![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silver_sunPart two.
Part one here: http://the-silver-sun.livejournal.com/241194.html
Being as it was the main police station for the whole of Shetland I’d expected Lerwick Central to be rather bigger than it was, which was about the size of the nick in Camden. I wondered if there wasn’t much crime here or if it was because there weren’t many people to commit crime the first place. I eventually settled on it being down to a bit both. All the same it was warm, dry and the floor didn’t try to throw you off your feet, so it was about a million times better than the St Clair had been.
Sandy showed us through to an office that had police stamped all over it and then went to get us some coffee. Nightingale sat down in a chair and started looking at a copy of the local newspaper, presumably in the hope of spotting something that might be connected to our magical theft. Which left me holding the bags and looking out of the window at dismal looking grey stone buildings along and the treeless landscape rising behind them. It only reinforced my belief that the far north of Scotland wasn't the natural home of the London Copper.
DI Perez arrived before Sandy got back with our drinks. He proved to be a shortish man in his late forties with gingery hair and an impressive collection of freckles. I couldn't help but wonder if there was a trend for ginger Scottish blokes to have names that really didn't sound like they were. Dr Walid would probably know how to do the stats on that or laugh that it was too small a sample size to conclude anything.
Perez, or Jimmy as told us we could call him when they weren't dealing with the public, seemed like a class bloke. Anybody who suggests tea and a stack of bacon sandwiches to go with a briefing was alright by me. I wondered if it was a usual thing or if it was them showing us Londoners that they knew how to run things up here thank you very much.
I had little doubt they knew what they were doing, but the place seemed a little bit behind the times. Kind of like I'd gone into a police station back in the late Nineties. Actual paper notice boards on the wall rather than virtual ones, old chunky backed computer monitors rather than flat screens and and piles of paper files on desks. I wondered whether this was part of the whole North-South funding divide that politicians said was a thing of the past and comedians still jokes about. Or maybe it was urban versus rural. Maybe they didn't want or need anything newer. Part of me wanted to believe that, the rest of me was more sceptical.
The one thing that Lerwick Central had which Camden didn't was a dog. A shaggy, black and white collie type had sidled into the room shortly after the sandwiches had arrived and proceeded to stare at Sandy until he'd given him some. It then did the same with Perez. Eventually, after making a circuit of the room, it lay down under Sandy's desk. I wondered if it was his dog, but the look on Sandy's face when it started drooling in its sleep over his shoe made me think otherwise. After some complaining a uniformed sergeant came and took the dog back out to where it had a basket under the front desk.
Sandy was more reserved now we were back at the station, there seemed to be something sad about him. Not sad like when kids say it when they mean boring or rubbish, just preoccupied and unhappy. The third detective, Alison McIntosh, or Tosh as everybody seemed to call her, was about my age and definitely fell into the category of cute. She also looked like she'd give as good as she got, so winding her up would probably end with me looking like a complete tit, and I would have thoroughly deserved it. The fact that I was noticing that, I decided meant that I was definitely feeling a lot better now that I was back on dry land.
"We've set up a room with a whiteboard and if you need it there's a projector you can use, just get Sergeant McBride, Billy, to sign it out for you. He's knows where the spare bulbs are if it blows again," Perez said as he showed us through to a what was probably a spare interview room. "If we get a major case we might need it back, but hopefully it shouldn't take too long for you wrap up your case, so you should be alright. You just let us know what you need and we'll see if we can come to an arrangement."
It had to be a bit awkward for DI Perez with Nightingale technically outranking him. I hoped it wouldn't end up being an issue. Although the only situation that it would be was if Nightingale tried to order people to do stuff Perez didn't want them to do. I doubted he would unless thinks were starting to go very wrong as we were operating far more under the radar here than we would have been in London.
"Our main issue, beside the obvious need to find our suspect, is one of transport," Nightingale said. "The loan of an unmarked car would be helpful and would the assistance of somebody with local knowledge."
"We've not got a spare we can loan out at the moment. But Sandy knows more about Shetland and Lerwick than just about anyone I know, on or off the force," Perez said, "If it's local knowledge that you need he'll know or know where to find out. So for the duration of your investigation I've assigned Sandy to help you, including being your driver while you're here. Apart from on Tuesday evening, if that's alright with you DCI Nightingale."
"What happens on Tuesday?" Nightingale asked. He sounded less than happy about having somebody along for the ride and I suspected that as soon as we were done here we'd be looking for somewhere that did hire cars so we could leave Sandy at the station to take any incoming calls.
"Nothing usually," Tosh said, sounding a little glum about it. "That's Shetland for you, but it's the last Tuesday in January, so it's Up Helly Aa."
Yeah, I had no idea what that meant. Neither did Nightingale if the look on his face was anything to go by. Or maybe he was trying not to start coughing again. Either was possible.
"It's a fire festival. The largest in Europe," Sandy said when nobody else had taken pity on us and told us what it was. "It's been going on in one form or another for more than a hundred years. There are parades, music and the like in the day and it ends at night when we burn the longship. People come from all over the world to see it."
That was us told. There was a definite sense of national pride there and I couldn't help but wonder if Trolhoulland did actually turn out to be some magical nationalist nut if Sandy could be a bit a problem. Conflict of interests and all that. I wanted to think that as a police officer he'd be able to separate his own feelings from the job, but then so had Lesley and look how that had turned out.
After our quick tour of the station. Here are the interview rooms, the loos and so on, Nightingale made it clear he was going to start work on the case today. So we filled Sandy in on what we had so far and asked whether he'd been able to get the CCTV footage we'd requested. We'd sent a CCTV print from the museum in London of Grava Trolhoulland and the time his ferry should have docked in Lerwick on ahead of us.
Sandy, as it turned out had done better than just find the right camera and get the footage, he'd already reviewed it and picked up Trolhoulland leaving Victoria Quay and heading into Lerwick on foot. Short, a couple of inches short of five foot tall, thin, wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a large holdall, he'd been pretty distinctive and we had little difficultly following him from one camera to the next as he made his way through town.
I'd hoped that that we'd see him get picked up in a car so we could trace a number plate or even better head into a hotel, where we could go and arrest him. Case closed. It didn't happen, but when are we ever that lucky? Trolhoulland continued on foot, walking along the Esplanade until he finally left the view of the camera.
"That's it I'm afraid," Sandy said. He took a proper old school VHS video out of its player. "That the extent of the CCTV coverage on that road. There isn't anything much until you get out to the new shopping complex at Clickimmin a mile or so away. It's an odd route to go to get there, he'd have been better off heading onto Scalloway Road and getting the bus."
The idea that some people have that they are watched everywhere they go just isn't true. Okay it was probably mostly true in London, but once you got out of urban areas there wasn't anything much watching you. And right now that was a bit of a problem.
"What do we do now?" I asked. I hoped that the answer wasn't go door to door down the Esplanade and onto Twageos Road, which was were Trolhoulland had gone when we'd lost sight of him.
"There's not much down there," Sandy said. "There's a secondary school, some houses and a private car park. He'll have met somebody at the car park. Probably assumed that they won't be seen there."
"Why do you think he's meeting somebody?" Nightingale asked. "We haven't got any information that would suggest he wasn't acting alone. Unless you have found anything more?"
Sandy paused and I got the impression he was thinking of something to say that wouldn't sound like he thought he was more clued up than his DCI about the case. "I don't know for certain," he said eventually. "But you said he'd been in London for a while, at least a couple of weeks. If he'd left his car parked there for so long people would have noticed. People look out for each other up here."
"Does the car park have CCTV?" I asked. Because if it didn't it was no use at all. I supposed we could get a have you seen this man poster done and put it up in the car park in the hope somebody might recognise him, but doing that meant admitting we were already out of ideas.
Sandy nodded.
Nightingale looked at the clock. It was early afternoon now. "How long does it take to get a warrant to see private CCTV footage here?"
"A warrant?" Sandy said surprised. "You don't think Belle's in on this somehow, do you? I'll just give her a call and she'll let us pop round and see it. It won't be a problem."
"Who's Belle?" I asked, wondering if she might be a relation. Things would be super awkward if she was. We'd have to ask for another officer to be assigned to us if she seemed in any way implicated.
"Mrs Gillespie, she runs the car park. She use to be a dinner lady at the school I went to. Now they've got a sixth form college on it now, so when she retired she figured there would be a need for cheap parking for older students." Sandy smiled. "She's a canny one is Belle, but she'd not be into anything that wasn't right. That's just not her."
"We won't know until we speak to her," Nightingale said. "Sometimes people can surprise you."
I doubted he meant any kind of good surprise, so I didn't say anything.
Nightingale went with Sandy to get the car, leaving me to hand our bags over to the sergeant of the smelly dog for safe keeping and possible drooling on.
"I'm probably going to regret asking this and it's not my business in the first place," Perez said, once the bag had been thankfully put on a shelf above dog height. "But you and your DCI, I'm getting the feeling there's more to it than him just having picked a PC to drag with him to the leg work."
Okay, now this was awkward. I really didn't want him doing any digging into what we did and what kind of cases we were involved in. "I've been assigned to DCI Nightingale for nearly three years," I said. "We're a very small department, we take cases like these stolen museum pieces."
Perez smiled. "I guess it's a bit different down in the smoke. We don't really have teams like that. Can't say I'm jealous really, more variety here. Stolen ponies one week, fishing dispute the next and maybe a bar fight between men coming back off the rigs. There's always enough to keep us busy."
It only occurred to me once we were outside that maybe he'd not been thinking about us secretly being some elite unit. Maybe he thought Nightingale had a thing for me or me for him. It was probably safer letting him assume that try to convince him otherwise. I mean Nightingale was a good looking guy and I had little doubt that if he wanted to direct that kind of affection towards me I'd probably be flattered enough to go why the hell not, it's worth trying anything once. But he hadn't, and right now, with things as strained as they had been between us I just wanted some sort of sign that he still trusted me and wanted me as his apprentice rather than just some kind of magical foot soldier in his fight against Faceless.
I should have talked with him about it before we'd ever left for Shetland. But the idea that maybe he really was regretting having me as an apprentice, especially as I was the one who'd shown Lesley magic and set her on the path that lead to her leaving, worried me enough that I hadn't said anything. I mean what if he didn't want me around anymore? I couldn't go back to being an ordinary PC on the beat, not after all I'd seen. So as I'd done with a couple of hated classes in school, I kept my head down, and hoped that it would either get better or that the final exams would hurry up and come.
Even if he'd stopped talking to me about much more than magical theory or that I needed to practice more, I still worried about him. Right now it was the cough that bothered me. Not because I was worried I might catch it, it was a left over of the cold I gave him in the first place, but that it was a sign he coming down with something nasty. Nightingale didn't know the meaning of take it easy at the best of times and working a case a few hundred miles from home was hardly the best of anything. Nightingale was still coughing periodically, but looked less green as we drove to the car park on Twageos Road. It turned out not to be that far and if the weather had been better I think we could have walked it in less than half an hour.
The car park was a small privately run affair and I suspected that it had started life as part of a very large back garden for the bungalow that stood fenced off in one corner of it. The bungalow turned out to be both the home and office of the owner of the car park. Belle Gillespie wasn't from Shetland. I got that the second she spoke. The accent was Glaswegian, although fortunately enough for us southerners tempered a bit perhaps by years away from the city to make it understandable.
About five foot two in her pink and white trainers, Belle had Clare tattooed on one plump hand and Kelly on the other. I suspected if she'd been a guy it would probably have been love and hate. About fifty at my best guess, had tough family matriarch stamped all over her. There wasn't much in the way of security around the car park, just a chain link fence and the CCTV camera mounted on a pole over the ticket machine. All the same, I wouldn't have played about in her car park and that was for sure.
"Sandy, man," she said, grabbing his hand and shaking it. "Is this work? Cannae be telling now you're not in uniform."
"Work. I was wondering if we could have a look at your CCTV from Monday morning."
"Do I want to know why?" she asked, waving us through into a room that seemed part bedroom and part CCTV control room.
"You know I can't tell you that," Sandy replied. "But you don't need to be worrying about your girls or anything, and I mean it."
"Alright then. You ain't going to be long, are you?" Belle said as she looked through a book case filled with tapes. "Closing the parking at five, I've got my grand kiddies round see."
"We will be as quick as we can," Sandy said. "If we find what we're looking for on it we will need to take the tape."
"That's alright by me." She laughed. "I'm easy like that."
Nightingale cleared his throat, while looking rather despairing about the whole situation. "If we may begin, Mrs Gillespie?"
"Right you are," Belle said shoving a video into a player.
It took a bit of fast-forwarding and rewinding to get to the right bit. The right bit being the part that proved Sandy had been right. Trolhoulland walked up the car park about ten minutes after leaving the Lerwick footage, still carrying the bag and not having had time to go else where on route. He'd definitely walked this way with the intention of getting to the car park.
He stood by the entrance barrier for a moment and then looked sharply round. The sound of a car horn was my guess. He started walking again and then stopped next to an incredibly muddy landrover. Trolhoulland paused to speak to the driver and then walked round and got into the front passenger seat next to them. A minute or so later the landrover drove out of the car park and out of sight of the camera.
Who the driver was was a mystery. The footage was so grainy we couldn't tell anything about them beyond the fact they existed. We rewound the tape to see when the landrover had arrived. It had only been about twenty minutes before, but fortunately for us the driver ad got out and put some money into the meter. The image wasn't great, but it seemed to show a man in a water proof coat with the hood up against the rain. Unfortunately, because there is always an unfortunately in these things as far as I can tell, he didn't once turn to face the camera. It shouldn't have been a problem, we should have been able to run the plates, but the plates were covered in mud and all we could get was that the last letter was a E or possibly a B.
Sandy called in what we'd found and put in a request to the DVLA for all early Defender series Landrovers on Shetland. It seemed like an act of desperation to me, but Sandy pointed out that there were less than ten thousand vehicles on Shetland and it was presumably registered in Shetland as Trolhoulland hadn't brought it over on the ferry with him.
Maybe we'd get a break, but I didn't feel like we could leave it at that for the day. Nightingale didn't either, so after a bit of talking things through between him and Sandy we headed for the Lerwick museum. The other less interesting archaeological finds from the 1976 excavation of Griminsta hut circle had ended up in storage there, so maybe our rock thief had been there asking questions before he'd gone to London.
The museum in Lerwick reminded me a bit of the one in London where the Pictish rocks had been taken from. Tucked away in a side street, it housed a little bit of everything. Stone bowls and axe heads, Victorian photographs of whiskery fishermen with harpoons, a scale model of a viking longship and a grey lump of what was apparently preserved butter dug up from a peat bog, were all neatly displaced in the few rooms that made up the public area of the museum.
Sandy knew the member of staff who came over to speak to us. Local knowledge was a handy thing, and in after a few minutes of Nightingale explaining what we needed, she'd shown us into the museums reading room and got out the register of who'd come in to look at things.
It wasn't a very long list and it only took us a few minutes to find Trolhoulland's name written in the book. It turned out he'd visited the reading room a grand total of once on the Sixteenth of December the previous year to look at the archaeological report for the Griminsta excavations. He'd also looked at a couple of other sites at Westerquarf and Jarlshof. We had a quick look at the reports and realised what they all had in common was a Pictish link and all had had carved stone balls found at them.
Hoping that our thief hadn't nicked them too, we asked after where the stones were. As it turned out they were both in Lerwick, held in the archive at the Shetland Amenity Trust. We could see them on Monday if we wanted to, Carrie, our super helpful museum assistant had told us. There wasn't much more we could do at the museum, so Nightingale called the Amenity Trust to ask about their stone balls and make an appointment to see them. I not sure I could have kept a straight face phone somebody up and asking to see their stone balls, Nightingale managed with not even the hint of a smile. Professionalism or no sense of humour? I had no idea.
It was pushing four o'clock when we got back to the station and it felt like we'd achieved sod all and now had more questions than we came with. I didn't want to be negative, but all we had was an accomplice with an old, muddy landrover and the information that Trolhoulland had visited the museum once back in December, when he read the report and then left. Unless we got something on the landrover we had nothing. I think Nightingale was feeling as negative about it all as I was, as he had his 'don't talk to me, unless you have something useful to say' frown on.
After a brief stop at our whiteboard to add what we'd found, we'd been ready to head to our B&B when Tosh came in. Heading over to Sandy she said, "Don't want to drop this on you, but Mr Leask has just called about his rocks again. He wants you to come this time, apparent I'm no use. Otherwise he said he was going to come to the station and demand to speak to our
Procurator Fiscal."
"Ms Kelly would love that," Sandy said, shaking his head. "I suppose I'd better go and talk to him again. Is it still pixies rearranging his rock garden when he's not looking? Or are we back to the one where his neighbour moves the wall in night and is slowly stealing his garden?"
"Rockery." Tosh gave him an apologetic smile. "I don't like dropping it on you, but I've got to go. I’ve already got it booked. I'll got next time."
Every police station had one. The persistent caller with the crazy stories. All Nightingale heard the word 'rocks' and decided that as remote as Mr Leask's rock garden being connected to Trolhoulland we'd have to go and rule it out just to be sure.
We took the road heading in the opposite direction from the one to Belle's car park this time and about ten minutes after we'd left the station Sandy parked the car in front of a rundown looking cottage. Around the cottage were rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Mostly from the beach at a guess, but some looked like they were just rubble from somewhere that had been demolished. There had been an attempt to arrange them into something that somebody might have generously called art.
Waiting for us at the door to the cottage was Mr Robbie Leask. Short and probably as round as he was tall, although as he was dressed a wardrobe full layers that I couldn't quite tell if he had any form of shape under them at all. Wiry grey hair poked out from under a grubby beanie hat, while the face underneath seemed like somebody had left eyes, nose and mouth in a sea of deeply etched wrinkles. You could have gravelled a road with his voice, as it sounded like he'd smoked about forty a day for last hundred years.
"About time they sent you," Robbie said as Sandy opened the gate. "No more being fobbed off with that wee lassie. She'd a pretty one I'll give you, but she'd got no time for the old ways." Robbie stopped and looked at me and Nightingale. "Who are they?"
"Colleagues from London. They are investigating a case that may link in with your own," Sandy replied. "This is Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale and Constable Grant."
Robbie seemed less than impressed. "I 'spose as I'd better show you my garden. Mind you don't be touching it. I can't have it touched."
We stood and listened, nodding in the right places, as me and Nightingale had a check for vestigia or anything that might suggest there was anything magical about Robbie's rocks. There wasn't. Not that I'd expected there to be.
"It's the Peerie folk, I'm telling you that," Robbie said stomping over to one of the rock piles. He peeled off the filthy fingerless mittens to reveal almost as dirty hands, then picked up one of the unremarkable stones. Then he stared at me. "People like YOU wouldn't understand."
I'm not normally lost for words, bur for a second couldn't actually believe Robbie had said it. I mean regardless of what the media might say about us being a post-racial society, there were those little Englanders who couldn't get beyond the colour of a person's skin. The point was that people tended to be less overt about their racism these days, especially in front of the police, which is why it took me by surprise. I was about to respond with a restrained under the circumstances 'People like what?' when Robbie glared Nightingale with far more distaste than he'd managed for me. He pointed cracked and grubby finger nail at him. "Him neither. None who’s not of the Old Rock, them don't see it."
Okay, so Robbie had it in for anybody not from Shetland. It was better than the alternative, but not by much. I hoped Robbie's attitude wasn't common on Shetland or our investigation would be made a lot trickier than it already was.
"You though," Robbie shuffled over to Sandy and prodded him in the chest. "You're Mima's kin. I expected better of you. You more than any one I could ask. I don't think she was wrong in what she believed, touched by the sea trou.."
"No more of that, Robbie. Not know," Sandy said, taking a step back. "You called the police, you can't expect us to go chasing things from children's stories. It'll just be kids or the wind, like DS McIntosh told you the last time."
I wished that Sandy had let Robbie finish talking, as all I could come up with to end the sentence was sea trout and that really didn't make any sense. I mean pixies rearranging your rock garden wasn't likely, but telling somebody they are touched by a fish is just gibberish. I was also pretty certain that I was now going to have the Monty Python fish slapping sketch going through my head for the rest of the day.
"You might try to act like you're not of the Old Rock for these city boys, but I know you Alexander Wilson. I know you and your kind. It'll out before the wind changes, you mark my words." Robbie grinned, all gums. "Then where'll you be. They won't be having you then, you city friends. Now off with the lot of you. I'm busy."
We left him muttering about us turning up uninvited and went back to the car.
"I'm sorry about that," Sandy said once we were driving back. "Robbie is getting on a bit now. He went to school with my grandmother back in the thirties. I don't think he'll be able to stay on there much longer on his own. It's sad really."
It was. I wondered if the old guy was just lonely, if that’s what the calls were about. The suspicious copper part of me still wondered if there was something Robbie was hiding. Nightingale didn’t say anything about it. He looked at bit preoccupied, I thought, although if it was about the case or the fact he was nearly old enough to be the guy’s granddad and he was a bit weirded out by it.
As interesting as a diversion to visit one of the local characters of Shetland was, it hadn't got us any closer to figuring out anything else about Trolhoulland's plans or who his accomplice might be. There wasn't much else we could do apart from call it a day, so Sandy took us back to the station to pick up our bags and then dropped us at our B&B.
Nightingale wasn’t even trying to hide the fact he was exhausted by the time we'd booked into the Sea View bed and breakfast and got our bags up to our rooms, which sadly didn't have a view of the sea at all. Any plans about scoping out anywhere by ourselves wasn't going to happen, so we decided on getting some food and then sleep. We ended up going to a takeaway simply because it was nearest to the B&B, rather than because we believed the sign outside stating they had the best fish and chips in Shetland. It was actually pretty good fish, mainly because it had been swimming about in the sea a couple of days ago.
Talking through the case this evening or taking another look around the car park was out of the question, as Nightingale disappeared into his room shortly after we got back to the B&B. I briefly thought about going out and seeing what actually went on in Lerwick on a Saturday night before decided I was too tired to be bothered either. Nightingale's room was across the hall from mind, and heard him coughing a few times in the night, but I was tired enough that once I'd finally got to sleep I stayed that way until morning.
TBC
Notes.
Perez, Sandy, Tosh, Sergeant Billy McBride and his dog which is always on the scrounge for food are from Shetland. Belle, the museum assistant and the very strange Robbie Leask are made up for this story. The police station is the one shown in the series Shetland and isn't the real Lerwick central police station. The other locations, with the exception of Belle's car park and the B&B, do all exist.
Part three: TBC Thursday 18th Sept.
Part one here: http://the-silver-sun.livejournal.com/241194.html
Being as it was the main police station for the whole of Shetland I’d expected Lerwick Central to be rather bigger than it was, which was about the size of the nick in Camden. I wondered if there wasn’t much crime here or if it was because there weren’t many people to commit crime the first place. I eventually settled on it being down to a bit both. All the same it was warm, dry and the floor didn’t try to throw you off your feet, so it was about a million times better than the St Clair had been.
Sandy showed us through to an office that had police stamped all over it and then went to get us some coffee. Nightingale sat down in a chair and started looking at a copy of the local newspaper, presumably in the hope of spotting something that might be connected to our magical theft. Which left me holding the bags and looking out of the window at dismal looking grey stone buildings along and the treeless landscape rising behind them. It only reinforced my belief that the far north of Scotland wasn't the natural home of the London Copper.
DI Perez arrived before Sandy got back with our drinks. He proved to be a shortish man in his late forties with gingery hair and an impressive collection of freckles. I couldn't help but wonder if there was a trend for ginger Scottish blokes to have names that really didn't sound like they were. Dr Walid would probably know how to do the stats on that or laugh that it was too small a sample size to conclude anything.
Perez, or Jimmy as told us we could call him when they weren't dealing with the public, seemed like a class bloke. Anybody who suggests tea and a stack of bacon sandwiches to go with a briefing was alright by me. I wondered if it was a usual thing or if it was them showing us Londoners that they knew how to run things up here thank you very much.
I had little doubt they knew what they were doing, but the place seemed a little bit behind the times. Kind of like I'd gone into a police station back in the late Nineties. Actual paper notice boards on the wall rather than virtual ones, old chunky backed computer monitors rather than flat screens and and piles of paper files on desks. I wondered whether this was part of the whole North-South funding divide that politicians said was a thing of the past and comedians still jokes about. Or maybe it was urban versus rural. Maybe they didn't want or need anything newer. Part of me wanted to believe that, the rest of me was more sceptical.
The one thing that Lerwick Central had which Camden didn't was a dog. A shaggy, black and white collie type had sidled into the room shortly after the sandwiches had arrived and proceeded to stare at Sandy until he'd given him some. It then did the same with Perez. Eventually, after making a circuit of the room, it lay down under Sandy's desk. I wondered if it was his dog, but the look on Sandy's face when it started drooling in its sleep over his shoe made me think otherwise. After some complaining a uniformed sergeant came and took the dog back out to where it had a basket under the front desk.
Sandy was more reserved now we were back at the station, there seemed to be something sad about him. Not sad like when kids say it when they mean boring or rubbish, just preoccupied and unhappy. The third detective, Alison McIntosh, or Tosh as everybody seemed to call her, was about my age and definitely fell into the category of cute. She also looked like she'd give as good as she got, so winding her up would probably end with me looking like a complete tit, and I would have thoroughly deserved it. The fact that I was noticing that, I decided meant that I was definitely feeling a lot better now that I was back on dry land.
"We've set up a room with a whiteboard and if you need it there's a projector you can use, just get Sergeant McBride, Billy, to sign it out for you. He's knows where the spare bulbs are if it blows again," Perez said as he showed us through to a what was probably a spare interview room. "If we get a major case we might need it back, but hopefully it shouldn't take too long for you wrap up your case, so you should be alright. You just let us know what you need and we'll see if we can come to an arrangement."
It had to be a bit awkward for DI Perez with Nightingale technically outranking him. I hoped it wouldn't end up being an issue. Although the only situation that it would be was if Nightingale tried to order people to do stuff Perez didn't want them to do. I doubted he would unless thinks were starting to go very wrong as we were operating far more under the radar here than we would have been in London.
"Our main issue, beside the obvious need to find our suspect, is one of transport," Nightingale said. "The loan of an unmarked car would be helpful and would the assistance of somebody with local knowledge."
"We've not got a spare we can loan out at the moment. But Sandy knows more about Shetland and Lerwick than just about anyone I know, on or off the force," Perez said, "If it's local knowledge that you need he'll know or know where to find out. So for the duration of your investigation I've assigned Sandy to help you, including being your driver while you're here. Apart from on Tuesday evening, if that's alright with you DCI Nightingale."
"What happens on Tuesday?" Nightingale asked. He sounded less than happy about having somebody along for the ride and I suspected that as soon as we were done here we'd be looking for somewhere that did hire cars so we could leave Sandy at the station to take any incoming calls.
"Nothing usually," Tosh said, sounding a little glum about it. "That's Shetland for you, but it's the last Tuesday in January, so it's Up Helly Aa."
Yeah, I had no idea what that meant. Neither did Nightingale if the look on his face was anything to go by. Or maybe he was trying not to start coughing again. Either was possible.
"It's a fire festival. The largest in Europe," Sandy said when nobody else had taken pity on us and told us what it was. "It's been going on in one form or another for more than a hundred years. There are parades, music and the like in the day and it ends at night when we burn the longship. People come from all over the world to see it."
That was us told. There was a definite sense of national pride there and I couldn't help but wonder if Trolhoulland did actually turn out to be some magical nationalist nut if Sandy could be a bit a problem. Conflict of interests and all that. I wanted to think that as a police officer he'd be able to separate his own feelings from the job, but then so had Lesley and look how that had turned out.
After our quick tour of the station. Here are the interview rooms, the loos and so on, Nightingale made it clear he was going to start work on the case today. So we filled Sandy in on what we had so far and asked whether he'd been able to get the CCTV footage we'd requested. We'd sent a CCTV print from the museum in London of Grava Trolhoulland and the time his ferry should have docked in Lerwick on ahead of us.
Sandy, as it turned out had done better than just find the right camera and get the footage, he'd already reviewed it and picked up Trolhoulland leaving Victoria Quay and heading into Lerwick on foot. Short, a couple of inches short of five foot tall, thin, wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a large holdall, he'd been pretty distinctive and we had little difficultly following him from one camera to the next as he made his way through town.
I'd hoped that that we'd see him get picked up in a car so we could trace a number plate or even better head into a hotel, where we could go and arrest him. Case closed. It didn't happen, but when are we ever that lucky? Trolhoulland continued on foot, walking along the Esplanade until he finally left the view of the camera.
"That's it I'm afraid," Sandy said. He took a proper old school VHS video out of its player. "That the extent of the CCTV coverage on that road. There isn't anything much until you get out to the new shopping complex at Clickimmin a mile or so away. It's an odd route to go to get there, he'd have been better off heading onto Scalloway Road and getting the bus."
The idea that some people have that they are watched everywhere they go just isn't true. Okay it was probably mostly true in London, but once you got out of urban areas there wasn't anything much watching you. And right now that was a bit of a problem.
"What do we do now?" I asked. I hoped that the answer wasn't go door to door down the Esplanade and onto Twageos Road, which was were Trolhoulland had gone when we'd lost sight of him.
"There's not much down there," Sandy said. "There's a secondary school, some houses and a private car park. He'll have met somebody at the car park. Probably assumed that they won't be seen there."
"Why do you think he's meeting somebody?" Nightingale asked. "We haven't got any information that would suggest he wasn't acting alone. Unless you have found anything more?"
Sandy paused and I got the impression he was thinking of something to say that wouldn't sound like he thought he was more clued up than his DCI about the case. "I don't know for certain," he said eventually. "But you said he'd been in London for a while, at least a couple of weeks. If he'd left his car parked there for so long people would have noticed. People look out for each other up here."
"Does the car park have CCTV?" I asked. Because if it didn't it was no use at all. I supposed we could get a have you seen this man poster done and put it up in the car park in the hope somebody might recognise him, but doing that meant admitting we were already out of ideas.
Sandy nodded.
Nightingale looked at the clock. It was early afternoon now. "How long does it take to get a warrant to see private CCTV footage here?"
"A warrant?" Sandy said surprised. "You don't think Belle's in on this somehow, do you? I'll just give her a call and she'll let us pop round and see it. It won't be a problem."
"Who's Belle?" I asked, wondering if she might be a relation. Things would be super awkward if she was. We'd have to ask for another officer to be assigned to us if she seemed in any way implicated.
"Mrs Gillespie, she runs the car park. She use to be a dinner lady at the school I went to. Now they've got a sixth form college on it now, so when she retired she figured there would be a need for cheap parking for older students." Sandy smiled. "She's a canny one is Belle, but she'd not be into anything that wasn't right. That's just not her."
"We won't know until we speak to her," Nightingale said. "Sometimes people can surprise you."
I doubted he meant any kind of good surprise, so I didn't say anything.
Nightingale went with Sandy to get the car, leaving me to hand our bags over to the sergeant of the smelly dog for safe keeping and possible drooling on.
"I'm probably going to regret asking this and it's not my business in the first place," Perez said, once the bag had been thankfully put on a shelf above dog height. "But you and your DCI, I'm getting the feeling there's more to it than him just having picked a PC to drag with him to the leg work."
Okay, now this was awkward. I really didn't want him doing any digging into what we did and what kind of cases we were involved in. "I've been assigned to DCI Nightingale for nearly three years," I said. "We're a very small department, we take cases like these stolen museum pieces."
Perez smiled. "I guess it's a bit different down in the smoke. We don't really have teams like that. Can't say I'm jealous really, more variety here. Stolen ponies one week, fishing dispute the next and maybe a bar fight between men coming back off the rigs. There's always enough to keep us busy."
It only occurred to me once we were outside that maybe he'd not been thinking about us secretly being some elite unit. Maybe he thought Nightingale had a thing for me or me for him. It was probably safer letting him assume that try to convince him otherwise. I mean Nightingale was a good looking guy and I had little doubt that if he wanted to direct that kind of affection towards me I'd probably be flattered enough to go why the hell not, it's worth trying anything once. But he hadn't, and right now, with things as strained as they had been between us I just wanted some sort of sign that he still trusted me and wanted me as his apprentice rather than just some kind of magical foot soldier in his fight against Faceless.
I should have talked with him about it before we'd ever left for Shetland. But the idea that maybe he really was regretting having me as an apprentice, especially as I was the one who'd shown Lesley magic and set her on the path that lead to her leaving, worried me enough that I hadn't said anything. I mean what if he didn't want me around anymore? I couldn't go back to being an ordinary PC on the beat, not after all I'd seen. So as I'd done with a couple of hated classes in school, I kept my head down, and hoped that it would either get better or that the final exams would hurry up and come.
Even if he'd stopped talking to me about much more than magical theory or that I needed to practice more, I still worried about him. Right now it was the cough that bothered me. Not because I was worried I might catch it, it was a left over of the cold I gave him in the first place, but that it was a sign he coming down with something nasty. Nightingale didn't know the meaning of take it easy at the best of times and working a case a few hundred miles from home was hardly the best of anything. Nightingale was still coughing periodically, but looked less green as we drove to the car park on Twageos Road. It turned out not to be that far and if the weather had been better I think we could have walked it in less than half an hour.
The car park was a small privately run affair and I suspected that it had started life as part of a very large back garden for the bungalow that stood fenced off in one corner of it. The bungalow turned out to be both the home and office of the owner of the car park. Belle Gillespie wasn't from Shetland. I got that the second she spoke. The accent was Glaswegian, although fortunately enough for us southerners tempered a bit perhaps by years away from the city to make it understandable.
About five foot two in her pink and white trainers, Belle had Clare tattooed on one plump hand and Kelly on the other. I suspected if she'd been a guy it would probably have been love and hate. About fifty at my best guess, had tough family matriarch stamped all over her. There wasn't much in the way of security around the car park, just a chain link fence and the CCTV camera mounted on a pole over the ticket machine. All the same, I wouldn't have played about in her car park and that was for sure.
"Sandy, man," she said, grabbing his hand and shaking it. "Is this work? Cannae be telling now you're not in uniform."
"Work. I was wondering if we could have a look at your CCTV from Monday morning."
"Do I want to know why?" she asked, waving us through into a room that seemed part bedroom and part CCTV control room.
"You know I can't tell you that," Sandy replied. "But you don't need to be worrying about your girls or anything, and I mean it."
"Alright then. You ain't going to be long, are you?" Belle said as she looked through a book case filled with tapes. "Closing the parking at five, I've got my grand kiddies round see."
"We will be as quick as we can," Sandy said. "If we find what we're looking for on it we will need to take the tape."
"That's alright by me." She laughed. "I'm easy like that."
Nightingale cleared his throat, while looking rather despairing about the whole situation. "If we may begin, Mrs Gillespie?"
"Right you are," Belle said shoving a video into a player.
It took a bit of fast-forwarding and rewinding to get to the right bit. The right bit being the part that proved Sandy had been right. Trolhoulland walked up the car park about ten minutes after leaving the Lerwick footage, still carrying the bag and not having had time to go else where on route. He'd definitely walked this way with the intention of getting to the car park.
He stood by the entrance barrier for a moment and then looked sharply round. The sound of a car horn was my guess. He started walking again and then stopped next to an incredibly muddy landrover. Trolhoulland paused to speak to the driver and then walked round and got into the front passenger seat next to them. A minute or so later the landrover drove out of the car park and out of sight of the camera.
Who the driver was was a mystery. The footage was so grainy we couldn't tell anything about them beyond the fact they existed. We rewound the tape to see when the landrover had arrived. It had only been about twenty minutes before, but fortunately for us the driver ad got out and put some money into the meter. The image wasn't great, but it seemed to show a man in a water proof coat with the hood up against the rain. Unfortunately, because there is always an unfortunately in these things as far as I can tell, he didn't once turn to face the camera. It shouldn't have been a problem, we should have been able to run the plates, but the plates were covered in mud and all we could get was that the last letter was a E or possibly a B.
Sandy called in what we'd found and put in a request to the DVLA for all early Defender series Landrovers on Shetland. It seemed like an act of desperation to me, but Sandy pointed out that there were less than ten thousand vehicles on Shetland and it was presumably registered in Shetland as Trolhoulland hadn't brought it over on the ferry with him.
Maybe we'd get a break, but I didn't feel like we could leave it at that for the day. Nightingale didn't either, so after a bit of talking things through between him and Sandy we headed for the Lerwick museum. The other less interesting archaeological finds from the 1976 excavation of Griminsta hut circle had ended up in storage there, so maybe our rock thief had been there asking questions before he'd gone to London.
The museum in Lerwick reminded me a bit of the one in London where the Pictish rocks had been taken from. Tucked away in a side street, it housed a little bit of everything. Stone bowls and axe heads, Victorian photographs of whiskery fishermen with harpoons, a scale model of a viking longship and a grey lump of what was apparently preserved butter dug up from a peat bog, were all neatly displaced in the few rooms that made up the public area of the museum.
Sandy knew the member of staff who came over to speak to us. Local knowledge was a handy thing, and in after a few minutes of Nightingale explaining what we needed, she'd shown us into the museums reading room and got out the register of who'd come in to look at things.
It wasn't a very long list and it only took us a few minutes to find Trolhoulland's name written in the book. It turned out he'd visited the reading room a grand total of once on the Sixteenth of December the previous year to look at the archaeological report for the Griminsta excavations. He'd also looked at a couple of other sites at Westerquarf and Jarlshof. We had a quick look at the reports and realised what they all had in common was a Pictish link and all had had carved stone balls found at them.
Hoping that our thief hadn't nicked them too, we asked after where the stones were. As it turned out they were both in Lerwick, held in the archive at the Shetland Amenity Trust. We could see them on Monday if we wanted to, Carrie, our super helpful museum assistant had told us. There wasn't much more we could do at the museum, so Nightingale called the Amenity Trust to ask about their stone balls and make an appointment to see them. I not sure I could have kept a straight face phone somebody up and asking to see their stone balls, Nightingale managed with not even the hint of a smile. Professionalism or no sense of humour? I had no idea.
It was pushing four o'clock when we got back to the station and it felt like we'd achieved sod all and now had more questions than we came with. I didn't want to be negative, but all we had was an accomplice with an old, muddy landrover and the information that Trolhoulland had visited the museum once back in December, when he read the report and then left. Unless we got something on the landrover we had nothing. I think Nightingale was feeling as negative about it all as I was, as he had his 'don't talk to me, unless you have something useful to say' frown on.
After a brief stop at our whiteboard to add what we'd found, we'd been ready to head to our B&B when Tosh came in. Heading over to Sandy she said, "Don't want to drop this on you, but Mr Leask has just called about his rocks again. He wants you to come this time, apparent I'm no use. Otherwise he said he was going to come to the station and demand to speak to our
Procurator Fiscal."
"Ms Kelly would love that," Sandy said, shaking his head. "I suppose I'd better go and talk to him again. Is it still pixies rearranging his rock garden when he's not looking? Or are we back to the one where his neighbour moves the wall in night and is slowly stealing his garden?"
"Rockery." Tosh gave him an apologetic smile. "I don't like dropping it on you, but I've got to go. I’ve already got it booked. I'll got next time."
Every police station had one. The persistent caller with the crazy stories. All Nightingale heard the word 'rocks' and decided that as remote as Mr Leask's rock garden being connected to Trolhoulland we'd have to go and rule it out just to be sure.
We took the road heading in the opposite direction from the one to Belle's car park this time and about ten minutes after we'd left the station Sandy parked the car in front of a rundown looking cottage. Around the cottage were rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Mostly from the beach at a guess, but some looked like they were just rubble from somewhere that had been demolished. There had been an attempt to arrange them into something that somebody might have generously called art.
Waiting for us at the door to the cottage was Mr Robbie Leask. Short and probably as round as he was tall, although as he was dressed a wardrobe full layers that I couldn't quite tell if he had any form of shape under them at all. Wiry grey hair poked out from under a grubby beanie hat, while the face underneath seemed like somebody had left eyes, nose and mouth in a sea of deeply etched wrinkles. You could have gravelled a road with his voice, as it sounded like he'd smoked about forty a day for last hundred years.
"About time they sent you," Robbie said as Sandy opened the gate. "No more being fobbed off with that wee lassie. She'd a pretty one I'll give you, but she'd got no time for the old ways." Robbie stopped and looked at me and Nightingale. "Who are they?"
"Colleagues from London. They are investigating a case that may link in with your own," Sandy replied. "This is Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale and Constable Grant."
Robbie seemed less than impressed. "I 'spose as I'd better show you my garden. Mind you don't be touching it. I can't have it touched."
We stood and listened, nodding in the right places, as me and Nightingale had a check for vestigia or anything that might suggest there was anything magical about Robbie's rocks. There wasn't. Not that I'd expected there to be.
"It's the Peerie folk, I'm telling you that," Robbie said stomping over to one of the rock piles. He peeled off the filthy fingerless mittens to reveal almost as dirty hands, then picked up one of the unremarkable stones. Then he stared at me. "People like YOU wouldn't understand."
I'm not normally lost for words, bur for a second couldn't actually believe Robbie had said it. I mean regardless of what the media might say about us being a post-racial society, there were those little Englanders who couldn't get beyond the colour of a person's skin. The point was that people tended to be less overt about their racism these days, especially in front of the police, which is why it took me by surprise. I was about to respond with a restrained under the circumstances 'People like what?' when Robbie glared Nightingale with far more distaste than he'd managed for me. He pointed cracked and grubby finger nail at him. "Him neither. None who’s not of the Old Rock, them don't see it."
Okay, so Robbie had it in for anybody not from Shetland. It was better than the alternative, but not by much. I hoped Robbie's attitude wasn't common on Shetland or our investigation would be made a lot trickier than it already was.
"You though," Robbie shuffled over to Sandy and prodded him in the chest. "You're Mima's kin. I expected better of you. You more than any one I could ask. I don't think she was wrong in what she believed, touched by the sea trou.."
"No more of that, Robbie. Not know," Sandy said, taking a step back. "You called the police, you can't expect us to go chasing things from children's stories. It'll just be kids or the wind, like DS McIntosh told you the last time."
I wished that Sandy had let Robbie finish talking, as all I could come up with to end the sentence was sea trout and that really didn't make any sense. I mean pixies rearranging your rock garden wasn't likely, but telling somebody they are touched by a fish is just gibberish. I was also pretty certain that I was now going to have the Monty Python fish slapping sketch going through my head for the rest of the day.
"You might try to act like you're not of the Old Rock for these city boys, but I know you Alexander Wilson. I know you and your kind. It'll out before the wind changes, you mark my words." Robbie grinned, all gums. "Then where'll you be. They won't be having you then, you city friends. Now off with the lot of you. I'm busy."
We left him muttering about us turning up uninvited and went back to the car.
"I'm sorry about that," Sandy said once we were driving back. "Robbie is getting on a bit now. He went to school with my grandmother back in the thirties. I don't think he'll be able to stay on there much longer on his own. It's sad really."
It was. I wondered if the old guy was just lonely, if that’s what the calls were about. The suspicious copper part of me still wondered if there was something Robbie was hiding. Nightingale didn’t say anything about it. He looked at bit preoccupied, I thought, although if it was about the case or the fact he was nearly old enough to be the guy’s granddad and he was a bit weirded out by it.
As interesting as a diversion to visit one of the local characters of Shetland was, it hadn't got us any closer to figuring out anything else about Trolhoulland's plans or who his accomplice might be. There wasn't much else we could do apart from call it a day, so Sandy took us back to the station to pick up our bags and then dropped us at our B&B.
Nightingale wasn’t even trying to hide the fact he was exhausted by the time we'd booked into the Sea View bed and breakfast and got our bags up to our rooms, which sadly didn't have a view of the sea at all. Any plans about scoping out anywhere by ourselves wasn't going to happen, so we decided on getting some food and then sleep. We ended up going to a takeaway simply because it was nearest to the B&B, rather than because we believed the sign outside stating they had the best fish and chips in Shetland. It was actually pretty good fish, mainly because it had been swimming about in the sea a couple of days ago.
Talking through the case this evening or taking another look around the car park was out of the question, as Nightingale disappeared into his room shortly after we got back to the B&B. I briefly thought about going out and seeing what actually went on in Lerwick on a Saturday night before decided I was too tired to be bothered either. Nightingale's room was across the hall from mind, and heard him coughing a few times in the night, but I was tired enough that once I'd finally got to sleep I stayed that way until morning.
TBC
Notes.
Perez, Sandy, Tosh, Sergeant Billy McBride and his dog which is always on the scrounge for food are from Shetland. Belle, the museum assistant and the very strange Robbie Leask are made up for this story. The police station is the one shown in the series Shetland and isn't the real Lerwick central police station. The other locations, with the exception of Belle's car park and the B&B, do all exist.
Part three: TBC Thursday 18th Sept.