Raven Black

Chapter Twenty-Six

Fran had acquired a dog. One of the mothers at school had turned up with it the evening before. She'd been tentative. 'We don't want to intrude but we thought she might be a comfort. There's no harm to her, but she makes an awful lot of noise when she's disturbed.

We thought, being on your own, and so close to where the body was..!

Fran had invited the woman in, offered her wine which she refused and tea which she accepted. Fran had intended this as a polite introduction to refusing the gift. In London she'd always hated dogs. They crapped on the pavements and whined. The woman talked about their respective children, about the school. 'Oh, she's a great teacher, Margaret Henry. She stands no nonsense!

Fran didn't offer her own opinion. Neither did she discuss the murder. But when the woman stood up to go, the dog stayed. Fran had the sudden superstitious feeling that if she rejected the offer she would be setting herself up for something dreadful to happen. An attack on the house, on her and Cassie. She imagined the parents talking about it afterwards in the playground. It was her pride, you see.

We offered her the dog to look after her and she turned it down.

So Fran had a dog called Maggie. A mongrel with a lot of collie in her. Black and white. Cassie was delighted – she had pestered often for a pet – and spent the evening tormenting the animal, who accepted the treatment with such equanimity that Fran thought it unlikely she would be much good as a guard dog.

Now it was Sunday afternoon and Cassie was at a school friend's birthday party. She'd dressed in her favourite dress, all pink frills and glitter, working herself almost into tears when her hair wouldn't stay up as she'd wanted it. What will the others think of me, looking like this? Other people's mothers have straighteners and curling tongs. By implication Fran was a terrible parent.

Fran tried to understand the tantrums. It would be Cassie's first proper sleepover. A rite of passage. She'd been given a lift to the party and Fran had stood at the door waving her off, but Cassie didn't notice. She was already giggling and gossiping with the other girls in the car. Maggie was lying asleep in front of the range.

Fran began work again on a pen and ink drawing she'd started earlier in the week. It was inspired by Raven Head, the patterns on the rock face, the shingle beach below. She'd begun with a clear vision of how she hoped the design would work, but now she found it impossible to concentrate. There was a prickly restlessness which felt like caffeine overload. She'd caught Cassie's frenetic mood. In a moment of frustration she screwed the paper into a ball and threw it on to the fire.

She felt she'd been trapped in this one room for days. If I was in London, she thought, I'd call someone.

We'd meet in a bar for a late lunch, a couple of glasses of wine. There'd be people around, noise, gossip. If I’d found a body there, I'd talk it out of my system. The image wouldn't sit in the back of my mind, contaminating every thought. It wouldn't float in front of my eyes when I was trying to draw.

She pulled on a pair of wellingtons and a coat and opened the door. The dog followed. An astonishing change in temperature had occurred outside overnight. It was as if Ravenswick had become a different place, softer, less hostile. The police were still on the road down by Hillhead, but there weren't so many of them on the hill now.

From this distance the men looked like children's stick drawings, like the drawing Cassie had made in the sand on the beach at the Haa.

She could see Euan's house too. His car still stood outside. She thought on impulse she should visit. If she was feeling stifled, how much more difficult must it be for him? She walked down the hill with the dog yap ping at her ankles. When she knocked at the door, Euan opened it immediately and glared out at her. She took a step back in surprise.

'I'm sorry' he said. 'I thought you were a reporter. The police stop them at the top of the bank, but one or two have got through. It's not the locals. The nationals must have got wind of the case now too!

'I wasn't sure if you'd want a visitor. I'm quite happy to go if you like..!

'No. I should be looking through Catherine's things. The police have asked to see her video recorder. But I'm not sure I can face it yet. Let's have some tea, shall we?'

.

She left the dog in the garden and followed him.

When he took her into the space-age kitchen, she saw what an effort it was for him to hold it all together.

His hand shook as he held the kettle under the tap.

'I want to know about the other girl: he said, his back still towards her.

'What other girl?'

'Catriona Bruce. The other girl who lived here. The other girl who disappeared!

He turned and lifted two mugs from a shelf. 'At first it didn't matter who'd killed Catherine. Not really. It was being without her. Her absence. Very selfish, I'm sure, but that was all that mattered. Then you told me about the other girl and I realize it makes things different!

'How?'

'If Catherine's death is part of a pattern, it could have been avoided. You do see what I mean?'

Fran wasn't sure she understood at all, but she nodded slowly.

'So I have to know what happened to the girl eight years ago. It's a way of making sense of things. A way of understanding why Catherine died!

'Catriona's body was never found!

'I know that: The electric kettle had boiled but he ignored it. His tone was impatient and the anger had returned. 'Of course, I know that: He walked past Fran. 'Come here: he said. 'Come here! He seemed about to grab her arm, but stopped himself. He led her through into a small utility room, with a sink, washing machine and drier. It was a dark little room which had escaped the improvements in the rest of the house. It smelled damp. 'This must have been the old kitchen: he said. 'And this must have been the larder!

He opened a cupboard door. 'Look.' His voice had risen to a shrill squeal. 'Look.'

The inside of the larder door hadn't been painted for years. He pushed it wide open so she could see the marks in felt-tip pen drawn inside showing the height of the children who'd lived there. By each mark there was an initial and the date. He pointed to the lower mark. 'B: he said. 'That's for Brian, her younger brother. I asked the detective. He told me his name. This is Catriona.' The mark was pink. 'This is how tall she was a month before she died.'

'She was small for her age,' Fran was moved despite herself. Cassie would only be a couple of centimetres shorter.

Euan seemed to have forgotten that he'd offered her tea. He wandered back to the kitchen and sat on a stool with his head in his hands. She stood for a moment, helplessly, but realized there was nothing she could do for him. When she said she should go, he seemed not to notice.

Fran set off up the bank. She needed to walk away from the vision of the educated man crumbling in front of her, looking for an explanation in patterns and old pen marks on a wall, becoming obsessed with another child.

Was it guilt which drove him? The guilt of knowing he'd not been much of a father? The dog danced beside her then ran on. She came to an area of flat ground before the land started to rise steeply. Everything here was soggy, the ditches full of melted snow, the peat soaked and spongy. There was a pale sunshine which reflected from the standing water, the pools and puddles which had appeared overnight.

They ran together into one wide, shallow lake. She splashed through it, thinking, Cassie would love this.

I don't think I can handle this on my own, she thought. It wasn't just the big things, like Catherine and her father.

There was other stuff she'd have liked to discuss with friends. Men, for instance. She missed having a man in her life, would have liked to have admitted that, joking, weighing up the possibilities. Here, it was impossible to talk about it. People wouldn't understand.

She missed even the trivial conversations about clothes, diet, holidays, the stuff she'd despised when it was a part of her life. She'd always thought of herself as an independent woman. Strong. Now, for the first time since moving back to Shetland she longed for the company of her women friends.

Here, she'd always be an outsider. Always. Cassie might grow up with a Shetland accent, marry a local man, but people would never forget that her mother was English. It would have been different if Fran had stayed married to Duncan. There would have been acceptance of a kind then. Now she couldn't see how it would work out.

Of course there were other incomers, expat English. Hundreds of them, like Euan and her, trying to forge a life for themselves in the islands. Some of them tried so hard to be local that they made themselves ludicrous, with their spinning lessons, their music and attempts at dialect.

She saw them gathered in the cafes and restaurants in town, in their elaborate Fair Isle cardigans and handspun woollen sweaters. She met them at the film club and the book festival. Other incomers preferred to keep themselves apart. For them Shetland was a temporary exile and soon they'd return to civilization with tales of the cold and the isolation. Both groups mixed mostly with their own kind. She couldn't see herself fitting in with either of them. So, is this how it'll end? she thought. I'll become pathetic, lonely and middle-aged, living only through my art.

But already the exercise was lifting her mood. There was a childish pleasure in kicking out at the water as she walked through it. The last thought was self-mocking. And what was wrong, after all, with living through her art?

She began climbing the hill, following a drystone wall. She'd never been this far before. Usually on walks she had Cassie with her and the girl couldn't walk at this pace. She grizzled and whinged to return as soon as they were out of the house. Here, high on the moor, the effect of the rain and the melted snow was more dramatic. It ran in waterfalls down gullies in the rock and through the peat, picking up the soil and shale, scouring out a path down the hillside. It would take only one heavy rainstorm to cause more severe landslides.

She'd heard Alex Henry talk about it on the radio. Part of the problem was overgrazing, he'd said. There were just too many sheep, loosening the root structure of the grass, pulling away the fabric of the land. It was a good thing the system of subsidies would change and there'd no longer be a payment for every animal. She'd thought it had been a brave thing to say. It wouldn't make him friends among the farmers. He was a local and perhaps he was more isolated than she was. She'd heard the parents muttering about him in the school playground and wondered if he had any real friends at all.

The dog had run on, unaffected by the gradient. Now she stopped and was barking. Fran called to her, but she refused to return. Fran followed her across the hill, sliding occasionally where the ground was bare and muddy.

Maggie was at the top of a steep peat bank. The rain seemed to have loosened a pile of rocks and boulders exposing the black peat below. The dog was scrabbling into the debris. Fran called her again. She turned, but still she didn't move. The sun came out from behind thin cloud and shone more brightly than it had all day. It was low against the hill now and the light seemed unnatural, sulphurous. The dog and the boulders and the hillside seemed hard-edged, drawn by a heavy hand.

Breathing heavily, Fran reached the dog. She began swearing at her and told her she'd never wanted her in the first place. Then she stopped and caught hold of her collar and pulled her away. There was something under the pile of rock. A shoe. The leather was discoloured and the buckle was tarnished. It was a child's shoe. The dog was going crazy, barking and jumping, and Fran thought she would strangle herself. She was still trying to keep hold of the collar. There were a few tatters of clothing. Yellow cotton. And then the waxy outline of a small foot, pale against the black, fibrous peat.