S Bolton - Sacrifice

The incident sticks in my mind because it is the only occasion I can remember feeling valued by those around me. The only time I ever felt popular.

In secondary school I always seemed to find myself one of a threesome. I'd start out with a best friend and then, somewhere along the way, someone else would appear and our two would become three. Slowly but relentlessly, the interloper would spend more and more time with us until I couldn't ignore the fact that she was seeing more of my best friend than I was. Time and time again this happened, until I didn't know what it was like to have a best friend all of my own.

So I learned not to expect too much from other women. I went through medical school without getting particularly close to anyone. I wasn't a dork, spending every night in studying, and no one would have called me Norma No-Mates. But never that special someone, the one whom you absolutely have to speak to every couple of days, who will feed you chocolate and sympathy when your heart is breaking, whom you know will be maid of honour at your wedding and godmother to your first-born child.

I was startled by voices outside the door and I braced myself to feign sleep.

'At least she's on hand if she's needed,' said a voice, one I recognized as belonging to one of the student midwives.

'Can't see it happening,' said an older woman, whom I thought might be Jenny. 'I've never seen a healthier batch of babies. Must be something in the water this spring.'

The midwives moved on and I sank back into my pit of self- pity.

I'll say one thing for myself: I'm never pushy. I rarely take the initiative with girlfriends, always waiting to be phoned, for the other person to suggest getting together. I never complain when friendships start to cool, never grumble when the message pad is continually empty, when I see girls I know on jaunts to which I haven't been invited. I accept it as the norm, bottle up my loneliness and stick it on the shelf with the rest.

The point behind this self-indulgent rant is that with Dana, the whole process had begun again. Dana had gone from being someone I didn't much like to someone I trusted without question. More than that, I was starting to enjoy being with her. Gradually, over the past ten days, Dana had got a little closer to becoming a friend. Until, some time during the course of the day, while I'd been scurrying down the islands like a panic-stricken rabbit, she had lain down in a bath of her own blood.

I opened my eyes. Thank the Lord for chattering midwives. I knew what had been bothering me since that moment in Richard's study when I'd learned that one of the symbols on Melissa's body meant Harvest. I knew what I had to look for next.

I was in an ancillary private room attached to one of my wards. I found my clothes and dressed quickly. It was a quarter to nine and the hospital would be quietening down for the night. I took a glance at the chart fixed to my bed. No medication had been prescribed for me during the night; with luck, I wouldn't be missed until morning. I opened the door. Three of the beds in the outer ward were occupied. One woman was sitting up, feeding. The other two appeared to be sleeping, their tiny appendages panting softly in transparent cots. Unnoticed, I walked slowly towards the door and out into the corridor.

I needed a computer but couldn't risk going to my office. In a room two doors down from my own I turned on the desk lamp and switched on the desk-top. My password was still valid and after a couple of minutes I was in the system.

Batch was the word Jenny had used that had struck a chord with me while I lay in my room musing about friendship. I was looking for a batch.

IN RICHARD'S STUDY, I'D FOUND AN INTERPRETATION OF Melissa's runes that had finally started to have some meaning. But one of them still hadn't made much sense. I could see where the… artist (shall we call him?) was coming from with Fertility and Sacrifice, but Harvest? In medical circles we use the word Harvest when we talk about an organ being removed for transplant and I'd toyed with the idea that it might refer to the missing heart. But really, what's the likelihood of an ancient cult using a modern medical term? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Harvest was a reference not to the heart, but to the baby.

Which brought me neatly to the next key question. Generally speaking, how often do you come across a harvest of one? Use the word harvest as a noun and it's decidedly plural in its implications, conjuring images of fruitfulness and plenty. And I already knew that at least one other young woman had met an untimely death in 2004, the year Melissa had supposedly died. Kirsten Hawick, who'd been hit by a lorry while out riding her horse, had been a similar age to Melissa and had been pretty similar in appearance. Plus, a wedding ring that was probably hers had been found in my field. I'd never truly accepted that as coincidence.

Melissa hadn't died and been cremated in 2004; her body, still in the morgue, offered irrefutable evidence of that. Whilst I couldn't begin to imagine how it had been achieved, her earlier death had to have been faked; so had the same thing happened to Kirsten and maybe other women as well?

Were there more bodies to be found?

The first thing I had to find out was how many female deaths were recorded in 2004 and I accessed the General Register Office for Shetland on the Internet. It wasn't the most user-friendly of sites but after a bit of poking around, I had it: a simple table, covering deaths that had occurred on Shetland, grouped in five-year age brackets, between 1983 and 2007.

In 2004, the year Melissa's and Kirsten's deaths had been recorded, there had been 106 female deaths on the islands. Scanning across the row I found that, as you would expect, the majority of them fell into the older age groups, from age 65 upwards. Down at the lower end of the scale, of course, deaths were far less common. In this particular year, no females had died aged between 0 and 19. In the 20-24 bracket though, five had. In the 25-30 bracket, three women had died and in the next one up, 30-34, four women had died. A total of twelve young women dead in one year.

Seemed like quite a lot to me.

I looked next at 2005. Only six women in the corresponding three age brackets had died. In 2006, there had been only four such deaths.

2006 was the latest year for which stats had been collected so I went back in time. In 2003, two women in the age range had died. 2002 had been a particularly good year for young women with no deaths recorded. 2001, on the other hand, recorded eleven deaths.

I went further back. 2000 had seen six mortalities, there were just two in 1999, but an impressive ten in 1998.1997 saw a modest two, as did 1996, but – would you believe it – in 1995 eight women had met a premature end.

I went back as far as the table did, to 1983. I'm no statistician but even I could see a pattern emerging. Every three years a modest but significant blip appeared in the female death rates. Now, what the hell did that mean and, more importantly, why had no one spotted it before?

I looked again at the total column, to see if the pattern was reflected there. The number of total female deaths on Shetland ranged quite considerably from just 86 in 2003 to 154 in 1997. I looked for quite some time but there was no discernible three-year pattern that I could see; the spread of deaths, the difference in the numbers, appeared totally random. Whatever was going on in the three age groups representing young adult women was being hidden by the larger numbers involved in the female population as a whole. When you added male deaths into the equation, the chances of someone spotting what I'd just seen were non-existent.

Which might explain why no keen-eyed statistician at the General Register Office had spotted the anomaly. Taking the Shetland population as a whole, nothing was happening; and, when you considered that the death rate on Shetland is actually lower than the rest of Scotland, there'd be no reason for anyone to look more closely at the figures. The numbers were simply too small to show up on anything other than a very focused search.