David looked out in the direction of the sea.
‘Okay, Terry, if du goes alang da beach, startin fae dis end, dat’ll wirk. If du needs wis, try me mobile, or else flash da torch a few times and we’ll come doon.’
He reached out and pressed his hand to Mary’s cheek as Sandy got in beside him, then they were off down to the end of the road. Mary watched as the men got out of the pickup, went out through the gate and into the dark field, the dog running on ahead. She could hear them for a while – the scuffling of their waterproof jackets and the thunk of their boots on the soft ground. There were no voices, though. Once he’d said what he needed to say, David would be quiet.
The two torch beams scraped this way and that across the field, then crossed the burn and began moving up the headland – Burganess. She could see the third light swinging somewhere on the beach behind Maggie’s house. She didn’t trust Terry with much, especially when he’d been drinking, but she hoped he could take the task seriously. She drove back down to Maggie’s house and went inside. From the west window in the living room she could still see the torches shifting, the strange unnatural movements puncturing the night.
This valley had been Mary’s home now for almost thirty-five years, and in all that time Maggie had been part of the place – as much a part of it, in fact, as the fields, the burn and the road itself. Mary thought back to the first time she’d been in this house, shortly before she and David married. She’d been brought to the valley to meet everyone. She was taken from house to house like an exhibit or a circus act, so that everyone could see her and speak to her and then discuss her with each other once she was gone. They came to meet Jimmy and Catherine, David’s parents, then Maggie and Walter, here, then to the Red House to meet Willie, and Joan, up at Kettlester, where she and David now lived. Lots had changed in this house, of course. They’d fixed it up in the late eighties, modernised it, with a brand-new kitchen and another bathroom. But it was still recognisable beneath all of that. The same pictures were on the wall, the same furniture, the same ornaments. It was even the same smell she remembered from that first day: a thick, comforting smell, of hand cream and dust and soap and soup.
When the door opened, Mary jumped, her heart thudding inside her. It was David, his coat and hat and boots still on. He looked at his wife and then turned away.
‘Well, did you find her?’ Mary asked, trying to sound hopeful. David shuffled, looking at the floor, then finally back at Mary.
‘Aye, we found her.’
SATURDAY,
23RD JANUARY
Alice looked up from her desk and out of the window at a snow-covered corner of the garden and a white stretch of hill beyond. This was the first proper snow in almost a year, and it didn’t look set to stay. It never seemed much at home here in Shetland and rarely lingered for long. But its presence, sometimes, felt like a blessing. This had not been a cold winter, but it had not been an easy one either. It had arrived in early November. The morning of Maggie’s funeral brought an angry fit of gales and horizontal rain, and looking back it seemed hardly to have let up since then. Week after week of wind and water, grey on grey. Now, near the end of January, this burst of clear, cold weather felt like a relief. Spring was still months away. Any brightness was welcome.
A car went past, heading out of the valley. From where she sat, Alice couldn’t see the road, but she recognised the sound of the vehicle, the whine of a loose fan belt. Terry, she thought, then went back to her work. She was distracted, trying to inspire herself to write by going back over what was already written, rereading her own words. The book in front of her was not really a book. Not yet. It was a stack of paper two inches thick, each page covered in black type, some overlaid with vermicular scrawl in two colours: red ink for edits, blue for additional notes and ideas.
She flicked through the pile, stopping at random, cutting it like a deck. She read a few lines aloud to herself – a paragraph about the carnivorous sundews that grew in the damp ground near the burn, Drosera rotundifolia, with their sticky red tendrils and lollipop leaves – and then she flicked further. This time she stopped on a passage about the social impact of the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886. Dry stuff, she thought. Important, but dry.
The book had started small. A few notes and observations about the valley made on scraps of paper. At one point Alice thought it might become a short history of Shetland. That would have been a simple job, really, which no one had yet bothered to do. Alice was no historian, but the details were already out there, they just needed to be thrown together over a few hundred pages. She could do that, no problem. But that wasn’t what happened. In the three and a half years she’d been working on it, the book had become something else, something bigger in scale and yet narrower in focus. Those initial notes just kept growing, but her attention hardly shifted beyond the confines of the valley. It wasn’t necessary to expand her view at all, she realised. This place was the story she wanted to tell.
The history, for the most part, had been easy. She had read everything she could find about the valley and the surrounding area, spoken to those who knew it best. She’d invited archaeologists out to walk with her along the edges of the burn, around the crofts and up over to Burganess. They had told her all they could tell her without digging the place up, and they had told her plenty. She trawled through the archives in Lerwick, noting down everything of relevance, filling files and folders with dates, names, events, causes and consequences. She began to see a picture of the place stretching backwards, rich and generous in its detail.
But the story of the valley couldn’t be told just like that, she understood. The story of the valley was much more than the chronology of what human beings had done here. It was everything that happened in this place, everything that belonged here and lived here. So she’d begun to learn, too, about the natural history, reading books on the islands’ birds and plants, then trying to find them for herself, describing and photographing them. And the more she learned, it turned out, the more there was to know. The book kept growing.
For a long time, she feared it would never be finished. There was too much to find out, she thought, too much to explore. She had taken on an impossible project. But now, finally, the end was approaching. The pile of papers no longer felt beyond her control. Most of the chapters were complete. The book had a shape; it was just a little blurred around the edges. Another six months, perhaps, and it would be done.
This was the first time Alice had attempted something like this, something real. It was also the first time she had written something for herself, without any other readers in mind. Crime novels: that’s what she used to write. That’s what she was known for. Those other books, five of them in total, she knew who’d be reading them. She could picture her readers as she wrote, and she had met them, too, at book signings and at festivals, back when she lived in York. Back when everything was as it used to be. They would tell her how much they loved her work, how much it meant to them. She couldn’t understand that. Not really. But that’s how it was. She was somewhat well known for a while, somewhat respected. She wrote stories of lone detectives: obsessive, flawed, angry and successful – at least in catching criminals. Gritty: that was the label they gave her, and that was fine. She enjoyed writing those stories, found it satisfying, mostly. She liked shaping the characters, moulding them, then pushing them around, moving them in their various directions until they reached the destination she had chosen, the fate she had decided. She felt, not powerful, exactly, but something like that. She had control, and she liked it. But then she stopped liking it. When Jack, her husband, became ill, everything changed. She had just begun her last book, Beggar Man, with a deadline in front of her, and a mortgage and bills and a reputation. She kept working, kept getting up each day and going to her desk, a cup of black coffee in front of her. But it was different. She no longer cared what happened next in the story. She no longer cared what her characters had done or what