the old traditions. If Willy had still lived in his house it would have upset him to see the line of men crossing the hill on a Sunday morning. He’d been a regular at the kirk in Middleton. One of the congregation would collect him each Sunday. Willy would be ready and waiting at the door, dressed in a suit which was quite shiny with wear. Kenny wondered if they still took him to the kirk from the sheltered housing. He hoped they did.
So there would be fewer men available to help on the hill on Monday; they all had their own work to go to. But if they missed a few sheep, he could go back later in the week and fetch them in. Edith had arranged to take the day’s leave from the care centre so she would be there to help. He was grateful for that. He knew she’d been saving as much holiday as possible to go south when their grandchild arrived.
Martin Williamson came along. He’d opened the Herring House on Saturday, because it was always so busy and he’d heard nothing from Bella to the contrary. But when she’d found out she’d been furious and had insisted on closing the gallery and the restaurant for the rest of the week. He said he didn’t mind as long as she continued to pay him and he’d be glad to help with the sheep. Kenny was surprised by his flippancy. He’d thought Martin and Roddy had been friends of a kind. But perhaps that was just the way he was, always making light of things. And there was a group of retired men, all from Unst, who still worked a bit of croft land as a hobby. They turned out for events like this and stood now outside the house, identical in their caps and boiler suits, talking about the old times, their dogs panting at their feet. Kenny could tell the men were happy to be there. It was such fine weather and they were glad to be useful.
Although he knew exactly what he planned to do when he got on to the hill – he had almost as much experience as them – he asked their opinion, and nodded seriously when they told him the best line to take. Edith came out of the house to join them. She was wearing overalls and boots and had her hair tied away from her face. She’d caught the sun in the last few weeks of good weather and there was a pale mark where her hair usually hung. She carried the stick that his father had always used.
At the last minute Peter Wilding turned up. They’d just started up the track and he chased after them.
‘I heard from Martin what you were up to. I wondered if you could use an extra pair of hands.’
‘Of course,’ Kenny said. ‘The more the merrier.’ It was true that the more people there were to cover the hill, the easier it was to round up all the sheep. There was less chance for the odd beast to escape. But he couldn’t quite take to the man and he wished he wasn’t there. He thought the writer was like some sort of parasite. He only wanted to be on the hill so he could write about it later. It was the first thing to spoil the day for him.
The second was seeing Perez and a young couple on the lip of the Pit o’ Biddista. They weren’t in the way to scare the sheep – Kenny and the others would be walking the animals away from them – but Kenny found them a distraction. He’d hoped today to forget about the man hanging in the shed on the jetty and Roddy Sinclair’s twisted and broken body.
While the others lined up down the length of a gully to begin the walk, Kenny went up to talk to Perez. The young couple had climbing gear. He didn’t understand that. If they wanted to get to the bottom, why not just go down the grass slope? They were young and fit.
‘What are you doing?’
Perez turned very slowly to him. Kenny thought he was probably working out in his head how much to tell him. Instead he ignored the question.
‘You’re clipping today,’ he said. ‘If we get finished here in time I’ll come and help you.’
‘What’s going on here?’
He thought Perez would refuse to answer again. But he said, ‘I want a thorough search. Of the rockface and the tunnel at the bottom. There are some items that are still missing.’
‘How long will this go on?’ Kenny demanded. ‘When will we be left in peace?’
‘When I know what happened,’ Perez said. ‘When I know who killed two men.’
The young people had been ignoring the exchange and preparing for their climb. The woman was already at the edge of the cliff, leaning out, held by the nylon rope. Kenny turned away; if he had his back to them, perhaps he could pretend that none of this was happening.
He ran to catch up with the line of people walking slowly across the hill. The dogs chased between them, filling in the gaps. The men had their arms outstretched and whooped and called to move the sheep ahead of them. The ones at the end seemed a long way off, their voices lost in the thin air. Kenny stood beside Edith, who was waving the stick and yelling like the rest of them.
‘What’s going on up there?’ She had to shout to be heard above the noise of the men, the dogs and the sheep.
‘Some sort of search. I don’t know. I hate it. I hate all this happening so close to home.’
She seemed to be shouting back some words of comfort, but he couldn’t make them out because of the noise.
They had the sheep gathered up in a circle of drystone with a rough wooden gate held across the gap and let them out one at a time for clipping. The old men sat with an animal each, turned on its back, the front legs held firm, and hand-clipped with sure firm bites until the fleece was free. Then the poor bald beast was let loose to run away. The men’s hands were brown and soiled and calloused. Kenny looked at his own and saw that they were going much the same way. Edith’s hands were soft and he thought she’d have a few blisters by the end of the day, but she was just as accurate as the men, and as strong as most of them too. She had a fine deft way with the clippers and she could keep her sheep calm. But she wasn’t as quick as they were. Sometimes they looked over and teased her about how slow she was and she laughed back at them, not minding at all.
At midday she brought out flasks of tea and thick sandwiches made with cheese and a ham which she’d cooked herself. They ate, although their hands were still greasy with lanolin, just rubbing them on the cropped grass to get rid of the worst of the muck. Peter Wilding sat with them, but didn’t join in much. He tried to clip one but held it away from him as if he was scared of it. Edith took it from him and finished it in the end. Kenny thought he was just listening to all the conversation. It was as if he was making notes in his head. Later he lay back in the grass with his eyes shut. He probably wasn’t used to working in such a physical way.
Then the gate was opened and another animal released. When Edith had finished doing a dainty black ewe, she held the fleece up to show Kenny. ‘I might have a go at spinning this,’ she said, ‘knit something for the baby, a soft toy. What do you think?’ She was always thinking of what she could make for the children, things to remind them of home. In the shed at Skoles there was a skin she’d been preparing for the baby’s bedroom. She’d rubbed it with alum to preserve it; later she’d comb out the wool until it was soft. On the floor of their living room they had three rugs she’d made in the same way.
They finished late in the afternoon. From where they’d been working there had been no view of the Pit o’ Biddista and the climbers. Walking back to the house, Kenny expected Perez and the people to be gone. How long could it take? He hadn’t taken seriously Perez’s offer to help with the sheep. But when they rounded the curve in the land so they could see the cliff ahead of them Perez was still there, and there was a police Land-Rover, which had been driven as far as it could possibly go up the track. People standing in a huddle as if they were waiting for something to happen. Kenny recognized the English detective who had flown up from Inverness.
Again he decided to pretend that none of this was happening and continued on his way towards the house. The old men took his lead and though they shot glances at the group by the cliff and whispered among themselves they didn’t talk about it to him.
Wilding, though, was too curious just to walk past. He stared at the group of police officers and finally sauntered up to them, all arrogant as if he had as much right to be there as they did.
The rest of them were halfway down the track, too far away to hear the exchange, but they stopped to watch what was happening. In the end Kenny turned to watch too. He would look foolish, striding on down towards the house on his own.
The English detective moved away from the rest of the group and stopped the writer before he could get anywhere close to the edge of the hole. There was a brief conversation, then Wilding was sent away. With a flea in his ear, Kenny thought with some satisfaction.
‘Well?’ Martin asked. ‘What are they all doing up there? Is it the giant’s lassie they’re after?’
Wilding obviously hadn’t heard the story, because he just looked at Martin as if he were soft in the head. The old men chuckled.
‘They won’t tell me anything,’ Wilding said. ‘It’s a crime scene and everyone should keep out. That’s all the man would say. Actually, he was rather rude.’
Usually after a day on the hill Kenny slept suddenly and deeply, despite the light outside. But tonight he was
