was almost impossible. There was no privacy. Nothing went unnoticed. She’d set him on a course of action that he’d be unable to fulfil to her satisfaction. And he’d lacked the courage to tell her.
At the door he paused, remembering another detail.
‘A skull was found on Setter land a couple of weeks ago. Val Turner reported it to Sandy. He did tell you?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you think that’s relevant?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s old,’ he said. ‘Just a fragment of skull. Part of an archaeological dig. A coincidence.’
Chapter Fourteen
Sandy woke from a deep sleep. He heard the sheep outside and smelled baking and immediately realized that he wasn’t in the cramped and messy flat in Lerwick, but at home at Utra croft in Lindby. His mother baked most days, even when she and Joseph were alone in the house. Having Sandy there gave her an excuse. He lay for a moment looking around the familiar room. His mother had tidied it after he’d left, taken his posters off the walls, removed the dartboard, put up fresh wallpaper and different curtains. He’d remembered to get rid of the stash of pornography, hidden under the bed since he was a teenager, before he’d allowed her into the place, smiled despite himself at the memory of his smuggling the pile of magazines out of the house in a couple of Somerfield carrier bags. How pathetic was that! She always made him feel like a fourteen-year-old. Now the room was clean and anonymous and even the smell was different. Evelyn had decided that this was where the baby would sleep whenever Amelia and Michael came to stay from Edinburgh. It wasn’t his space any more. He looked at his bedside clock. Eight o’clock.
If he had a day off in Lerwick he’d be straight back to sleep, but in Whalsay it was different. His mother was here, with her expectations and her judgement and her baking. You’d think he was still a peerie boy the way he cared what she thought of him. He wondered if he’d ever escape her.
He stretched and stumbled towards the bathroom, but already his mother had heard him.
‘Sandy! The kettle’s just boiled. Will I make you some tea?’ She’d never got it into her head that he preferred coffee in the morning.
‘Not yet. I’m going in the shower.’ His voice was more aggressive than it needed to be. Their relationship was made up of these tiny stands for independence; he was certain she never noticed them and that made the exchanges even more frustrating. Standing under the new power shower, he wondered about his father’s relationship with Mima. Had he felt the same resentment when Mima called on him to kill her hens when they stopped laying? Sandy thought it hadn’t been the same at all. Joseph had loved Mima and delighted in her company. They had laughed at the same jokes. Sandy was sure Joseph told Mima things he’d never have confided to his wife. Sandy had spent his life finding ways of not talking to his mother about anything important.
In the kitchen he felt the same mix of irritation and affection. Evelyn was standing at the table rolling out pastry, the sleeves of her sweatshirt rolled to her elbows. She’d be making a fruit pie because she knew it was his favourite. She had so much energy. Maybe she felt trapped here on the island. Maybe she’d sacrificed all her own ambitions to be here, bringing up her two boys, keeping the family together while Joseph was working for Duncan Hunter. It couldn’t have been easy for her struggling over the finances, watching Jackie Clouston and the other fishing wives with so much money that they didn’t know how to spend it, knowing that if she’d been born into a different family, or married into one, she’d have been wealthy too. He knew there were times when she brooded about it.
‘There’s tea made,’ she said. Then with a frown, remembering, ‘Or would you prefer coffee? I can easily do that. The kettle’s not long boiled.’
‘Tea’s fine.’
He poured the tea and helped himself to a bowl of cereal, found a clear corner of the table.
‘Would you be able to phone that nice Inspector Perez today, sort out when we can fix a day for the funeral?’
‘Perez might come to Whalsay,’ he said. ‘It depends what the Fiscal said.’
‘You mean he could be here to arrest Ronald?’
Sandy shrugged. She didn’t have to sound so pleased at the prospect.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s gone over to Setter. That cow still needs milking and the hens and the cat need feeding.’
‘I’ll wander over. See if he needs a hand.’
He thought she was going to say something to stop him. Perhaps she wished the two of them got on as well as Sandy did with his father. But she stopped herself. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘The rain’s stopped and the mist has lifted. It’s a fine day for a walk.’
By the time he reached Setter, his father had finished with the animals. Sandy found him standing in the kitchen. He waited in the doorway and looked in. His father looked lost in thought and it seemed like an intrusion to blunder in, but he felt kind of foolish just waiting outside. At last Joseph saw him.
‘It’s hard to think of this place without her,’ the older man said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll come up behind me, full of mischief and gossip.’
‘How did she keep track of everything that was happening in the island?’ Sandy had wondered about this before. His grandmother knew about his friends’ escapades and love affairs before he did. No wonder Evelyn had talked about her as a witch. ‘She didn’t go out so much towards the end.’
‘She made it to the Lindby shop every couple of days,’ Joseph said. ‘People were always coming to visit her. Cedric called in every Thursday to chat, but it wasn’t only her own generation who liked her company. Besides, she could smell a scandal like other folk smell rotten eggs.’ He looked around the room, seemed to be scoring the details on to his memory. The postcard from Michael and Amelia’s last foreign holiday propped on the dresser, the religious sampler which perhaps she’d stitched as a child, that seemed out of place in any room where Mima had lived, the enormous television, the dirty glasses by the sink. The photograph of Joseph’s father that had been taken during the war, looking young in his Norwegian jersey. They both knew Evelyn wouldn’t rest until everything had been dusted and scrubbed and tidied away.
‘Do you still think of this house as your home?’ As soon as he’d spoken Sandy thought that was a daft sort of question. Joseph had lived in Utra since he’d married. Utra had been in Evelyn’s family and had been a tumbledown wreck when they’d moved in. Joseph had made a home almost from nothing.
But his father considered before speaking and then it wasn’t a direct answer. ‘It wasn’t easy growing up here,’ he said. ‘My father died while I was still a baby and Mima was never the sort of island wife to have a meal on the table when I got in from school and clean clothes for me to put on each morning. I learned to look after myself pretty quickly. But it was a happy time. She was full of stories. She said it was us against the world.’ He laughed. ‘She always did have a dramatic turn of phrase. I grew up with tales of my father, about how well off we’d have been if only he’d lived. “He promised me the earth. Fine clothes and a fine house.” She loved telling stories; it was a mix of real island characters, make-believe and myth. I could have listened to her for hours, though sometimes I’d have preferred to do it with a full belly.’
For the first time Sandy could see what had attracted his father to Evelyn. She’d make sure there was dinner ready for him when he got in from work and the house was always clean, the clothes washed and ironed.
‘Why do you think she went out that night?’
