, repeating Macfie’s words, ‘You’re just the man for the job.’

As for those missing artefacts, Claydon, a man of few words, had not left any enlightenment regarding their origins. Speculation remained of a treasure far too sophisticated for the Neolithic settlement discovered in 1850 and under recent excavation. Much more likely they were from the Spanish galleon, El Rosario, shipwrecked off the coast way back in 1588, though still the subject of many an islander’s daydreams. Black-haired youths with white skins and fine dark eyes claimed that, if they were not descended from the Viking invaders, then their remote ancestor was some nobleman from that very vessel on the run from the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

None, however, wished to claim lowly descent from an ordinary, nondescript sailor, a foreign mercenary, or even a lowly galley slave, and as if to breathe a whisper of truth into the Armada legend and keep it alive, the occasional coin did still appear and encouraged experienced divers as well as local boys to try their luck, always in search of that pot of gold.

When this revived Armada gold fever occasionally erupted in his schooldays, Faro always shook his head. He had no desire to join the divers. An unfortunate episode when cut off by the rising tide – he almost drowned in the underground caves – had put an end to any dalliance with the eager swimmers. Besides which, he did not have a sailor’s constitution.

‘Couldn’t swim – an island lad who can’t swim!’ It was ludicrous, a constant source of amusement among his fellow schoolmates. Only the fact that Faro was tall and strong and could use his fists to good effect kept the teasing from slipping into bullying.

This state of affairs also gave rise to more sinister hints to account for his fear of water. The rumour that his grandmother was or had been a selkie, a seal woman. He would have loved to meet her, disappointed that she had been dead for years, according to what little Faro could glean from his mother.

He soon learnt that she was not to be discussed. Selkie blood was the island equivalent of a black sheep in a respectable family and Mary Faro clammed up, her lips together in a tight line of disapproval whenever little Jeremy said, ‘Tell me about Granny. Where is she? Is she in heaven?’

His childish curiosity had met with an angry response. ‘That I doubt. I cannot believe that the Good Lord has taken her to himself.’ And violently shaking off the thought, ‘I don’t know or wish to know anything more about her and even if I did, it would not be for your tender young ears. Decent God-fearing people the Scarths and Faros are – what would we be doing with creatures like that? Sitting down with selkies at our Sunday dinner – the idea of it! What would the neighbours think? We’d never lift our heads again.’

Curious still, as he grew older, Faro was sensible enough to turn his face away and not waste time on such legends. Like fairy stories, he didn’t believe a word of them, all this nonsense about the seal king rising from the waves at Lammastide and carrying off a human girl to his kingdom beneath the waves, to be his bride for a year and a day before returning her to mortal life again. Such illogical nonsense.

He’d never heard the like of it, although, as his mother insisted, a decent young girl on the island would never walk on that beach at Lammastide. True, the seals were always busy, restless and barking like angry dogs – no doubt that was how the story had arisen. Their heads bobbing out of the water did have an oddly human appearance.

Oblivious to argument, stubbornly Faro shook his head. From an early age he had to find an answer to everything, stoutly insisting that every question was bound to have one somewhere. Observation and deduction were already his watchwords.

And that was what turned him into a detective in the making, according to Macfie. When the old man almost adopted him, Faro, for once wrongly, assumed it was on account of his potential. Instead, it was because Faro reminded the lonely old widower of his only son, who would have been a similar age to the young constable, had he not died tragically some years before.

Faro had his own theories about the seal king and that once-yearly abduction, and for his grandmother’s legendary arrival on the island, a tiny girl caught in the fishing nets of his grandfather, Hakon Scarth. A likely tale just because it was Lammastide when the seals were particularly active – and noisy.

Most likely, putting an answer to everything, Faro believed she had been a survivor of the Norwegian ship that had sunk a mile out from the shore in a violent storm. There were only two other survivors, a couple of Norwegian sailors with little or no English, but enough furious head-shaking and protests to convince the authorities that they had never seen that little girl before. Unlucky they were, children on board a ship. And so it had proved.

Faro had decided, cynically no doubt, that they had their own reasons for denial, especially when considering the fact that the strictly illegal practice of smuggling their women aboard ships was ignored by the authorities. Men needed women for carnal reasons: to look after their bodily needs and to darn their socks on long sea voyages.

Still, he never ceased to regret not having met his grandmother, selkie or no, a legend that his mother wasn’t in the least proud to accept. A decent religious woman couldn’t lay claim to such a heathen creature.

As he grew older, questions about his grandmother’s whereabouts became more remote, and any hopeful reminders were fielded sharply aside by his sensible, less excitable father with the brief comment, ‘Don’t you be listening to such things, lad.’ Magnus had a short list of answers: ‘drowned while out fishing’, ‘died giving birth’, ‘ran away with a sailor’, ‘took consumption’.

All very glib and plausible, seeing as these were the most common causes of sudden death or disappearance from the island. Only the more reliable citizens achieved respectable immortality on the kirkyard’s tombstones.

Returning to his bleak police lodging that evening, Faro had a quick scan of the reports. What was the Claydon man doing anyway, by getting a boatman to row him out to meet the Leith ship and being picked up beyond the bar?

The boatman who was interviewed gave vague answers, admitting that passengers and crew who missed ship did this quite frequently, and more often than not were seriously drunk and desperately hiring assistance in the form of a willing boatman for what was an illegal procedure. The conclusion was that Claydon, jumping across, had missed his footing on the ship’s ladder and, falling into rough sea, drowned.

It was a night of fog and mist, the boatman explained, but he had remained circling the area, shouting and calling, to no avail. Regardless, the ship headed out to sea, the captain firmly ignoring the incident which, had it been reported, might have cost him his command.

Now, as the ship’s anchor attached the vessel firmly to the quay, its arrival heralded by the flashing wings and shrieking calls of seabirds, Faro set aside his list of questions and composed his expression to meet his mother who would have her apron strings ready starched. Bracing himself for a greeting, he had the words and the smile all ready.

‘Just come to see you, Ma.’

CHAPTER TWO

As his foot touched dry land, Faro realised that the only other person he had the slightest wish to see again at that moment was Inga St Ola, his first love. During a night on the moonlit beach, she had given him his first initiation into the mysteries of the female body, always so well hidden underneath layers of clothes and consequently a never-waning magnet for boyish curiosity.

Searching the faces of those on shore, heads raised, eagerly awaiting passengers, of course Inga would not possibly be there. She had been absent, he knew not where (on another part of the island perhaps?) on his previous brief visits, so why expect her to appear now? She might be any one of the head-shawled women – would he even recognise her after ten years? She was older than himself, past thirty and no doubt much changed from the captivating girl he remembered. Married, her lovely face lined, her luxuriant tresses grey-threaded, all ruined by the harsh island life and years of childbearing.

He had seen it so often, the natural result of time’s ruthless progress, and he could hardly bear to imagine Inga’s transformation. And he had changed too. But a man of twenty-seven in Orkney terms was in his prime, and Edinburgh had had a hand in changing the tall, coltish boy into a tall, strong man. His thick, flaxen hair tamed, the cheekbones beneath the soft contours of his face hardened, his gentle expression matured into deep-set blue eyes, straight nose and wide, sensual mouth. Still the ultimate legendary Viking, enthusiastically acclaimed by artist acquaintances who had never met one.

A stir from the midst of the head-shawled women, but it was not Inga St Ola who ran towards him. The diminutive figure that pushed her way forward was attired in a neat grey cape and straw bonnet, the modest attire of an upper-class servant.

Laughing, his mother almost tearful, clasped him in her arms, kissed him, but could not resist saying, ‘So you’ve come back home at last!’

This hint of reproach, all his sins of omission remembered. It wasn’t his fault, either: he felt, often indignantly, that he was the one abandoned and not the other way round. Distraught by memories of the death of his policeman father in Edinburgh, she had returned to Orkney and left him alone and uncertain among strangers in desolate police lodgings, when he would have most welcomed her presence.

Feeling misunderstood, he groaned as she added, ‘And what brings you here, lad, so unexpected? Not much warning to prepare for you. Here, let me take that,’ she said stretching out a hand for his luggage as if he was a small boy again.

‘No, Ma, please,’ he said, snatching it from her, ashamed that she was making him look a fool, a great big man resisting this small determined woman. He looked around for where the carriages and carters waited to take passengers to their destinations.

She smiled. ‘You won’t need your legs to carry you all the way to Kirkwall this time. Andy the carter, over there, has things to deliver to the big house at Scarthbreck. He’ll take us. Hold on while I check the goods.’

Faro found a seat alongside a mountain of packages, watching her tick items off a list. As she joined him, he said, ‘I’ll need a place to stay.’

She laughed. ‘A place to stay. And so you shall. That’s all been taken care of. There’s plenty of room in the servants’ lodge. I’m housekeeper there, didn’t I tell you?’ she said, adding proudly, ‘I have my own quarters, much grander than our place at home.’

The journey spoke to his senses as always, calling him back to the world he had lost, winding past the Loch of Stenness and the standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar, older than recorded time, looming against the horizon through the margins of the dark peat fields, where a solitary kestrel hovered in a bleak grey sky, sweeping out of sight for its prey.

Then sudden habitation, a group of houses, knitted tightly together, and a grey, straight street with contours more akin to a city than an island, set down temporarily by an architect who, defeated by its ugliness, had abandoned an uneasy struggle with an unwilling landscape.

‘That’s Spanish Cove,’ said Mary.

‘What an extraordinary place and where did it get that fanciful name?’

She laughed. ‘It is supposed to be the exact spot where that galleon went down, so they say, all that long time ago.’

Faro knew the story well. So this was the actual birthplace of one of Orkney’s popular legends, El Rosario, in flight after the defeat of the Armada, pursued by Queen Elizabeth’s superior fleet aided by storm and ‘the wind of God’.

Spanish Cove’s one long street perched uneasily close to the cliff edge undeterred by sudden storms and wild seas, with a small landing stage far below.

‘In the kind of wild weather we get, the cove has provided a refuge for foreign fishing boats. I’m told,’ said Mary, ‘that the herring catches are very good in these waters. Probably accounts for the houses in the first place.’

Its forbidding aspect suggested smugglers arriving at the dead of night rather than fishermen with their daily catch and Faro said, ‘I’m glad it’s not our destination.’

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Mary Faro agreed. ‘But the folk who live there don’t seem to notice, all crowded together like that. Not like our houses in Kirkwall, with their bits of land. Although these ones do have peedie gardens to grow a few vegetables.’

As he glanced back over his shoulder, she added, ‘There’s a shop and stables for folk wanting to hire a horse or a gig for Stromness and Kirkwall. The Scarthbreck servants find having such amenities very handy.’

Bewildered, Faro asked, ‘I wonder whose idea it was – and when?’

She shook her head. ‘Goodness knows. Been there a long time. Look, we’ll be seeing Scarthbreck soon.’

And suddenly the horizon was dominated by a distant glimpse of sea, and on the hilltop a fine new house.

Overlooking the vast expanse of Scapa Flow, on closer contact Scarthbreck also seemed to perch in an alien landscape as if aware of its transience, settling uncomfortably above evidence of earlier habitations. The builders had uncovered several skeletons, which confirmed the archaeologists’ theories that the original house had been built over a Norse burial ground.

For Faro, the area awoke echoes he had encountered in ancient buildings like St Magnus Cathedral. An awareness of a past unwilling to be obliterated by an aggressive present and completely hidden by this determinedly modern house with building operations still evident in a three-sided courtyard to house stables and the servants’ quarters.

Mary Faro said, ‘Not only skeletons outside either. The house is haunted,’ she added with a shudder.

Faro laughed. ‘Surely not, Ma. Can’t be more than fifteen years old.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ she said grimly, ‘but as the flagstones were being replaced by wooden floors, for extra comfort and warmth – they do like nice things, like a lovely Turkish carpet – well, they found another skeleton just inside the front door.’

That got Faro’s attention. An unsolved murder always had immediate drawing power.

‘An elderly man, they thought, but they’ve never found out anything more about who it was or how long it had lain there.’

Faro gathered that the original Scarthbreck had passed through many different hands in the course of its centuries-long existence, so there was no possibility of tracking down the identity of that particular dead man.

‘No one knows anything about him, but they couldn’t get a servant lass to live in again, after the first one said she’d seen his ghost. You know what it’s like, gossip of that kind spreads like wildfire. That’s the main reason for the lodges outside. They need servants. Of course, I don’t believe in such things,’ she added, but her anxious glance revealed otherwise.

‘Who are “they”?’

‘The Prentiss-Grants, you’ll have heard of them even in Edinburgh. Shipbuilders on the Clyde, made an absolute fortune. He got a knighthood for it. Sir Arnold he is now, has a wife and one lass. Right bonny she is.’

A few scattered stones was the only evidence of the original Scarthbreck, once the house of a Viking wolf lord, built when habitations were not intended for comfort, but for the grimmer business of defence and survival.

The servants’ lodge, a long, low building with one long corridor, had rooms linked by a succession of doors. The human equivalent of a horse stables, he thought and laughed. In this cheerless, box-like structure, with its no-nonsense courtyard, there was no place for ghosts and skeletons of ancient dwellers.

When he said so, his mother looked grave. ‘Folk are so superstitious, I can’t be doing with it, talk of a lot of heathen savages, going on about that seal king legend they’re all so scared of.’

He laughed. ‘I dare say you’ll be glad to be back in your safe little cottage again, come the short days, the long, dark nights.’

‘I will that. It’s all so smart, neat and clean but it doesn’t feel like my peedie home. I’m only here for the summer, I made that quite clear. Lots of posh folk coming, from the mainland and from England, for the shooting and fishing. I told them I wasna’ interested in staying all year. At least not at the moment. I might change my mind later, but I’d dread the winter up here. It’s too isolated for me.’

Far below them, away to the west in a great horseshoe of sand dunes set against a bleak sea, in the outcrops of rock the archaeologists had unearthed a Neolithic settlement.

What had conditions been like for those early dwellers, he wondered. Had they decided to settle there because the dunes offered hollows scooped out on the landward side, shelter from the wind and rain sweeping in from cruel winter storms? Built unwisely upon the sand, despite stone from the outcrops which took shape as walls, roofs and connected cells, they were doomed. No match for a succession of storms, obliterated by blown sand. The occupants gave up the struggle and moved elsewhere, all evidence lost until a decade ago when another violent storm stripped off the top sand, soil and turf to reveal a four-thousand-year-old housing estate.

Archaeologists had moved in immediately but made little progress in a site exposed to all weathers. Of interest to them were the stone furnishings, shelves for beds and storing, and an occasional bead, Stone Age implement or arrowhead, causing a furore of excitement and bringing to the wearied team renewed enthusiasm, brief satisfaction that frozen feet and hands and aching backs were well worthwhile in the cause of the island’s story.

Mary Faro was proud of the housekeeper’s quarters in the newly appointed servants’ lodge. A parlour-cum-kitchen, two rooms with beds, all very spartan accommodation, somehow a continuity of that transience Faro was beginning to associate with Scarthbreck, as if a sudden strong puff of wind might blow the whole place away and leave nothing behind but a few strands of coarse grass and heathland, lost for ever like the Neolithic dwellings.

Suddenly he longed for his old room in Kirkwall and, briefly, in St Margaret’s Hope, with their comforting associations of a happy secure childhood. This was all so new, so impersonal, as if the painted walls were not yet dry. There was no feeling of warmth, the welcome of returning home had been denied him – furnishings shabby but with precious associations in rooms full of memories.

Perhaps aware of his thoughts, his mother said, ‘At least you won’t have to sleep on the couch. I’m fortunate. My position entitles me to a spare room.’

She insisted on unpacking his case. He could not deny her that, and as he watched his meagre possessions vanishing into a cupboard and chest of drawers, he fielded a succession of questions. He considered the situation and wondered how he was to keep at bay his mother’s curiosity regarding the true reason for his visit.

He was only mildly interested in the fate of the vanished treasure trove of artefacts. ‘Priceless’ was not a word in his vocabulary. Gold, silver and jewels were, after all, mere material objects, waiting to be tagged by the museum authorities and set in glass cases. In Faro’s opinion, their acquisition could not be compared with what was truly beyond price in his estimation, one man’s life or needless death.

Before being interrupted by his mother appearing to tell him that a meal was ready on the table, and lured by the delicious smell of frying bacon, he was already compiling a list.

First, an interview with the boatman and the divers sent to the scene who had found neither treasure, nor Dave Claydon. In the absence of a body there was conveniently no indication whether he had drowned by accident or design.

It was a start, and already Faro had a sense of doom that this was fated to remain one of those unsolved cases which would go down in the annals of Orkney.

Consoled by the fact that it should not take long, he could salve his conscience by enjoying – or should it be enduring? – a bit of home life, the indulgent kind an only son expected, and one he had almost forgotten. As his mother hovered over him, always urging him to eat a little more of that, try some of this I made, or some of that, he put an arm around her, kissed her.

Perhaps the gesture alarmed her for, teapot in hand, she looked momentarily taken aback. The kiss was everything. How could he find the right words to tell her that suddenly he realised that, although she drove him mad sometimes, he loved her? She was all the close kin he had in the world, much as he deplored her treating him as a small boy. Often he wondered, did only sons ever become grown men in the eyes of doting mothers?

It would be different if he had a wife, and as the conversation slanted slyly but inevitably towards that subject, of whether he had a young lady back in Edinburgh, he smiled.

This was one good reason for marrying his faithful Lizzie. He was very fond of Lizzie, told himself regularly that this was the love he had waited for. He was certain that she loved him. He had no doubts about that.

But there was an old saying that in every relationship ‘there is one who kisses and one who is kissed’. He had to confess that he fell into the latter category. He had never experienced, perhaps never would, the kind of love poets like Burns wrote about or lovers like Romeo and Juliet died for.

He had known infatuation for what it was, a kind of bewitchment or temporary madness, but what was this mysterious, all-consuming emotion? The nearest he had ever known was with Inga St Ola, who had scorned his solemn suggestion after their brief loving ten years ago that they should get married.

Inga had laughed, dismissing him as far too young and saying that she was a free spirit and had no desire to spend the rest of her life with him, the wife of an Edinburgh policeman. She couldn’t imagine such a future. That had hurt then, the memory still did.

His thoughts drifted back to the safer ground of Lizzie. Dear Lizzie. He knew she would be the perfect wife for a busy police detective: amiable, undemanding and kind. A good cook and housewife who would provide for his bodily needs and in due course present him with children – sons and daughters.

He groaned as memory popped up the one fly in the ointment, so to speak, to marriage with Lizzie. Her sullen, scowling eleven-year-old son, Vince, who hated him. What was more to the point, Lizzie wasn’t just a respectable young woman, tragically widowed, who he could present to his mother. She had borne Vince as a result of rape by an aristocratic guest in a Highland mansion one summer when she was a fifteen-year-old parlourmaid.

This unfortunate experience entitled her to be spurned as an outcast from any decent Edinburgh society. All Faro’s sympathy was with her, but did he think there was any possible way that his mother wouldn’t be shocked and horrified at the prospect of a daughter-in-law who was no longer a virgin and had an illegitimate child? Unthinkable! Faro could see her lips tighten, narrow in disapproval.

He knew what Mary Faro wanted. She hoped he would marry some nice, respectable local lass, and he reeled back in horror, remembering those brief earlier visits when she managed to thrust in his path, by accident or design, a shortlist of girls for him to consider as suitable candidates for the role of Mrs Jeremy Faro.

He soon learnt that Scarthbreck was to be no exception, as a very pretty housemaid presented herself at the door, was invited in and introduced by a somewhat hopeful and gleaming-eyed Mary Faro as ‘My dear little friend, Jenny. She comes from Kirkwall too.’

Somewhat dazed, he was trying not to listen to a glowing biography, a story full of virtuous good points. Groaning inwardly, he knew it was all happening again. He had hardly set foot on the island and Mary Faro was on the march again.

To find him a wife.

CHAPTER THREE

If Faro must desert his mother and return to Edinburgh, then it was her fondest dream that he should return with a wife of her choosing, a lass she liked and approved of, a lass she felt comfortable with who would never challenge a mother’s role in his life, to whom she could pass on all his likes and dislikes, as well as her own domestic and social skills.

Although the latter enjoyed in Orkney should be of little use in Edinburgh, she swept aside such considerations as unimportant. Her ideal as her son’s wife was a lass she could understand, who spoke the same language and would keep closely in touch with her mother-in-law, while keeping a stern eye on Jeremy.

Faro, knowing how her mind worked, hated the matchmaking circuit. It was all too much for him. He remembered again, with acute embarrassment, her previous matchmaking attempts, where tea was provided for by his mother, both parties knowing perfectly well what Mrs Faro was up to.

They were on show, on their best behaviour, careful in their speech, trying to remember not to lapse into broad Orkney with its Nordic vowels, wearing their best gowns and best smiles. And he was on show too.

Then into their midst – almost – stormed Inga St Ola. And she was not on Mary’s list. Her lips tightened in disapproval at the mention of her name, while she anxiously regarded Jeremy’s face for indication that he wished to renew this undesirable old acquaintance. In the passing years, still unmarried at past thirty, Inga St Ola, by scorning conventions, had gained quite a reputation within the annals of island respectability.

And respectability was Mary Faro’s yardstick; proud of her bloodline, she never forgot that the Scarths belonged to the Sinclair Stuart clan, the elite of the island, a family who claimed descent from wicked Robert, Earl of Orkney, bastard son of King James V and half-brother to Mary Queen of Scots. It made her cross that her son preferred to ignore any connection with the tyrannical rule of the earl, who had in his spare time repopulated Orkney through a small legion of illegitimate sons.

As for Inga St Ola, Faro’s imagination had painted a different picture of this once lovely girl changed beyond recognition by the hardships of island life, marriage and childbearing. He was in for a shock. A pleasant one for a change.

When, on the morning after his arrival, the Scarthbreck gig set him down with Mary to shop in Stromness, it had been raining and the woman calling his name from across the street wore a black shawl over her head.

He stopped and looked round politely.

A trilling and once familiar laugh. ‘Is it yourself, Jeremy Faro? Well now, don’t you know me anymore?’ she said, plucking off the shawl and shaking free the abundant tresses he remembered. Luxurious, shining dark hair. Head on one side, her smile provocative, a look he remembered and which often haunted his dreams. Her teeth were still excellent, her complexion radiant and Faro almost staggered back, overwhelmed by her nearness, this unexpected meeting.

‘Have I changed so much?’ she pouted, that expression, too, he remembered.

Recovering his manners, he took her hand, kissed it. ‘No, no, Inga,’ he said softly. ‘That’s the trouble, you haven’t changed at all.’

Again the trilling laugh. ‘No trouble at all, I assure you.’ And suddenly serious, looking him up and down with an intensity that stripped him naked, she said slowly, ‘But you have, Jeremy. And for the better. Why, you’ve grown up at last.’

That was too much. ‘What do you expect after ten years away in Edinburgh?’ He heard a note of pride in his voice, and wishing for the first time that he was in uniform to impress her, he added softly, ‘Of course I’m different to the lad you knew. In years, that is. But you – you’re still the same. How on earth, living here …?’ and he left the rest unsaid in a gesture to the grey streets.

It was her turn to be amused. ‘Luck, I suppose, although most of the folks here about, dead jealous, will blame it all on Baubie Finn.’

‘Baubie Finn?’

‘Aye, the island witch woman. You must have heard of her, works miracles; or should I say witchcraft? Nothing’s past her.’

Inga was teasing him as of yore but Jeremy had heard of Baubie Finn: old beyond time, there had always been a Baubie Finn, her name spoken in awe even by so-called God-fearing, respectable Orcadians who went to the kirk each Sunday and said their prayers each night.

Baubie Finn was dangerous. A seal woman, not to tangle with.

He shook his head, looked at Inga, longing to touch her. ‘You’re even lovelier than I remember.’

She liked that. Standing on tiptoe she kissed his cheek. ‘Dear Jeremy, you always knew the right words to say.’ And regarding him quizzically, ‘What are you doing here? Your ma isn’t ill, is she? At least the last time I saw her, she was flourishing as usual, larger than life.’ There was a certain grimness in that statement, a hint that Inga and Mary Faro didn’t see eye to eye, never did and never would.

Faro sighed. ‘She’s fine, I just decided it was time I visited my native heath.’

Inga continued to look up at him, and letting her believe that was his sole intention, he gave her a crooked smile. ‘And now, I’m glad I came.’

He wanted to know about her. Surely time hadn’t stayed still. Nothing stayed still in Inga St Ola’s life. He heard the urgency in his voice as he asked, ‘Are you married?’ Perhaps an affluent marriage to some local worthy was the answer to her unchanged appearance, although such a lady would never wear a black shawl and would dress in the height of fashion.

She laughed, throwing back her head and pirouetted, showing shapely, long, slim legs, and ankles she was proud of. ‘Do I look married, Jeremy, I ask you? Me, a fisherman’s wife? Could you ever believe that I would be any man’s chattel? Remember my free spirit? Well, it’s still untrammelled, still the same.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Faro saw a familiar figure, his mother bustling along the street, carrying a basket and heading relentlessly in their direction.

Inga saw her too. ‘I must away. Be seeing you, Jeremy. At the Kirkwall market, maybe,’ she added casually. And again on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek quite brazenly this time, obviously hoping his mother would see it.

And Mary Faro did. He knew that by her tight-lipped expression. ‘So you’ve met that woman again.’

‘An old friend, Ma, an old friend.’

Mary searched his face anxiously but in vain for what she most feared, some indication that his feelings for Inga St Ola had been renewed. She had been aware of his infatuation with this older woman before he left the island to join the Edinburgh City Police and could never decide which worried her most. Especially as, soon after his departure, she learnt through island gossip that Inga had also gone away to the mainland. No, she hadn’t said why – not a word to anyone. So Mary was haunted by the possibility that she might have followed Jeremy to Edinburgh.

Every letter filled her with anxiety – would there be some mention that she dreaded? ‘Inga is here’, or worse, that they were married? There was nothing to justify her fears, however, and when Inga returned a year later saying that she preferred life on the island after all, Mary drew a sigh of relief. This was reinforced when on his brief visits Jeremy had made no mention of that woman.