Sacrifice

I'd also offered food and Dana had given me a vague look. I wasn't sure if it meant yes or no. I was hungry and acutely conscious of cold ham in the fridge and fresh bread in the larder.

'Everything is possible. I just can't see how they did it.'

'Who exactly are they? You're talking about my boss. He's a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, for heaven's sake. There were other people in the room with her when the machines were turned off. Kirsten Hawick died. Nearly a year before our victim did.'

Dana clicked her tongue. 'Yeah, yeah… I've heard all that too. But – just to put it another way – you find a wedding ring on the same patch of ground you found a corpse; the inscription inside suggests it belongs to a dead woman, one Mrs Hawick, who not only fits the age and ethnic group of our victim, but also, judging by her wedding photos, bears a reasonable resemblance to her. And we're being told it's just coincidence. How likely does that seem to you?'

Not remotely, was the honest answer. But the evidence for Kirsten's death had been pretty convincing. I stood up. I was not going to be intimidated out of making a sandwich in my own home. I got out the ham, butter and bread.

'I felt such an idiot,' I said. 'God knows what they thought when they saw me digging up weeds on her grave.'

'Does it strike you as odd that the two of them should follow you to the churchyard? How did they even know you'd gone there? And why would it bother them?' Dana stopped, thought for a second, then said, 'Do I sound paranoid?'

I glanced over my shoulder. 'Only totally.'

'Thanks.' To her credit, she managed a smile.

'Welcome.' I bent down again, fumbling in the back of the fridge for the mayonnaise. When I straightened up she was serious again.

'There's something I want you to do,' she said.

Just when I'd thought it was safe. 'What?'

She reached into a briefcase and pulled out a folder of thin, green cardboard. From inside she removed a sheet of black and white transparent film.

'This is a dental X-ray that was taken of our corpse. My team have been checking it against records of women on the missing persons list. No matches so far, although obviously not all records are available to us.'

I brought the food back to the table and went to get cutlery. 'What do you want me to do?'

'I have nagged and pleaded and begged, but DI Dunn will not even consider asking Joss Hawick to release his wife's dental records for comparison.'

I really couldn't see where she was going with this. 'So…'

'You should be able to find them.'

Back at the table, I started buttering bread. I shook my head. 'Most dentists work privately. No one else can access their records. Even if we knew who Kirsten's dentist was, he couldn't release them to me without Joss Hawick's permission.'

'Tora, you're thinking of England. It's different up here. Most people use an NHS dentist. Plus, there was an IT pilot scheme carried out here a year ago. All the islands' dental records were computerized and made centrally available.'

'I still don't see…'

'There's a dental unit attached to your hospital. Kirsten's records will be on the hospital computer system. You can access them.'

She was probably right.

'I'm not a dentist,' I said lamely.

'You've studied anatomy. You know how to read X-rays. You'd have a better chance of seeing a match than I would.'

Following a hunch was one thing, asking someone you barely knew to carry out an illegal search was another. What wasn't she telling me?

'Will you do it?' she asked.

I didn't know.

'If there's no match, that's it. The ring is a red herring and we waste no more time on it.'

It was worth it, surely, to be able to close the chapter. I could prove to Dana that the corpse was not Kirsten and that would be the end of it.

'OK, I'll do it tomorrow.'

I indicated the food. 'Help yourself Dana ignored the ham and took a slice of bread and butter.

I, on the other hand, was no longer hungry.

11

I'M NOT SURE AT WHAT POINT IN THE NIGHT I STARTED TO suspect that there was someone in the room with me. Sometime around two a.m., I guess, because that, typically, is when I'm in my deepest sleep and find it hardest to wake up. Ten years of being on call through the night and you get to know your sleep rhythms.

So there I was, two a.m. or thereabouts, alone, because Duncan was not expected back before Saturday morning, with a glimmer of consciousness returning and a niggling fear that all was not as it should be. Because someone had entered my bedroom.

I can't really explain how I knew; I just did. When you habitually sleep with a partner, you develop a sense of the closeness of the other and, upon waking, a dozen different triggers will remind you in an instant that he (or she) is still there: the scent of skin, the sound of breathing, the extra warmth another body creates. You settle back down reassured: you are not alone and the otherness beside you is comfort and familiarity.

This was neither comfortable nor familiar. The presence I could sense was far from the cosy warmth of a sleeping husband; it was alien, intrusive, predatory.

As always, I was huddled well down in the bed, covers drawn up around my face, and, like a child hiding from the bogeyman, I felt a sense of the quilt's protection; that if I lay still, pretending all was well, then maybe – just maybe – it would be; that whatever was in the room with me – quite close now, I could sense it – would just fade away into the realm of forgotten dreams. The drowsy side of me just wanted to slip back into oblivion and take the chance.

At the same time, the part of me that was trying desperately to wake up properly knew this wasn't just another night-time jelly-wobble, the kind of thing that occasionally happens when you sleep alone. This wasn't a random creaking floorboard or the wind rattling next door's dustbins. For one thing, I couldn't hear anything: the wind had dropped, the house's water-heating system had finally settled down for the night and even the night birds – often so loquacious on the Shetlands – were taking a break. Dead silence. A deep, dark, impenetrable silence.

I braced myself to move, to jump up, startle whoever it was and give myself a fighting chance. And found that I didn't dare. I lay there, totally exposed to the threat beside me and unable to move a muscle. I couldn't even open my eyes. I'm not sure how much time passed: it felt like for ever; realistically it was probably only a minute or two. Then the lightest movement of air passed across my cheek, the atmosphere in the room changed and I found myself sitting up.

The room was dark, much darker than normal. Light never really disappears during the Shetland summer, but this was as dark a night as I could remember. I looked all around, struggling to make everything out, to see into the deepest shadows. There was nothing and no one in the room that shouldn't be there. Except the smell.

I was breathing too fast – shallow, rapid, panicky breaths – and I made myself slow down, breathe in properly through my nose, be sure I wasn't imagining it. Like a perfumier testing a new fragrance, I explored the air around me: sweat, ever so faint but unmistakeable; and the softest hint of cigarette smoke, not the smell of a smoker, but of someone who might have passed briefly through a smoke- filled room; something else too, faintest of all, something that made me think of my mother's spice cupboard: cinnamon maybe, or ginger. It was a smell you might experience twenty times a day and think nothing of: passing someone in a corridor, getting on to a train, shaking hands with a stranger. Just the normal, everyday aroma of a normal, everyday male.

So what the hell was it doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?

That's when I noticed something else that wasn't right. The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Strange though it may seem, I cannot sleep when there are doors open around me. The door to the corridor, to our en-suite bathroom, even those on the wardrobes have to be closed. Duncan laughs at me, I even laugh at myself, but before I go to sleep, without fail, I close all the doors.