Cold Earth

Chapter Twenty

Jane woke the following morning to a clear, cold day. Even from her bed she could sense the change in the weather. There was no noise of wind and rain and the room was cold. She knew it was early. The council workers hadn’t started moving the remaining silt from the road above the house, so there was no background rumble of diggers and tractors. Kevin wasn’t in bed with her. She was a light sleeper, but she hadn’t heard him get up. He must have made a special effort not to wake her or he’d made his way out a long time ago, when she was sleeping most deeply. She had a moment of unease – that sense again that since the landslide everything had changed. It was winter and there was no reason for him to be up before it was light.

She got out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and looked out of the window. In the moonlight she saw there was a heavy frost. The ruins of the house at Tain had been turned from black to white, so the scene looked like a photographic negative. There was no sign of Kevin in the kitchen; his boots had gone from the rack in the porch, so he must be outside. She put on the kettle to make tea and thought the landslide hadn’t only changed things for her, but for her husband too. He’d put on a good show for the boys the day before. There’d been the same weekend rituals: beer and football and too much to eat. But she thought it had been an effort and he was sliding away from her, just as she was growing apart from him.

On impulse she left her tea where it was and went upstairs to get dressed. Michael was stirring, but it was a while yet before he needed to get the bus into school. She pulled on jeans and a heavy sweater, found her boots and coat in the porch and went outside. The cold was shocking. It stung her skin. The light from the kitchen window showed footprints in the frost crossing the grass towards the boundary with the Tain land. What attraction could the place have for Kevin and for Andy? What kept pulling them back there?

She’d been a regular visitor to Tain in Minnie Laurenson’s day. The old woman had been fierce and strong almost until the end, but not unfriendly. When Jane and Kevin had first moved into the farm, Minnie had invited Jane in. They’d had tea in a spotless kitchen. Flower-print plates and small crimped cups. Bannocks with orange Orkney cheese and home-made ginger cake. A dog by the hearth, and a cat on the arm of Minnie’s chair. ‘They’re all the company I need,’ Minnie had said. ‘You’ll be welcome to drop by any time you like, but don’t feel you have to. I’m not a woman to feel lonely.’ Then she’d given a dry chuckle. ‘I could have had a man, you know. I’ve had offers.’

And Jane had dropped in. Those had been her boozing days, but she’d always been sober when she called at Minnie’s house. Or almost sober. Minnie might have heard the rumours about Jane’s drinking, but she never mentioned it. The conversation had mostly been about the boys and the farm. ‘I see your man has bought up more land. That’s a lot for one man to handle. But he was always a good worker, your Kevin, even when he was a peerie lad.’

Minnie had died quite suddenly. If she’d been feeling ill, she hadn’t shown it. She’d driven herself into Ravenswick to the kirk on the Sunday morning and Magnus Tait had come to visit as usual in the evening. On the Monday, Jane had seen Minnie hanging washing on the line. It had started to rain in the afternoon, but Minnie hadn’t appeared to take in the clothes. Jane had gone down then, intending to bring in the washing herself, thinking that perhaps Minnie had taken an afternoon nap. She’d gone into Tain and seen Minnie, lying back in her usual chair by the fire in the gloom of a late afternoon in winter, the cat purring on her knee. But when Jane had unpegged the clothes and folded them in the laundry basket, Minnie still hadn’t stirred. When Jane came back into the house, the cat was by the cupboard where its food was kept and wrapped itself around her legs, almost tripping her up. Jane had gone up to Minnie then, to wake her, and had discovered that she was dead.

That had been horrible of course, but it had been a natural death. Talking to her friends, Jane had said that it was just the way she would want to go – in her own home and in her sleep. The murder of the mysterious woman who’d been staying at Tain had been quite different. She had been strangled and then her body had been ripped from the house by the tide of moving earth. Everything about that death had been violent and quite unnatural.

Jane had been in recovery before Minnie had died, and she was glad about that. She wouldn’t have wanted to be drunk at Minnie’s funeral, and by the end of her boozing days she’d almost always been drunk. Alcohol had made her wild and irresponsible and the memories of that time still haunted her; she talked about them occasionally at meetings. About the time she’d picked up a bloke in a Lerwick bar and found herself in the early hours in a strange bed, with a man whose name she couldn’t remember. About the time she’d almost fallen into the water after a night out in Scalloway. And on each occasion she’d got a taxi home to Kevin.

She’d been drunk on Andy’s first day at school, though nobody would have realized. She’d been hiding bottles by then, in places Kevin would never look: in her car, in the utility room behind boxes of washing powder. Had he noticed? Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to. Andy’s first day at the Ravenswick school, she’d woken up with a hangover and knew she shouldn’t drive, but had felt too rough to walk. Kevin had been away south, buying kit for the farm, so she’d piled both boys into the car. She’d been late already and had taken the track too fast, almost landing them in the ditch. Perhaps that had sent her along to her first AA meeting. The realization that she could have killed both of her sons because she’d been over the limit before nine in the morning. A sudden body-blow of guilt and shame.

She remembered that meeting: pushing open the door to the hall, where she still went each week. There’d been the same smell of propane gas and the shock of seeing some people she recognized. Respectable people from the town, also admitting that they were alcoholic. She’d broken down that first night, as she tried to explain what she was doing there, and there’d been more love and understanding in the room than she’d ever experienced before.

It was starting to get light. It wasn’t fully dawn yet, but the sky just above the horizon was silver and she could see a silhouette, a darker shadow against the lightening sky ahead of her. It must be Kevin, but he wasn’t looking out at Tain. He’d walked all the way to the coast and was standing at the edge of a low cliff, looking down at a rocky beach. Sometimes sheep got down there to forage on the seaweed and struggled to get back when the tide came in, because the paths were so steep. Perhaps that had happened and he planned to go down himself to shove a ewe in the right direction. It was a beach where seals hauled up to pup in the summer. Jane sometimes went there if the weather was very good, to sit in the sun and read.

She looked at her watch. Nearly eight o’clock. Michael would need to be out on the road to get the school bus in half an hour. Perhaps she should go back to the house and make sure he was up. Even though the boys were grown up, she always made them breakfast and checked they had clean clothes to put on. Reparation, maybe, for the time when she was rackety and unreliable, when nappies went unchanged and clothes unwashed. But Michael was a sensible boy and was old enough to get himself ready. She texted him: Out with Dad. You OK to get yourself to the bus? Immediately her phone pinged: Sure. See you tonight. He had no imagination. He wouldn’t be anxious that the kitchen was empty and there was no sign of either parent. He wouldn’t start making up scary stories in his head to explain their absence. She thought she should be more like him.

The sky was even lighter now and the silver light in the east was threaded with gold. It would be a beautiful day. She walked on until she’d nearly reached Kevin. He must have heard her boots on the frozen ground, because he turned round.

‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ She smiled at him.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you,’ Kevin said.

‘You must be frozen, standing there.’ She put her arm around his shoulder and pulled him in to her. She thought she should be more grateful. He’d stuck by her, when other men would have left.

‘We will be alright, won’t we?’

‘Of course we will.’ Because reassurance was the least she owed him. ‘Is something the matter, Kevin? Is there something you want to tell me? You’ve been kind of weird since they found that dead woman at Tain.’ Jane turned his face so that she could see it properly. His eyes were wet, but she couldn’t tell if he was crying or if it was just the cold. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him cry.

He hesitated. By now the beach below them was flooded with the low sunshine. The water slid onto the shingle, so calm that it was like oil.

‘Did you have something to do with her death?’

‘No,’ he cried. ‘Nothing like that. Of course not.’

The strange orange light made his face quite unfamiliar and she couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not. She was about to press him, to demand to know why he’d been brooding in the dark here, when her attention was caught by something washed up on the rocks below them. She thought it must have been thrown up by the storm of previous days. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was as if he was too wrapped up in his own troubles even to bother looking. ‘An old oilskin, maybe. Something thrown overboard from a ship.’

‘No.’ She was already scrambling down one of the sheep tracks that led across the slope of the cliff. It was still greasy with ice in places and she scattered pebbles as she climbed. She heard Kevin on the path above her. He’d taken a different route from her and they landed on the beach at about the same time.

It was the shoes that had persuaded Jane that this was a man, not a pile of disused clothes thrown from a boat. They were wet now, either with rain or with sea water, but she thought they would have been highly polished once. The man was wearing a suit and a white shirt, but no tie. On top of the suit a yellow oilskin that looked unnaturally bright in the low sunlight. He lay awkwardly; his head in a shallow rock pool was lower than his body, and fronds of seaweed covered his matted hair.

‘You do know who this is?’ Kevin sounded oddly excited

She had been thinking it couldn’t be a coincidence that Kevin was staring down at a beach where a man was lying dead. And that Jimmy Perez would come prying into their family affairs. Now the question distracted her for a moment, because of course she knew who this was. It was Councillor Tom Rogerson, the lawyer, and the man who’d been seen in Commercial Street arguing with her son.