Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

Perez was lucky. At least he didn’t have the funeral of the decade to live through on the following morning. Then he thought that might sound childish and ungrateful and it didn’t tie in with his new adult image. And it might sound disrespectful to Mima too. He was proud that he was learning when to keep his mouth shut.
    Sandy had expected Perez to come all the way back to Whalsay with him but the inspector asked to be dropped at his house in Lerwick. He said he didn’t need to be in Whalsay; he had other work to do and he should let the Fiscal know how the interview had gone with Gwen James. He’d come back to the island when there was word on the date of the bones.
    In Utra, Sandy’s mother hardly seemed to notice he’d returned. Michael and his family were due in on the last plane from Edinburgh. Sandy had thought she’d be full of things to say about Hattie, but the girl’s death seemed to have slipped from Evelyn’s consciousness, pushed out by essentials like what the baby might eat for breakfast and whether Amelia could possibly cope with towels that didn’t match the bedlinen. Sandy was surprised that the whole family would make the trip from Edinburgh to Whalsay. He wondered what his sister-in-law hoped to get out of the trip. Did she think Mima had anything worth leaving?
    Joseph had made himself scarce too. Evelyn said he was in Setter making sure the Rayburn was lit and the house fit for Sandy to stay in.
    ‘I’ll go and see if he needs a hand.’ Sandy had bought a bottle of single malt at Heathrow. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket and walked down the track towards Setter. The weather was fine and still. He thought in London it would never matter what the weather was like and which way the wind was blowing.
    Joseph was squatting in front of the Rayburn. The fire had gone out. He was plaiting twisted pages of newspaper and laying kindling on top of it. He heard Sandy come in and smiled when he saw who it was.
    ‘There’s a pile of peats in the yard. You’ll not go cold at least.’
    Sandy took the bottle from his jacket with the air of a conjuror. ‘You’ll take a dram.’
    ‘Aye well, maybe a small one. Can’t go back drunk with Michael and his wife about to arrive. What would your mother say?’
    They smiled conspiratorially.
    ‘Well,’ Sandy said, ‘if it gets too much for you over the next day or two you can always hide away here.’
    Joseph put a match to the paper and the kindling flared and caught. He set a peat on top of it, then another. The smell of peatsmoke filled the room, caught Sandy’s throat and reminded him so vividly of Mima that he had to blink to be sure she wasn’t there too.
    Sandy turned away and brought two tumblers from the cupboard on the wall, rubbed the dust away with a tea-towel hanging on the range, poured out the whisky. His father shut the Rayburn door. They clinked glasses, a silent toast to Mima, and settled to drink.
    ‘Did you hear they’d found some more old bones after Mother dug up the skull?’ Sandy thought his father would surely know. He never seemed to be listening to gossip, but he had Mima’s genius for sniffing out what was going on in the island. ‘They could belong to an ancestor of ours. What do you think?’
    ‘I think they should stop digging up the Setter land.’ The voice was hard, quite unlike Joseph’s. Sandy looked up, shocked. He’d never heard his father talk like that before, even when he was a boy and he’d misbehaved. Joseph continued: ‘I think if they hadn’t been mucking around here my mother would still be alive.’
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘Two deaths in a week,’ Joseph said. ‘When was the last time anyone died from anything other than natural causes on Whalsay?’
    Sandy wasn’t sure his father was expecting a reply, said nothing.
    ‘Well?’ Joseph demanded.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I’ve been trying to think,’ Joseph said. ‘My father was lost at sea. That was more than fifty years ago. I can’t mind any accidents since then. And now two people dead in a week. I never liked the idea of strangers rooting around in the ground and I wasn’t the only person in the island to feel that way. Mima was an old woman but she wasn’t ready to die. The English lass was a child. Now you say they’ve dug up a pile of bones.’
    ‘Not a pile,’ Sandy said. ‘And old bones. Likely hundreds of years old.’
    ‘I don’t care. I’ll go and see that Paul Berglund tomorrow