Raven Black (37 page)

'But you wanted to see the child?'

'I liked to see her,' he said. 'I gave her a glass of milk and a biscuit. But she said she didn't want milk; she wanted juice. We had no juice in the house. She wouldn't settle. Some days when she visited she would sit and draw a picture, or when mother was in the mood they would bake together. That day she was all over the place, opening drawers and looking into cupboards. I suppose she was bored. She said she was bored! He spoke in a puzzled voice.

Boredom was an idea he found hard to understand. Here in the police station he hated being locked in, and he worried about what was going on with his land at Hillhead, but he wasn't bored.

'So she left?' Perez said. 'Is that what you're telling me? She was bored so she left. Where did she go? Who did she see?'

There was a silence. 'Magnus?'

'She didn't leave,' he said. 'She went into my room and starting looking in there for things to play with! He remembered the girl pushing open the door, bouncing on his bed, her head thrown back, laughing, the horns of hair flying. His confusion as he watched her, watching the small brown body, glimpsing her knickers as her skirt rode up.

'She shouldn't have done that. Not without asking first!

'No,' the detective agreed. Magnus expected him to ask another question then, but he didn't. He sat looking at Magnus, just waiting for him to go on with the story.

'I'd kept some things which had belonged to Agnes,' Magnus said. 'You remember, I told you about Agnes. She was my sister. She died when she Was still a girl. She caught the whooping cough. My mother had asked me to get rid of them. She didn't want them in the house. But I couldn't bear to.

They were in a box, which I kept under my bed!
Except when mother did the spring cleaning. Then I had to
move them.
He didn't tell the detective those details. He didn't think he'd understand what it was to have just one secret, one thing only for yourself. 'Catriona found them. There wasn't much. A soft toy. A rabbit. And a doll with long hair. That was all Agnes had. It wasn't like these days when the children have so many toys! 'You didn't want her to play with them,'

Perez said.’ Because they'd belonged to Agnes!

'No!' Magnus wasn't sure how he'd make the policeman see how it had been. 'I liked to see her playing with them. I was afraid she'd laugh at them, because they weren't like the toys she was used to. But she didn't. She took the doll in her arms and held it. She rocked it as if it was a baby. Agnes used to do that.

She used. to rock the baby and sing to it. Catriona didn't sing, but she was gentle with it. She asked if she could brush its hair. She wasn't a bad girl. No, not bad. She just had too much spirit. They didn't know what to do with her!

'What happened next?' the detective asked.

Magnus shut his eyes, not to recapture the scene, but in an attempt to block it out. But he couldn't block it out.

There it was playing in front of him, and when he opened his eyes again he could still see it. His mother appearing suddenly at the door, the horsehair belt holding the knitting needle still round her waist.
Give that to me.
Reaching out and grabbing for the doll. The girl, defiant, enjoying the scene she was making, the fuss all around her, doing a kind of teasing jig, with the doll held above her head. Not understanding, because how could she? Agnes was never mentioned in the house after her death.

Mother must have held on to the memory in her fierce, unforgiving way, but Magnus was never allowed to speak of her. So Catriona would never even have known of her existence.
It's my dolly now. Magnus gave her to me.

The icy hatred in his mother's eyes when she turned and looked at him. Then the girl trying to dance her way out of the house, skipping and laughing.

But she never made it to the door. Because his mother had reached for the scissors. They were the scissors she used to snip the wool when she was knitting, and cut the cloth when she was sewing. Not big scissors, but narrow-bladed and very sharp. And then the girl was still and dead, looking almost like a doll herself, lying on the rag rug in front of the fire. His mother had raised the scissors above her head and using both hands thrust them down to kill Catriona.

Catriona had made a little sound, hardly a cry at all, taken a small step and fallen on to the rug. Magnus had remembered his mother making that rug, cutting up the scraps of old clothing and pulling the material strips through a piece of sacking with a crochet hook. He'd knelt down on it to look at Catriona, turned to his mother, looking for guidance. What should they do? They had no telephone but he could run to the Bruce house. His mother had spoken in her quiet firm voice.
She shouldn't have played with Agnes's toys.
Then she sat back in the chair and continued her knitting.

It was Magnus who was left to deal with it. He rolled Catriona up in the rug and took her into his room. There was blood but not so much of it. He put the doll and the rabbit back in the box under his bed. When people came looking for Catriona he was out in the garden, slicing up the weeds with his long handled hoe.
No, she's not been
here.
And when they came back later and asked his mother she told them the same thing. No one noticed the missing rug. Why would they? They seldom came into the house.

When it was dark, he unwrapped the rug so Catriona was lying on her back in the middle of it, he untied her ribbons and spread out her hair. Then he carried her up the hill. It was a cloudy night. No moon. Raven black. The men still searching for her were on the headland and along the cliff tops. He could see the flashes of their torches but nobody saw him. They were at the coast and he went inland. Then he left the girl there on the heather, her face turned to the rain and went back to the house for a spade, a good sharp spade. He went up the hill again and he buried her in the peat bank and covered the spot with loose rocks.

It was dawn when he'd finished and 'was on his way home. It was summer then and the nights were still short.

But still nobody saw him. In the house, he cut up the rug with his mother's scissors and threw it on the fire a piece at a time. His mother stayed in her room until it was all done, and then she came out and made the porridge for his breakfast as she always did. They never spoke of it. Only when the policemen came for him and she said,
'Tell them
nothing.

'That was how it was,' he said, when at last the words had stopped and the scene had faded in front of his eyes.

'That was what happened.'

He could see that the detective was disappointed. It wasn't what he'd been hoping to hear.

.'That was how it was,' he said again. 'I'm sorry.' Then because he'd got into the habit somehow of speaking - after having such a long time of having no one to speak with, he was starting to get used to it - he opened his mouth again and he started telling the detective from Fair Isle about the last time he'd seen Catherine Ross.

Somehow he didn't care any more about his mother's instruction to tell them nothing.

All that evening Fran was aware of the time passing. With each minute it became less plausible that Cassie had wandered away and was safely caught up with a family who was looking after her. Now it was nearly midnight and in Lerwick the community halls' Up Helly Aa celebrations were in full swing. In every part of the town, people were dancing and laughing and listening to music. The men were rowdy with drink. This wasn't a time for children. All the children would be long in bed. She'd concentrated on making the minutes move slowly. She'd never wanted to reach this point. She watched the clock, the two hands coming together, couldn't bear to see them meet and turned away.

Outside it was freezing. The sort of cold which penetrates clothing and goes straight to the bones. Sitting in the house at Ravenswick, Fran was aware of the cold, even though her fire kept the room hot. She had the curtains open to watch for headlights coming down the road. Every now and then she cleared the condensation from the glass and saw the frost, thick and white on each blade of grass. She thought of Cassie, hoped that she was still wearing her scarf and her gloves, preferred to think of her outside in the open than shut up somewhere.

Cassie hated the dark and always had a lamp on when she was in bed. Fran thought of the nightmares which had troubled her daughter, remembered Cassie, still half asleep, blindly reaching out to her. for reassurance. Fran blinked, an involuntary response to the image, felt the tears on her cheeks. but couldn't find the energy to wipe them away.

Euan Ross was sitting with her. The fat policewoman was at the table, awkward, silent. Euan had poured Fran whisky, just as she had poured some for him after his daughter had died. She sipped it to be polite. Even now, when she was going crazy, panic frozen so she couldn't think straight, she still didn't want to offend him. He knew his daughter was dead.

There was still hope that hers was alive. She wondered that she could have considered herself upset when she found the bodies of the other girls.

She'd shut the dog in the bedroom. It reminded her too fiercely of Cassie. She didn't want to see her, the smell of her at her feet made her want to retch.

The telephone rang. She sprang to her feet, reached it before the second ring, felt the adrenaline hit her brain, making her suddenly clear headed. It was Duncan.

'Any news?'

'I would have phoned you: she said. After Perez had visited the Haa looking for Cassie, Duncan had called her, demanding an explanation. She couldn't tell how he was feeling. She'd expected him to blame her for losing their daughter. In a similar situation she would have torn his eyes out. Instead he seemed distant, icy. At first she'd thought he was very drunk and trying not to show it. That intense effort to seem sober. Now she thought there was more to it. He had called every hour since. She couldn't be angry with him. It was her fault, not his. If she'd allowed Cassie to go with him to the Haa, the girl would be safe.

'I'm sorry,' she said. She said that every time he phoned too.

There was a moment of silence. 'No,' he said. 'There was nothing you could do. You can't blame yourself.

Should I come over?'

'No. Stay there. There should be someone in both houses. Just in case. . : He was about to speak again but she interrupted him. 'Please, I'm going to hang up now. The police might be trying to get through. As soon as I hear anything I'll call you. I promise: As she hung up, she saw herself reflected in the window. A dark shadowy figure, unrecognizable, middle-aged.

A wave of self-pity took her by surprise. She'd moved here to keep Cassie safe. It had been all she'd wanted. A better life for them both. It was as if she was the object of some twisted prank. To find the bodies had been hard enough. She couldn't be expected to deal with this too. She realized she was sobbing. Not for Cassie this time, but for herself.

Euan came up behind her and offered her a handkerchief. It was clean, white, ironed. She took it from him. The feel of the smooth cloth against her face was a small comfort.

'How can you think of ironing? At a time like this?'

It was the first thought that came into her head.

It took him a moment to realize what she meant.

He gave a little smile. 'Not me,' he said. 'I have help in the house. Someone to keep things going. Left to myself I'd have fallen apart. You saw that:

Now, it seemed to her that he was entirely composed.

'Did you find anything in that writing of Catherine's?' she demanded suddenly. 'Anything which might help them find out who's doing this?'

Before he could answer there was a noise outside. Her image in the window broke up, as headlights caught it from behind. She held her breath as the car coming down the road slowed and then pulled to a stop. It was Jimmy Perez and she could tell at once that he was alone. She waited, still hoping despite herself, that he would move round the car to help a child from the back seat, but he walked straight to the house.
He's come to tell
me
that Cassie's
dead. If it had been good news he'd have phoned.
He
wouldn't have wasted time driving here.
Maggie heard him approaching and started barking and jumping up at the bedroom door.

The first thing he said, as soon as the door was open, was, 'I haven't got anything to tell you. We haven't found her. Not yet: Because she'd convinced herself that Cassie was dead in the moment of his walking from the car to the house, she felt relieved. She could have kissed him.

'I have some questions: he said.

'Of course. Anything:

He looked over her shoulder at Euan Ross. 'I'm sorry. We'd like to talk to Mrs Hunter alone. You understand?'

'I'll go home: Euan said. 'Give me a ring if you'd like me to come back. Or stay with me, Fran, if you'd prefer. Don't worry about the time. I'll be up!

Fran wasn't aware of his leaving. She knew she should thank him, see him out, offer coffee and food to the detective, but she sat impatiently waiting for the questions. She thought Perez had an idea, ideas. There was hope.

As she waited she saw the lights of another car coming from the direction of Lerwick, but it didn't stop.

He pulled out a hard dining chair and sat on that, facing her, his long legs twisted under the seat. The policewoman eased her chair back into a corner. Fran sensed an urgency. He was desperate for her to answer quickly. When she paused for a moment he didn't tell her to hurry, but she knew that was what he wanted. The questions made no sense to her. They seemed entirely random.

He asked about Cassie and how she was doing at school, about Fran's social life and the friends she'd made away from Ravenswick. She didn't demand to know what the questions were about. She could do nothing more to find her daughter. She was in his hands. And if he wasted time explaining his ideas to her, it might be too late.