“Perhaps someone else,” the man said patiently.
“Perhaps my neighbors in St. Margaret’s Hope,” she said. “The Millers.”
“You remember now, Emily, that you moved to Kirkwall when your husband died ten years ago.”
There was a pause. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. Magnus and I moved to Kirkwall. Magnus will come and get me.” I thought if I could feel anything at all, other than cold, I would find this very sad.
The police may have been very courteous, but they weren’t for letting me take the flight out of Orkney I was booked on. I was asked to remain there until the forensics team arrived from Aberdeen, headquarters of the Northern Constabulary, and had had a chance to do whatever they do. Such expertise, it was explained to me, would have to come outwith Orkney. “Outwith” was not a word I was familiar with, but it sounded rather nice. I told them about Rob, which softened them up considerably, and that I knew that staying as long as necessary was the right thing to do.
Percy’s mum was leaving just about the time I was told someone would drive me to Stromness. A neighbor from Kirkwall had come to take her home. I didn’t ask her about Percy’s granny and her furniture, because I didn’t think of it, and even if I had her grip on reality still seemed a little tenuous, and furthermore it would hardly have been the appropriate time. I’ve wondered since, though, whether it would have made a difference. I suppose had Percy been alive he would have told me it was one of the questions I was supposed to ask.
Detective Cusiter, if that was what his name was, had been good enough to have someone phone the car rental company to explain my situation, and they in turn were nice enough to deliver another car to Mrs. Brown’s place in Stromness shortly after I got there. The man who delivered the car apologized profusely for my inconvenience, which was an unusual word under the circumstances. “Please be assured that you will not be charged for the second car. We are terribly sorry for your loss.” My loss? Loss of the car? Loss of a friend? Loss of my seat on the plane? I told him that was exceptionally decent of the rental agency, and really it was. Everybody was so nice here.
The other residents of the BB were equally aghast and sympathetic. “Travelers,” one man opined. “No one from Orkney would do such a thing. In the good weather, they come in on the ferry, do their nefarious business, and then take off on the next boat. They’ll never find them.”
“Travelers?” I said.
“You know, gypsies, other criminal elements.”
I thought that was rather unfair, but what did I know? I needed a scotch, and I didn’t care what that doctor said. What I also wanted was for everyone to stop being so nice. I wanted them to take to the streets to protest what had happened to Percy. I wanted them to unleash that Viking blood they kept telling me flowed in their veins, to hunt down the killer, take justice into their own hands, and tear this terrible person to pieces. That’s what I wanted them to do, because I myself was too tired and too cold to do it. I had a large scotch, despite doctor’s orders, left a voice mail for Rob telling him I wouldn’t be home immediately and why, then went straight to bed, and enjoyed a dreamless sleep that left me even more tired than I’d been when I lay down. I still couldn’t remember what Percy had said to me.
The next day, after Mrs. Brown plied me with bacon and eggs and some rather lovely brown bread in the notion that it would help, which indeed it did, I undertook a self-guided tour of the Neolithic in Percy’s honor. I really just wanted to stay in bed, but I had a feeling that if I did so, I’d never get up again. I crawled on all fours or slithered into every chamber cairn I could find. I climbed up Wideford Hill, and down into Wideford Cairn, then Unstan, Cuween, Grain, Mine Howe; any tomb or earth house or whatever I came across, I entered. They were all rather interesting, from the outside just grassy mounds, but with stone entrances, and inside stone chambers, often more than one. I could almost hear Percy telling me about them. I hoped I’d done him proud. I went to a place called the Brough of Birsay which held the remains of a Viking church and homes. It wasn’t old enough for Percy to have recommended it, but the sun was shining as I walked across the causeway usable only at low tide to see the place, and from the vantage point of lighthouse high atop the hill, I looked down a coast of spectacular cliffs disappearing into the mist, and across water that would have stretched without interruption back to my home country. I decided Orkney might have the biggest sky I had seen in a very long time, bigger perhaps than the prairies of home. It was very, very beautiful, breathtakingly so.
Then I went back to the Stones of Stenness and walked around the Ring of Brodgar. The pastoral view was truly lovely, and I wished Percy were there to share it. After that I just drove around the island, I don’t know why, maybe searching for someone who looked as if he’d killed my strange friend, Percy. Occasionally I stopped to eat. Stuffing food down my throat seemed to be the only thing that kept me from doing something else, although what that something else was I didn’t know. I did know I didn’t feel like crying.
It was thus that I found Willow in the Quoyburray Inn in Tankerness a couple of days later, but by then I didn’t care. She was sitting alone at a table in the corner of the bar with a plate offish and chips in front of her, and, in a choice of questionable taste given the recent demise of her boyfriend and the means of his dispatch, a bottle of Skull-splitter beer. With Percy’s death, my interest in Blair and Trevor, the furniture, and therefore Willow had evaporated.
Willow, and I’ve thought about this a lot since, seemed very surprised to see me. I didn’t care about that either. In fact, I didn’t give a fig about anything, although a small part of my brain was trying to tell me I should. Willow dropped her fork, put her hand to her mouth, and said “Lara!” in a rather strange tone of voice. There was a pause, and then she said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Sure you have, I thought. You have been roaring around Orkney on the back of a motorcycle piloted by a rather well-built young man in red and blue leather just hoping to see me standing by the side of the road.
“What I mean is, I thought I’d missed you, that you would have gone home by now. I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I don’t believe I knew you were coming to Orkney, Willow,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Had I known, I would of course have told you where I was staying.”
“I know that,” she said. “I trust you.” If I hadn’t felt so awful, I probably would have laughed. She gestured to me to sit down and then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I found it,” she whispered. “As soon as I found it, I called your shop, and a nice man told me you were taking a bit of a holiday in Britain. I knew that meant you’d headed for Orkney, so I flew out the very next day. I figured I’d just find you here somewhere. After all, it’s not a very big island.”
A nice man? Surely she didn’t mean Clive. “You found what?” I asked in a normal speaking voice. “The money?”
“Shush,” she said. “Not the money, but the closest thing to it.”
“And what might that be?”
She leaned forward again. “The treasure map,” she mouthed.
Oh, spare me, I thought. “I see,” I said. “That’s exciting. I knew you were here, actually, Willow. I saw you get off the ferry and then again on South Ronaldsay, but I couldn’t catch you because you were on a motorcycle with a rather fetching young man.”