S Bolton - Sacrifice

'I'm truly, truly sorry,' I said, hearing my voice crack.

Detective Chief Inspector Helen Rowley stared at me for a long time. I could hear the central-heating system creaking as it cooled down for the night. Outside a dog barked.

'Can you believe she killed herself?' she asked me, so softly I could barely make out the words. She wasn't really expecting an answer, but I'd spent the better part of eight hours waiting, longing, to be given the chance to say what I said next.

'Not for a fraction of a second have I believed she did that.'

Helen's eyes glinted in surprise, then narrowed as she caught up with me. 'What are you talking about?' she whispered.

'Have you seen the fridge?' I asked, the first thing that came into my head. 'You think Dana would stock a fridge hours before taking her own life?'

If anything, the stare intensified. She didn't believe me. And she was quickly becoming angry. But I was already there. Helen was supposed to know Dana better than anyone. Why was it up to me to convince her of the blindingly obvious?

'If Dana – the Dana I knew – had planned to kill herself she'd have emptied her fridge, put the contents in the bin, wheeled it down to the bottom of the drive and then cleaned the fridge with Dettol,' I said, with a bitterness I knew was unfair but couldn't help. 'Oh, and she'd have taken back her library books as well.'

Helen took a step back and fumbled against the wall. The room filled with light and I could see her properly. She wore a padded green jacket and baggy combat-style trousers. She was tall, almost my height, and her hair wasn't short, it was pulled back in a plait. She was attractive. Not pretty, exactly, but with a clean jaw-line and brown eyes. I realized with a jolt of surprise that she looked quite a lot like me. She looked round and then sank on to one of Dana's sofas.

I made myself keep quiet for a few seconds. I had so much to say, I didn't trust myself to get it all out coherently. When I thought I could speak without blithering, I continued:

'About four years ago, I spent some time working with suicides. Failed suicides, of course, tricky to talk to the ones who… well, they have various reasons, come from various circumstances, but they have one thing in common.'

Helen had curled herself forward, arms crossed in front of her body, hands gripping her upper arms. She spoke to the rug at her feet. 'What's that? Despair?'

'I guess. But the word I was going to use was emptiness. These people look into their future and they see nothing. They believe they have nothing to live for and so they don't.'

She looked at me. 'And that wasn't Dana?'

Forcing myself to speak slowly, I leaned closer. 'No way was it Dana. There was just too much going on in her life. She was determined to get to the bottom of this case… furious at the lack of cooperation she was getting. I've spoken to her several times over the last few days. She was fine – worried, angry, edgy – but definitely not empty. She wrote a note to me this morning. I'll show it to you; it's upstairs somewhere. It's not the note of a suicide. Dana was not a suicide.'

'They told me she'd been struggling to fit in, not relating to her colleagues, missing her old force… missing me.' Her voice was unsteady.

'Probably all true. But not nearly enough.'

'She phoned me yesterday evening. She was worried, she wanted my help, but you're right, she didn't sound empty'

We were still, for a while, and silent. I was wondering whether I should offer to make tea when she spoke again.

'This house is so like her. She could make homes beautiful. Her flat in Dundee was the same. You should see my place. Total mess.'

'Mine too,' I agreed, but inside I was getting edgy again. My relief at finding Helen was giving way to anxiety. Sooner or later I was going to be found. I would be taken down to the station – ostensibly to make a statement – and find myself stuck there for as long as they chose to keep me. I'd thought I needed Helen but I didn't need her grieving and helpless. I wanted her functioning.

'What the hell is that?' she said.

I followed her gaze along the floor. 'A humane killer,' I said. 'For putting horses down.'

For a second I thought she was going to laugh.

'Jesus,' she said. 'Is it legal?'

I shrugged. 'Used to be. Back in the 1950s.'

'Mind if I put it somewhere safe?'

'Be my guest.'

She stood up, retrieved the gun and put it on the top of a dresser. When she faced me again, the skin around her eyes was blotched pink but I could see she was a long way from breaking down.

'Did you kill her?' she asked.

I felt my mouth drop open but I was totally incapable of replying. Whatever she saw made her relax, even half smile.

'Sorry. Had to ask. So who did?'

'I'm not sure. But probably not one person acting alone. And it was almost certainly connected to the case she was investigating.

I think Dana was close to finding something out. Me too. I think someone tried to kill me, a couple of days ago.' I told her about the sailing accident, about my discovering the sawn-off mast. When I'd finished she was silent. Then she stood up and walked across the room. She stood in front of a picture I hadn't noticed before, a small pencil-drawing of a terrier surrounded by high-heeled, female legs. I had no idea whether she believed me or thought me a total fruitcake.

'I was going to contact you in the morning. To ask you to help me,' I said.

She turned round again and her face had hardened, just fractionally.

'Help you how?'

'Well, stay safe for one thing. But also to find out what's going on up here and who killed Dana.'

She shook her head. 'You need to let the police handle that.'

I jumped to my feet. 'No! That's just it. The police will not handle it. Dana knew that. That's why she didn't trust her colleagues, found it hard to work with them. There is something very, very wrong up here and somehow the police are involved.'

She lowered herself back on to the sofa. 'I'm listening,' she said. I sat down too. 'This is going to sound a bit weird,' I began.

Twenty minutes later I finished. A glance at the clock told me it was a quarter past midnight. Helen got up and left the room. I could hear her rustling about in the kitchen. After a minute or two she came back with two glasses of white wine.

'You were right,' she said. 'That did sound weird.'

I gave her a shrug and a goofy half-smile. Well, I had warned her.

'Trolls?' she said, giving me an are you serious? look.

I sipped my wine. It was good; crisp and clean, very cold. 'Well, no. Not real trolls. Obviously not real trolls. But some sort of cult that's based on an old island legend.'

'People who think they're trolls?'

She was wasting my time. I stood up.

'Sit down,' she barked. 'Dana didn't think you were an idiot and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.' She glanced up towards the dresser. 'In spite of some evidence to the contrary.'

I scowled, like a teenager who'd just been ticked off. Helen was looking through notes she'd made while I'd been talking and didn't see my expression. I sat back down again.

'OK, I need to put Shetland folklore on one side for a moment and concentrate on what we know,' she went on. 'You dug up a body in your field that has since been positively identified as that of Melissa Gair. She'd been dead about two years, and shortly before her death she'd had a baby.'

I nodded.

'Reasonably straightforward so far, if a bit gruesome. The complication comes because Melissa Gair is supposed to have died almost a year earlier. We have a woman who died twice. The earlier death was well documented and witnessed and, on paper at least, is hard to disprove. The second death has the edge, of course, because it has a body to back it up.' She stopped to take a sip of her wine.