S Bolton - Sacrifice

He shushed me and held me close again. We stood, not talking, for what felt like a long time. Then, almost out of habit, I raised one finger to stroke the hair at the nape of his neck. It had been cut recently and was very short. It felt like silk.

He shivered. Well, he had been away for four days.

'The police will want to talk to you,' I said, straightening up. I was hungry and needed a bath.

Duncan's arms dropped to his side. 'They already have.' He walked over to the fridge and opened the door. He squatted down, peering inside, more in hope than expectation.

'When?' I asked.

'Did it all over the phone,' he said. 'Dunn said he shouldn't need to bother me again. She was almost certainly buried before we came here.'

'They were asking about the previous owners.'

'Yeah, I know. I said I'd drop the deeds off at the station tomorrow.' Duncan stood up again. He carried a plate on which sat a half-eaten chicken carcass. He crossed to the table, put it down and returned to the fridge. 'Tor, we need to try and forget about it now.'

Twice in two hours someone had told me that. Forget about the fact that you dug up a corpse – minus heart, minus newborn baby – in your back field this afternoon.

'Dunc, they're digging up the field. They're looking for more bodies. I don't know about you, but I'm going to find that a bit difficult to ignore.'

Duncan shook his head, the way a fond parent does when his child has become over-excited about something. He was preparing salad and I didn't like the way his knife was slicing into a red pepper.

'There aren't any more bodies and they'll be finished by the end of tomorrow.'

'How can they possibly know that?'

'They have instruments that can tell. Don't ask me exactly how it works. You probably understand it better than I do. Apparently, decomposing flesh gives off heat and these gizmos can pick it up. Like metal detectors.'

Except any bodies out there were buried in peat. They weren't decomposing. 'I thought they'd have to dig up the whole field.'

'Apparently not. The wonders of modern technology. They've already done one sweep and found nothing. Not even a dead rabbit. They'll do another tomorrow, just to be sure, then they're out of here. Do you want something to drink?'

I filled a jug with water from the tap and added ice from the freezer. One benefit of living on Shetland was that we were saving a fortune on bottled water. Oh, and the local smoked salmon was pretty good. Apart from that, I was struggling.

'That wasn't the impression Detective Sergeant Tulloch gave me. She thought they'd be here for some time.'

'Yes, well, reading between the lines, I think the sergeant has a tendency to get a touch over-enthusiastic. Bit too anxious to make her mark and not afraid to set a few hares running in the mean- time.'

Which hadn't been the impression I'd had of Dana Tulloch. She'd struck me as someone who played her cards quite close to her chest.

'You seem to have got very chummy with DI Dunn on the strength of one phone call.'

'Oh, we know each other from way back.'

I should have known. I felt a touch of annoyance that Duncan, who'd played no part in the discovery of the body, should have been given far more information than I had, purely on the strength of being a fellow islander.

We sat down. I buttered some bread. Duncan served himself a large helping of cold chicken. Some of the flesh was still pink and jelly had congealed around it. At the sight of it, the nausea I'd been fighting in the post-mortem room reared up again. Great, after nearly fifteen years in medicine, I was getting squeamish. I helped myself to salad and a piece of cheese.

'Were there any reporters when you got home?' I asked. By the time I'd arrived, just before nine, the place had been deserted apart from one solitary copper standing guard. I'd braced myself to run the gauntlet of press questioning and been pleasantly surprised.

Duncan shook his head. 'Nope. Dunn's trying to keep a lid on the whole thing. Apparently under pressure from his Super. Thinks it might be bad for business, just as the summer tourist season starts.'

'Jesus, not again. I had the same thing from Gifford just now. Bad for hospital PR. I think you people need to get your priorities sorted out. This is not the people's republic of Shetland. You are remotely answerable to the outside world.'

Duncan had stopped eating. He was looking at me, but I didn't think he was still listening.

'What?' I said.

'Gifford,' he replied. The shine had gone from his eyes.

'My new boss. He's back. I met him just now.' Mentioning the drink didn't seem like a terribly good idea.

Duncan stood up, emptied his glass of pure Shetland water into the sink and poured an inch of neat Talisker into it. He drank, look- ing out of the window, his back to me.

'Can't help thinking there's a story here,' I said.

Duncan didn't answer.

'Anything I need to know?' I tried again.

Duncan muttered something that included more than one expletive and the phrase 'should have known'. Unlike me, he doesn't normally swear much. By this stage I was shamefully, gleefully curious.

He turned. 'I'm going for a bath,' he said as he left the room.

I made myself wait ten minutes before I followed him. I wandered back into our sitting room. There was one bookcase, its contents somewhat sparse. I'm really not much of a reader. Duncan tells anyone who'll listen that I won't consider a novel not written by someone called Francis (Dick or Claire – take your pick). Duncan is marginally better, but not exactly one for the classics. He had, however, inherited his grandfather's library and there were a few volumes by Dickens, Trollope, Austen and Hawthorne on the top shelf. I looked closely. Nothing by Walter Scott.

So I switched on the TV just as the late news was starting. If I'd been hoping for a starring role I'd have been disappointed. The last item was a twenty-second piece about the discovery of a corpse in some peat land several miles outside Lerwick. The location hadn't been specified, nor had there been any footage of our home. Instead, DI Andy Dunn, standing outside Lerwick police headquarters, had said the minimum possible whilst still using words. He did, though, finish with a speculative comment about the possibility of an archaeological find – I guessed the recording had been made before we'd met Stephen Renney. It was an obvious attempt to play down the situation but I assumed he knew what he was doing.

When I judged I'd left enough time I went upstairs. Duncan was in the bath with his eyes closed. He'd filled the tub so full that water was trickling down the overflow pipe. I knew from experience that the temperature would be pretty close to forty degrees. Duncan and I never shared a bath. About a year ago, before the sperm tests, I'd wondered if Duncan's hot baths were behind our failure to conceive. The effect of hot water on sperm is well known and I'd suggested he might try soaking his testicles in ice water for five minutes a day. He'd looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'How?' I was still thinking about it. Maybe one day I'd invent a device for the con- venient cold soaking of the male genitalia. Western fertility levels would soar and I'd make my fortune.

I leaned against the sink. Duncan made no sign of knowing I was there.

'You can't just leave it at that, you know. I have to work with the man. We're probably expected to entertain him and his wife for dinner over the next couple of months.'

'Gifford isn't married.'

I felt a jolt of something like relief mixed with alarm. Had I been hinting? And if I had, had Duncan spotted it?

'What is it?' I tried again.

Duncan opened his eyes but didn't look at me. 'We were at school together. I didn't like him. The feeling was mutual.'