Sacrifice

27

I LAY ON THE FLOOR, THE SIDE OF MY HEAD PRESSED AGAINST Dana's oak floorboards, my right hand empty.

The weight pressing me down moved. I jabbed my elbow back hard and heard someone grunt. Then that solid weight was on me again. My right arm had been captured and was being twisted behind me. I squirmed and bucked and kicked backwards with both feet. My first three blows made contact and then the weight shifted forward.

'Police! Keep still!'

Yeah, right! One of the hands holding my right arm was released, presumably to grab a hold of my left hand and get cuffs on me. But he wasn't strong enough to hold me with one arm.

I took a large breath – tricky because with that weight on my chest my lungs could barely function – and twisted round. The figure on top of me slipped sideways. I was on my feet. So was my opponent. We stared at each other. In the darkness I could make out a tall figure; short, blond hair; neat, regular features. I resisted the temptation to say 'Dr Livingstone, I presume,' because I now knew who I'd been scrapping with.

'Who the hell are you?' she said.

'Tora Hamilton,' I answered. 'A friend of Dana's. She gave me a key.'

It occurred to me that that might not have been the wisest response, but the woman seemed to relax.

'I work at the hospital,' I added. 'I've been helping Dana with one of her cases. The murder. The body was found in my field. I found her.'

I stopped gabbling.

The woman nodded her head. 'She told me.'

I was breathing normally again. My head was sore but had stopped spinning.

'I'm truly, truly sorry,' I said, hearing my voice crack.

Detective Chief Inspector Helen Rowley stared at me for a long time. I could hear the central-heating system creaking as it cooled down for the night. Outside a dog barked.

'Can you believe she killed herself?' she asked me, so softly I could barely make out the words. She wasn't really expecting an answer, but I'd spent the better part of eight hours waiting, longing, to be given the chance to say what I said next.

'Not for a fraction of a second have I believed she did that.'

Helen's eyes glinted in surprise, then narrowed as she caught up with me. 'What are you talking about?' she whispered.

'Have you seen the fridge?' I asked, the first thing that came into my head. 'You think Dana would stock a fridge hours before taking her own life?'

If anything, the stare intensified. She didn't believe me. And she was quickly becoming angry. But I was already there. Helen was supposed to know Dana better than anyone. Why was it up to me to convince her of the blindingly obvious?

'If Dana – the Dana I knew – had planned to kill herself she'd have emptied her fridge, put the contents in the bin, wheeled it down to the bottom of the drive and then cleaned the fridge with Dettol,' I said, with a bitterness I knew was unfair but couldn't help. 'Oh, and she'd have taken back her library books as well.'

Helen took a step back and fumbled against the wall. The room filled with light and I could see her properly. She wore a padded green jacket and baggy combat-style trousers. She was tall, almost my height, and her hair wasn't short, it was pulled back in a plait. She was attractive. Not pretty, exactly, but with a clean jaw-line and brown eyes. I realized with a jolt of surprise that she looked quite a lot like me. She looked round and then sank on to one of Dana's sofas.

I made myself keep quiet for a few seconds. I had so much to say, I didn't trust myself to get it all out coherently. When I thought I could speak without blithering, I continued:

'About four years ago, I spent some time working with suicides. Failed suicides, of course, tricky to talk to the ones who… well, they have various reasons, come from various circumstances, but they have one thing in common.'

Helen had curled herself forward, arms crossed in front of her body, hands gripping her upper arms. She spoke to the rug at her feet. 'What's that? Despair?'

'I guess. But the word I was going to use was emptiness. These people look into their future and they see nothing. They believe they have nothing to live for and so they don't.'

She looked at me. 'And that wasn't Dana?'

Forcing myself to speak slowly, I leaned closer. 'No way was it Dana. There was just too much going on in her life. She was determined to get to the bottom of this case… furious at the lack of cooperation she was getting. I've spoken to her several times over the last few days. She was fine – worried, angry, edgy – but definitely not empty. She wrote a note to me this morning. I'll show it to you; it's upstairs somewhere. It's not the note of a suicide. Dana was not a suicide.'

'They told me she'd been struggling to fit in, not relating to her colleagues, missing her old force… missing me.' Her voice was unsteady.

'Probably all true. But not nearly enough.'

'She phoned me yesterday evening. She was worried, she wanted my help, but you're right, she didn't sound empty'

We were still, for a while, and silent. I was wondering whether I should offer to make tea when she spoke again.

'This house is so like her. She could make homes beautiful. Her flat in Dundee was the same. You should see my place. Total mess.'

'Mine too,' I agreed, but inside I was getting edgy again. My relief at finding Helen was giving way to anxiety. Sooner or later I was going to be found. I would be taken down to the station – ostensibly to make a statement – and find myself stuck there for as long as they chose to keep me. I'd thought I needed Helen but I didn't need her grieving and helpless. I wanted her functioning.

'What the hell is that?' she said.

I followed her gaze along the floor. 'A humane killer,' I said. 'For putting horses down.'

For a second I thought she was going to laugh.

'Jesus,' she said. 'Is it legal?'

I shrugged. 'Used to be. Back in the 1950s.'

'Mind if I put it somewhere safe?'

'Be my guest.'

She stood up, retrieved the gun and put it on the top of a dresser. When she faced me again, the skin around her eyes was blotched pink but I could see she was a long way from breaking down.

'Did you kill her?' she asked.

I felt my mouth drop open but I was totally incapable of replying. Whatever she saw made her relax, even half smile.

'Sorry. Had to ask. So who did?'

'I'm not sure. But probably not one person acting alone. And it was almost certainly connected to the case she was investigating.

I think Dana was close to finding something out. Me too. I think someone tried to kill me, a couple of days ago.' I told her about the sailing accident, about my discovering the sawn-off mast. When I'd finished she was silent. Then she stood up and walked across the room. She stood in front of a picture I hadn't noticed before, a small pencil-drawing of a terrier surrounded by high-heeled, female legs. I had no idea whether she believed me or thought me a total fruitcake.

'I was going to contact you in the morning. To ask you to help me,' I said.

She turned round again and her face had hardened, just fractionally.

'Help you how?'

'Well, stay safe for one thing. But also to find out what's going on up here and who killed Dana.'

She shook her head. 'You need to let the police handle that.'

I jumped to my feet. 'No! That's just it. The police will not handle it. Dana knew that. That's why she didn't trust her colleagues, found it hard to work with them. There is something very, very wrong up here and somehow the police are involved.'

She lowered herself back on to the sofa. 'I'm listening,' she said. I sat down too. 'This is going to sound a bit weird,' I began.

Twenty minutes later I finished. A glance at the clock told me it was a quarter past midnight. Helen got up and left the room. I could hear her rustling about in the kitchen. After a minute or two she came back with two glasses of white wine.

'You were right,' she said. 'That did sound weird.'

I gave her a shrug and a goofy half-smile. Well, I had warned her.

'Trolls?' she said, giving me an are you serious? look.

I sipped my wine. It was good; crisp and clean, very cold. 'Well, no. Not real trolls. Obviously not real trolls. But some sort of cult that's based on an old island legend.'

'People who think they're trolls?'

She was wasting my time. I stood up.

'Sit down,' she barked. 'Dana didn't think you were an idiot and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.' She glanced up towards the dresser. 'In spite of some evidence to the contrary.'

I scowled, like a teenager who'd just been ticked off. Helen was looking through notes she'd made while I'd been talking and didn't see my expression. I sat back down again.

'OK, I need to put Shetland folklore on one side for a moment and concentrate on what we know,' she went on. 'You dug up a body in your field that has since been positively identified as that of Melissa Gair. She'd been dead about two years, and shortly before her death she'd had a baby.'

I nodded.

'Reasonably straightforward so far, if a bit gruesome. The complication comes because Melissa Gair is supposed to have died almost a year earlier. We have a woman who died twice. The earlier death was well documented and witnessed and, on paper at least, is hard to disprove. The second death has the edge, of course, because it has a body to back it up.' She stopped to take a sip of her wine.

'Bit of a tricky one,' I agreed.

'You're telling me. Now, because of certain markings on the body, and because of a ring found in your field, you started to think that more than one woman might have been murdered.'

I nodded again.

'So, you looked up mortality statistics on the islands.' She bent down and picked up the notes I'd made at the hospital. 'If your figures are correct…'

'They are,' I interrupted. She frowned at me.

'If they're right, they indicate – I admit – a definite pattern. Every three years, the death rate among young females does seem to increase. OK, now we move from fact on to theory. You theorize that a number of these women…'

'Around six every three years.'

'Right. A number of these women were abducted. Their deaths were faked – in a busy, modern hospital – and they were held some- where against their will for a whole year.' She looked down again. 'Your best guess is this island called Tronal. During that time they were… impregnated?' She grimaced. So did I.

'Or they could have been in the early stages of pregnancy when they were taken,' I said. 'Like Melissa was. There are just so many stories on these islands about young women, pregnant women and children being abducted, about human bones being discovered. God, this place has more mass graves than Bosnia.'

'Umm. And these crimes are being committed by grey-clad men who live in underground caverns, love music and silver and fear anything made of iron?'

I said nothing, just glared.

'OK,' she said at last, 'back to the missing women. You think while they were being held prisoner they had babies. Then they were killed. Their bodies were brought back to the mainland and buried in your field.'

Helen stopped.

'Yes,' I said. 'That's what I think happened.'

She said nothing.

'It's exactly like the legend,' I rushed on. 'The Kunal Trows steal human wives. Nine days after their sons are born – it's always a son because they're a race of males – the mothers die.'

'Tora…'

'Melissa Gair was killed between a week to ten days after giving birth.'

'Whoa, whoa… Is it remotely possible to fake death in a hospital? Really?'

'Not so long ago, I'd have said definitely not. Now, I think it could be.'

'How?'

'Quite a lot of people would have to be involved: several of the medical staff, maybe an administrator, definitely the pathologist. I'm not sure you could fool a trained medic, but a layman, especially a distressed relative… if there was a lot of fuss, plenty of distractions… and if the patient was very still, maybe heavily drugged into a coma-like state.'

Helen was whirling the wine round in her glass, staring at the patterns it made. She was giving nothing away but I sensed she was listening.

'And I think they use hypnosis,' I went on, thinking what the hell, in for a penny…

She stopped twirling. 'Hypnosis?' she said. Seeing the look on her face, only the fact that she hadn't already clapped me in handcuffs and phoned her colleagues gave me the courage to go on.

'Hypnosis isn't hokum,' I said quickly. 'It's been scientifically proven. Plenty of psychiatrists practise it. You can alter someone's perception by planting ideas in their head. I think it just possible that a grieving relative could be shown an apparently lifeless body and be led to believe that person was dead.'

Helen was silent. Then her head started to shake. She wasn't buying it.

'All the stories I've read emphasize the Trows' ability to hypnotize people.'

'They're just stories.' She looked incredulous. As well she might. But she hadn't been in my shoes for the last ten days.

'I don't think so any more. I'm sure my boss at the hospital can do it. There was an incident a short while ago with my horse. He put me in some sort of trance; made me do exactly what he told me. And I think he's done it a couple of times at work too. He puts his hands on my shoulders, looks me in the eye and talks to me. And my mood just changes. I feel calm and happy to do whatever he says.'

Helen's head was still now, but I couldn't tell whether she was convinced or not. And there are drugs that can do what you said – make someone look dead?'

'Absolutely. Just about any sedative, if you take enough of it, will drop the blood pressure so low that finding a peripheral pulse would be all but impossible. It's risky, of course; you could easily give the patient too much and end up killing them. But a skilled anaesthetist would probably manage it.'

I gave her time to think about it. And I thought about the skilled anaesthetist I knew.

'How much of this did you discuss with Dana?' she asked.

'I didn't get chance. But I left messages. I told her about the Trow legends. And I know she took me seriously because she has all the books upstairs. She didn't say anything to you when she called?'

Helen sighed and took another gulp of wine. It was arguable which of us was drinking fastest. We needed to slow down. I, especially, needed to slow down.

'No,' she said. 'She wanted to see me. I could tell she was worried. She didn't want to talk on the phone.' 'She learned too much,' I said, wondering if I'd ever be able to deal with that knowledge. Because of me, because of the messages I'd left her, Dana got too close to whatever was going on up here. She'd paid the ultimate price for my meddling.

As if sensing my thoughts, Helen put a hand on my shoulder. 'I'm not dismissing the stats you found, but I'm struggling with this Trow business. We still only have one body. Let's work with that, shall we?' She stood up. 'Come on, let's see what Dana has to say about all this.'

I looked up at her stupidly. What was she planning, a seance?

'Let's go and check her computer. I know her passwords.'

I shook my head. 'Her desk is empty. The police took it.'

'Oh, you think?' she said, and turned to go upstairs.