'Friend of Catherine's?'
'I don't know. Maybe:
'Any idea where he comes from?'
'Somewhere in the south. Quendale? Scatness?
The family haven't been in Shetland long:
'You said you'd seen Catherine around. Where had you seen her?'
'Parties. Bars in town. You know how it is:
'She was the sort of girl you'd notice then. The sort of girl you'd pick out in a crowd:
'Oh yes,' Robert said. 'You'd notice her. She didn't say much. She was always watching, weighing you up.
But you couldn't help noticing her! He picked up his glass, took a drink.
Suddenly he seemed more relaxed.
'How did she die?' he asked. 'Hypothermia, was that it? Too much to drink and passing out in the cold?'
'Did she drink a lot?'
Robert shrugged. 'They all drink too much, don't they, those young girls? What else is there for them to do in the winter?'
'It wasn't hypothermia: Perez said. 'It was murder!
Chapter Twelve
Magnus had thought the police would come back for him. He sat all evening waiting stiff and upright in his chair. Five times cars went past but none of them stopped. The blue and white tape still fluttered across the gap in the wall. The headlights caught it as they dipped down the hill. And Catherine was still there, lying under a tarpaulin. He hated to think of it. What would her body be like now? At least the ground would be frozen, he thought. There would be no decay. No animals or insects to tear into the flesh. Last time it had been summer. He knew how quickly a dead lamb began to rot when the sun was on it. The earth soon warmed.
The next car did stop. He waited for the knock on his door, but the men stood by the side of the road, their hands in their pockets, chatting, waiting for something to happen. Then there was a Transit van. It pulled right on to the grass to let other cars past. They manhandled a small generator out of the back and lifted it on to a trolley to pull it across the field. There were cables and two big lights on stands. They all disappeared over the hill and out of Magnus's line of vision. He could imagine what Catherine would look like, pale and frozen under those powerful white lights.
He looked at his mother's clock. Eight o'clock. The plane from Aberdeen would have landed by now. The team from Inverness would be driving north from Sumburgh. They had sent a special team last time, but they'd achieved no more than the local men.
There flashed into his mind the image of a little girl's face, clear as a photograph.
He stood up, suddenly restless, and looked out of the window. The police were out of sight. He presumed they were nearer to the body. A patch of cloud shifted and he saw there was a full moon. His mother always said a full moon made him dafter than usual.
Its light formed a path on the still water. He realized he' hadn't eaten all day and wondered if that was what was making him feel confused. It would be that or the moon. In his mind he saw Catriona dancing on the road outside his house. It was a strange sort of jig with her hands held above her head, her arms curved like a ballet dancer's. He imagined that she tilted her head in his direction and gestured for him to follow her.
He knew that it must be his imagination. Even if she'd lived, Catriona would be a young woman now, older than Catherine. But he couldn't stay in the house. It was the moonlight on the water and waiting all day for the police to come back. It was listening to his mother saying '
He put on his boots, fumbling with the laces in his rush to be out. He had a woollen hat which his mother had knitted, and the big jacket she'd bought for him in Lerwick just before she'd died. It was as if she'd known she'd die soon, and she didn't trust him to buy his own clothes. She'd brought back a pile of underpants and socks from the same trip and he sometimes still wore those too.
Out of the house he climbed away from the track until he reached the Lerwick road. In the house by the chapel there was no light. There was a gap at the bed room window where the drawn curtains didn't quite meet, but he could see nothing through it, only a ghostly reflection of his face in the glass. Reluctantly he turned away and started off again on to the hill.
In the shadow of a dyke he stopped and looked back. The police hadn't seen him leave Hillhead. In the moonlight he saw them surprisingly clearly in the field where Catherine lay. The scene spread out below him and he could recognize individuals by the way they stood and the way they moved. They were blinded by the fierce white lights and their concentration on the small body covered by the tarpaulin shroud.
When they turned away from the crime scene it was to look out for headlights from the south. Soon the team would arrive from Sumburgh.
Magnus continued his climb. He walked slowly. He knew he had to pace himself. He'd had a winter of laziness since he'd last been up here. He felt the strain in his knee and a wheezing in his chest. The sunshine during the day had melted the snow in patches, so he could see the peat and the dead heather through it. He reached the top of the bank and ahead of him there was nothing but bare hillside.
They'd told him at school that once, Shetland had been covered with trees. He couldn't picture it. Now the only trees were in folks' gardens. He thought this must be what the moon must look like, if you were standing on it, not looking at it from the earth. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and looked behind him again.
The figures in the field looked less important from here. Beyond them he saw the silver ice on the voe and the houses of Ravenswick. If he had any sense he'd go back to his bed, but something kept him moving. Was this how Catriona had felt when she couldn't stop dancing?
He hadn't been sure he'd know the place, but now, approaching it even in this strange light, it was familiar.
He'd spent much of his youth up here, working with his uncle, his father's elder brother, who had run the croft.
Magnus had helped count the hill sheep, collect them into the cru for clipping and bring them down the hill ready for slaughter. And in the early summer, this was where they'd come to cast peats.
Hard work that had been, peeling back the turf from the bank and cutting into the dense dark earth. The digging had been back-breaking work and even worse was wheeling the peats down to the road in a barrow. Now, if they dug peat, and not so many did, they used a tractor and trailer. His uncle had been proud of him. He'd said Magnus was stronger and a better worker than his own sons. In those days Magnus had had a father and a mother, an uncle and cousins. Then, he'd had a sister. Now he had nobody.
He came to a small loch, where his cousins had come in the winter to shoot geese. You'd hear the birds flying in from the north, calling, a long line of them following each other so closely you could believe they were attached, like the ribbons on a kite tail, and the cousins would be out then with their guns.
Magnus had never been allowed a gun, but afterwards his mother would cook the goose and they'd all come together to eat it. Out on the freezing hillside, he had a picture of them gathered round the table in the Hillhead kitchen and it was so real he could smell the goose fat and feel the heat from the range on his face. Magnus wondered if he had an illness. All these day dreams reminded him of the scenes which play through your mind in a fever.
At the edge of the loch he stood for a moment to get his bearings. The ice was thick. In some places it was clear so he could see the grey water underneath. In others it was white and lumpy and looked a bit like the sweeties his mother had made with dried coconut, sugar and condensed milk. He wondered why it had happened like that, why the water hadn't frozen evenly. The thought distracted him for a moment and he worried away at the
