bag. Why don't we look at those?'
He stood up and she thought he was going to walk out and leave her there alone. She'd heard the patronizing tone in her own voice and wouldn't have blamed him. Instead, he went to the sink, ran the tap, cupped cold water in his hands and threw it on to his face. Still wiping his hands on a towel, he returned to the table. 'You're right,' he said. 'Of course, you're right! He was quite calm. The outburst had shocked her, but now it was hard to believe it had happened. 'Let's look in the files!
There were three of them. One was labelled history, one psychology and one English. Fran let Euan make the choice. He flicked through the first two and discarded them quickly. They were recent lesson notes, handwritten.
The English file was very thin. She was worried that it would be empty. Then she saw on the outside of the cardboard a series of the
It was A3 size, folded into two so it fitted in the file. He spread it out and stood beside her, so they could look at it together.
At first Fran could make nothing of it. She thought this must just have been a first attempt to capture random thoughts and ideas on paper. The sheet was divided up into small boxes. Each rectangle had a series of sketches in black ink. There were scribbled words. It seemed unlike Catherine's usual, organized way of working. The writing was cramped and almost unintelligible.
'What do you think?' Euan said. Then, becoming more desperate. 'This is all there is. This is all we have to work on!
'It could be a storyboard,' she said. 'Each scene drawn out visually. Not exactly that, because sometimes she uses words instead, but a plan for how she'd like the film to turn out!
'A master plan. So she'd know what scenes she needed to shoot!
'Perhaps!
She focused on one square at a time, blocking out the others around it with her hands and a blank sheet of paper torn from the back of the pad. 'How does it start? This is a sketch of the ravens. Really they're very good. So the film would start here, at home. At least I guess that's it! She moved on to the next one. 'Does this mean anything to you?'
'It says 'house room'. That's what they call the sixth-form common room at school. A scene there, I Suppose!
'And this?'
He shook his head. 'A couple of stick figures which could have been drawn by a child. It obviously meant something to her. A sort of shorthand perhaps. It doesn't say anything to me. But this plan gives us something to go on. It should be possible to work out what she intended.'
Fran thought it unlikely they'd ever be certain what Catherine had in mind, but didn't say so. She was pleased that Euan's mood seemed to have lifted. She moved slowly on. In one square they made out representations of sheep, in another seals. Perhaps those images were to provide a background for her voiceover. She couldn't see how they fitted with her themes of ice and fire.
There were initials scattered throughout the grid. Most meant nothing to her. Then she came across
'But Inspector Perez asked me about him. He asked if I knew him. He'd seen his van out here one night. But that was after Catherine died so I suppose it's hardly relevant.'
Unless he'd come here to steal the film and the script, Fran thought. That could have happened after the murder.
Euan didn't start looking for the film until several days after that. But she kept her thoughts to herself. She didn't want to explain how she knew Robert. What would she say? He's the grown-up son of my husband's middle- aged lover? In the same box as the initials something else had been scribbled.
'What do you think this is?' In the storyboard, Catherine's writing was much less clear. It was as if she'd wanted to get down her ideas very quickly, before she lost track of them.
Euan turned the page so he could see it more clearly. 'A date. January 3rd. It looks as if it's been added. Isn't it in different ink?' He straightened, stretched. 'We must be missing something. I can't see anything here which would lead someone to murder her.'
'Perhaps there is nothing.' It sounded brutal, but she didn't know how else to say it. 'Perhaps Magnus Tait was responsible all the time. Perhaps the film and the script aren't in the house, because she'd finished it. She took it into school at the end of last term and left it there. Perhaps we should have checked before putting you through all this.'
'No,' he said 'I can't accept that. If the film was edited and complete in the middle of December why the date, the third of January? Why the reference to Up Helly Aa in the notebook? That doesn't happen until the middle of January.' He picked up the receipt with its own message. 'Why the interest in Catriona Bruce?'
'This isn't for us to decide.' Fran thought he would go quite mad if he kept on with it, imagined him sitting up for another night, reading conspiracies and hidden messages into words which had been thrown down almost carelessly. 'You have to show this to Jimmy Perez. He'll know what to do with it.'
His reaction shocked her again. He stood up so suddenly that his chair tipped behind him. 'No: he said. 'This is my business. It has nothing to do with the police.' Then he must have realized that he'd frightened her. He picked up the chair, sat down and became again the courteous and controlled teacher. 'I'm sorry. Of course you're right. But I'll have to take a copy before I give it to them. It seems so intimate, this writing. I can't bear the thought of people going through it. It's another sort of violation!
Chapter Thirty -Seven
Magnus sat in the police cell. There would be one more court appearance before he was transferred to the prison on the Scottish mainland, though he hadn't quite grasped that. He knew sometime he would be moved and every time an officer approached, the keys rattling on his belt, boots firm on the tiled floor, Magnus thought the time had come for him to leave Shetland. Sometimes he thought the future was like an enormous black wave waiting to drown him. But it was worse than that. A wave he could understand.
He couldn't swim so he would never survive, but he could understand it. This was unknowable, blank. He was so terrified about moving that when the door opened for his food to arrive, or for his lawyer to visit, he began to shake. No one could get any sense out of him and they'd given up talking to him.
Outside it was raining. He could hear the rain on the window, but it was too high for him to see outside. In his head, it was summer, and he was cutting hay, using a scythe in the old way, because they had so little land that it wasn't worth the fuss of asking a neighbour with a machine for help. He stopped to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. There was a stiff westerly, blowing the waves beyond Raven's Head into white peaks, but the effort of bending and cutting had made him hot. He could see a small child dancing up the hill.
She was carrying flowers tied with a ribbon, which streamed out behind her. He leaned the scythe carefully against the wall. He'd been working since breakfast. He'd thought he'd get the field done before he stopped, but now he decided he'd take a short break, have a cup of tea and one of those griddle scones his mother had baked the day before.
Outside in the passage there were shouts. He couldn't make out the words – he'd been lost in his daydream. Two constables calling to each other. He held his breath, grew dizzy with panic, but it must just have been a bit of fun.
There was a sudden burst of laughter and he heard them move away into the office. He began to breathe again.
He'd talked to Catherine about Catriona, that last time she'd come to visit, the day he'd gone to Safeway's and he'd seen her on the bus. He hadn't meant to. He'd just asked her in for tea. She'd wanted tea. Not a dram, it had been too early for that, she'd said. But she was dying for a cup of tea.
