S Bolton - Sacrifice

'Yes,' she said. 'But I think there are over two thousand Chinese characters.'

'Maybe the Vikings didn't talk much.'

She opened her notebook and turned it to face me. The page I was looking at had a reproduction of the three runes we'd seen in the morgue the day before. 'So what we have here,' she went on, 'are the runes for Separation, Breakthrough and Constraint, inscribed on the body of our victim. What's that all about then?'

I looked from her notes to the textbook. On the next page the runes were reproduced again, this time with their Viking names. The fish-like symbol was called Othila, meaning Separation; the kite-bow was Dagaz, meaning Breakthrough, and the diagonal, sword-like rune was Nauthiz, meaning Constraint. I looked up at her. She was watching me carefully.

'What about the sub-meanings?' I asked.

'Go ahead,' she encouraged.

On the page opposite, lesser meanings for each rune were listed. Othila also meant Property or Inherited Possessions, Native Land and Home; Dagaz meant Day, God's Light, Prosperity and Fruitfulness; Nauthiz meant Need, Necessity, Cause of Human Sorrow, Lessons, Hardship.

'Separation of significant internal organ from rest of body?' I suggested, not entirely seriously. She gave me an encouraging nod. I looked down at the book. 'Breakthrough… umm, breaking through the chest wall to reach the heart? Constraint… well, she was constrained, wasn't she? The bruises around her ankles and wrists… And she certainly suffered hardship…' I tailed off and looked at Dana.

'Seem good enough to you?' she asked.

I shook my head. 'No,' I said. 'Seems like bollocks.'

'Like meaningless doodles?' she suggested.

'Much more elegant way of putting it,' I agreed. 'What about the ones downstairs?'

She pressed a button on her camera and pulled up the photo- graph she'd taken just ten minutes ago. There were five symbols inscribed along the lintel.

'An arrow pointing upwards,' I said.

Dana flicked to the back page of the book. 'Teiwaz,' she said, 'meaning Warrior and Victory in battle.'

I looked at her. We both made mystified faces.

'Next up looks like a slanted letter F.' I reached over and indicated it on the page. 'There, what does it say?'

'Ansuz,' she replied, 'meaning Signals, God and River Mouth.'

'Our third symbol of the evening is a flash of lightning.'

'Sowelu. Wholeness, the Sun.' She looked up again.

'This is just more bo- meaningless doodles,' I said.

'Certainly looks that way,' she agreed. 'What about the last two?'

'We have an upturned table called Perth, meaning… aah!'

'What?'

'Initiation.'

She frowned. 'I always worry when I hear that word.'

'Know what you mean. And, finally, a crooked letter H, called Hagalaz, meaning Disruption and Natural Forces.'

'Warrior, Signals, Wholeness, Initiation and Disruption,' Dana summarized.

I held up my hands. 'Meaningless-'

'Bollocks,' she said. And smiled. It was a pretty smile.

I laughed. 'You need to talk to Duncan's dad. Maybe it's a question of context.'

'Who needs to talk to my dad?' said a voice from the doorway. Duncan had crept up on us. He stood there, grinning, looking from Dana to me, and I felt my stomach tensing the way it always did when Duncan was in the presence of a pretty woman who wasn't me. They had a way of softening, somehow, around him: their skin would blush, eyes shine, bodies instinctively lean towards him. I braced myself for Dana to respond in the time-honoured way and, to my surprise, she didn't. Dana, that night, gave me the totally new experience of watching my gorgeous husband and an equally gorgeous babe and feeling no jealousy whatsoever. They exchanged a few pleasantries, she ascertained that he knew nothing more about runes than I did, and then she left. She didn't promise to keep in touch.

'GO ON, GO,' I URGED, AS HENRY MOVED INTO TOP GEAR. I rose out of the saddle and leaned forward, balancing over his neck as he pounded along the beach.

My favourite place to ride on Shetland was a half-moon beach, where dusky-pink, grass-tufted cliffs rose like the sides of a pudding basin around a bay of deepest turquoise. As I thundered along, spray blurred my vision and all I could see was colour: emerald grass, turquoise sea, pink sand and the soft, robin's-egg blue of the distant ocean. There are times on the islands when flowers seem superfluous.

The wind is rarely still on Shetland but it seemed content, that morning, just to whisper its presence, and the ocean was smooth but for small bubbles of white foam at the water's edge.

I turned Henry and we walked back through the surf. Both of us were panting. Blissful emptiness of mind disappeared and reality came tumbling back.

Thursday was my regular day off. I was expected to stay near a phone and respond to any emergency but otherwise I was free to relax. Some hope. I was having a period of what Duncan called 'the stressies'. I was finding it hard to get to sleep at night, waking up much too early in the morning and spending the day exhausted. For much of the time, I was grinding my teeth and clenching my fists without realizing it. A permanent headache nagged just shy of the point of being disabling and I was loaded up with aspirin and paracetamol twenty-four hours a day.

What was my problem?

Well, for a start, something was worrying Duncan but he wasn't telling me about it. We were hardly communicating at all; except in bed, if the non-verbal kind was allowed to count. His new business was proving harder to settle into than he'd expected and the hours he was working were as long as mine but he was doing it six, some- times seven days a week. The couple of times I'd mentioned babies his face had tightened and he'd changed the subject just as soon as he could. He hadn't spoken about adoption again. That morning, he'd left the islands on a three-day trip back to London for meetings with clients and I was finding it almost a relief to have the house to myself for a few days, not to have to pretend that everything was fine.

Second, I wasn't performing well at work. Nothing had gone wrong yet, all my babies had been successfully delivered and were doing well. With the help of the team I'd probably saved Janet Kennedy's life the other day. But somehow it just wasn't coming together. I was awkward, clumsy both in theatre and in the delivery room. I was pretty certain that no one, either on the medical team or among the patients, actually liked me. And it was my fault. I couldn't relax and be natural. Either I was stiff and cold or I tried too hard in the other direction, making inappropriate jokes and getting glassy-eyed stares in response.

Third, I was itching to know what was happening in the murder investigation. The day after DS Tulloch visited me at home I'd been interviewed again by a DCI from Inverness. He'd done nothing but reiterate the questions Tulloch had already asked me and, to my surprise, he'd even nodded sagely when I'd repeated DI Dunn's theory about the murdered woman being an islander. Since then, I'd heard from Duncan that most of the mainland team had been called home and that Dunn and Tulloch were, once again, in charge, although Dunn, Duncan told me, wasn't normally based on Shetland but at Wick on the mainland.

I'd thought about calling Dana Tulloch but didn't much fancy the inevitable rebuff I'd get. I'd made a point of catching the main news each evening for the last few days but had learned nothing. There had been some coverage in the local press and on Shetland TV, but far less than I'd expected. Nobody from the media had tried to interview me. Nobody at work had bothered to ask about it, although I was sure I'd caught one or two suspicious-looking glances. Neither had any of our neighbours been round in a spirit of friendly nosiness.