Ann Cleeves - Red Bones

Curiosity led him to form a question about her family in his head. Your parents must be very proud of you. Will they get a chance to visit the islands?

Then he heard Fran’s voice, had a very clear picture of her tipping her head to one side, a half-smile, her nose slightly wrinkled as it was when she meant to tease. What business is it of yours, Jimmy Perez? You’re a policeman, not a psychotherapist. Let the poor child alone.

So he said nothing. There was a moment of awkward silence at the table. Sophie picked up a piece of creamy fat which remained on her plate and bit into it with sharp white teeth. She looked around her.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘which of you lovely men would like to buy me another glass of wine? I thought this was supposed to be a party.’

Outside the Pier House, Hattie and Sophie stood briefly before separating. Hattie had only drunk two halves but felt disengaged and a little woozy. She wasn’t used to eating a big meal at lunchtime.

‘The boys have promised me a look round one of the big ships,’ Sophie said. ‘I’d like to see what it’s like inside and they might not ask again. Don’t suppose you want to come?’

‘Who’s going to be there?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual Artemis crew.’

Hattie shook her head. The way she was feeling a boat would make her sick, even if it were moored at the harbour. Anyway, she never knew what to say to most of the fishermen with their unintelligible voices and their stories of adventures at sea. Besides, she had other plans.

‘They said I could go out with them sometime,’ Sophie said, looking out towards the Shetland mainland. ‘There’s a spare cabin I could use. It’s got a DVD, everything. Do you think they’d take me for a spin today? The sea’s flat calm.’

She turned back to Hattie, a challenge as well as a question in her look.

‘You should be careful,’ Hattie said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’

Sophie laughed, her head thrown back, so Hattie could see her long neck, stretched even further, much paler than her face.

‘Do you think I care about that? It’s not as if I want to make my life here.’

‘Shouldn’t you be here when Paul gets in?’ Hattie was thrown by the thought that she might have to deal with Paul on her own. She felt a return of the old panic.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t really want to go.’ Sophie grinned, so Hattie realized the woman had just been winding her up. ‘But don’t expect me back until the morning!’

She grinned again and loped away quite steadily, though she’d had twice as much to drink as Hattie. There was a rip in her jeans and the flesh of her thigh showed through. It reminded Hattie of the fat on the steak Sophie had just eaten. Hattie watched her walking away down towards the harbour. There were times when she hated Sophie for her beauty, her easy way with men, her thoughtlessness. There were times when Hattie wanted to lash out and slap her.

It seemed to Hattie that the walk down the island had a hallucinatory quality. Phrases and ideas came into her mind with no logic or reason.

April is the cruellest month.

Living in the south of England, that had never made sense to her in a literal way. Spring was a time of gentle rain and imperceptible growth. Now she thought of the last ewes lambing untended on the hill with the ravens circling above, Mima lying on the sodden ground at Setter. She repeated the phrase under her breath to the beat of her footsteps.

She wasn’t used to drinking in the middle of the day. Perhaps that was it. She hadn’t slept the previous night, consumed by a recurring paranoia that the shot that had killed Mima might really have been meant for her. The implication of that was so shocking that now she couldn’t bring herself to consider it in any detail and she allowed her thoughts to float away from her.

Instead she tried to relive the moment of finding the silver coins in the Setter dig, from glimpsing the first glint of metal. The scene was so close to what she’d dreamed of that she found it hard to believe in the reality of it. Still walking, keeping the rhythm of her feet on the road and the words of T. S. Eliot at the back of her mind, she took her hands out of her pockets and looked at them. Under the fingernails she saw the soil in which the coins had been buried. In that one moment, the instant of rubbing the earth from the dull silver, she’d justified the project, established a future for herself in the islands. Unreal , she thought. It’s unreal .

She decided to walk on to Utra. She’d ask Evelyn to open the drawer of her desk and show her the coins. There was a British Museum website with images of coins and she wanted to check it out, see if there was anything similar to her find. Evelyn had a computer with internet access. Hattie thought if she didn’t do something constructive, in her present state she’d go crazy, maybe even manage to convince herself that the find was a dream; in the past after all she’d muddled fantasy and reality. She wished Mima were still alive; she’d always helped Hattie get things in proportion.

As she walked down the track that led to Utra, she passed an elderly couple. The old man was pushing a wheelbarrow with a hoe and a fork balanced on the top. The woman carried a plastic carrier bag containing something so heavy that one shoulder was lower than the other. Hattie didn’t recognize them. They stopped; the man smiled and said a few words of greeting. He only had one tooth and Hattie couldn’t understand a word he said.

‘Good-afternoon!’ She grinned, lifted her hand. ‘Good-afternoon!’

The old woman said nothing. Further along the track, Hattie swivelled back to look at them, but they’d disappeared. She told herself that they’d turned off. Perhaps they were working in one of the planticrubs, the old woman with her grey skirt and her wellingtons, the old man with his gummy smile. But she wasn’t entirely sure that they existed at all. Perhaps they were ghosts, like the merchant’s wife at Setter and her powerful husband, conjured up by her own imagination.

Evelyn was real enough. She was standing at the kitchen table cutting meat. The knife was small with a sharp, serrated blade. There was a pile of fat and bone pushed to one side of the wooden chopping board. It made Hattie feel ill.

‘I thought I’d do a casserole,’ Evelyn said. ‘There was some of last year’s mutton left in the freezer. It needs using. Sandy’s taken some leave from work to help with the arrangements for the funeral. I never know what time he’ll be in to eat.’

‘Can I do anything towards the meal? We’re not working this afternoon.’ Hattie hoped the activity might stop the whirling thoughts.

‘You can peel the carrots if you like. I won’t ask you to do the onions. They’re big strong ones and they’ll have you crying like a baby.’

‘I don’t mind.’ Hattie thought you couldn’t make up tears, the stinging of the eyes, the taste of salt in the mouth as they ran down your face. But she sat at the table next to Evelyn and began to peel the carrots, aware of how slow and clumsy she was. She knew the older woman was watching.

‘Would you and Sophie like to come for dinner?’ Evelyn looked up from the growing pile of meat. ‘There’s plenty, and you can’t just go back to the Bod on a night like this.’

‘I don’t know…’ Hattie set down her knife.

‘Of course we must celebrate! It’s a dream come true. I wish I’d been there with you when you came across that first coin. This is just what we need before we put together a funding application for a big dig. I’m so thrilled for you. It’s much more exciting than the piece of old skull.’ She tipped the meat into a bowl and, using the same knife, cut an onion in half. A smear of blood was transferred to the white semicircle. She held it face-down on the board and chopped it very fast into translucent slices.