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silver_sunNorthern Lights - Part 3 of 6
Sunday morning dawned cold, grey and wet. Not that seeing the sunrise meant getting up early, not here at this time of year, it didn't start to get light until about half eight in the morning. I hadn't particularly wanted to leave my bed when my alarm went off at seven, it was warm and dry and I suspected that once we left the B&B I wouldn't be that again until evening. I didn't really have much choice as I could already hear Nightingale moving about and coughing. So I made the effort to get up and look something like presentable and went down for breakfast.
Nightingale was already there and he looked rough. Not rough by most peoples’ standards admittedly, he was still dressed and smart in one of those three piece suits that look so good on him, his hair combed and his tie done in a fancy knot that I'd probably end up choking myself with if I attempted it. He still looked worse than when we'd got of the St Clair, all grey and pasty from not enough sleep, and that was saying something.
I knew he must be feeling dire as he didn't attempt to discuss the case with me over breakfast, something we'd got into a habit of at the Folly. Not that you could really call it eating breakfast, he hardly touched his, and I could imagine Molly giving him one of her deeply unnerving stares should he have left so much at home. I wasn't sure when I'd started calling the Folly home, but it felt right, so it didn't bother thinking about it. What did bother me was Nightingale, or rather the fact that he was ignoring the fact he looked like death warmed up. So after a short discussion, which was mostly me trying to talk sense and him not wanting to listen, I somehow managed to persuade him that we should stop at Boots or whatever it was they had up here and get something so he didn't spend the entire day coughing over everybody.
As it was we didn't, mainly because we couldn't find anywhere open. Well not apart from a pub on the quayside which seemed to catered to men coming in off the North Sea oil rigs who wanted a double vodka at nine on a Sunday morning. As we walked up to Lerwick Central I soon came to the conclusion that nothing happens in Shetland on a Sunday. I think that they should have that printed on the top of any tourist brochures to give any would be holiday makers fair warning. Fortunately for us Sandy seemed to be only too happy to give up his day off and drive us around, and he'd agreed to meet us there at about eleven. We could have hired a car had anywhere been open to do so, but having somebody who actually knew where they were going was something that money couldn't buy. Especially as anywhere that sold maps of the island was also closed.
Despite sounding like he was attempting to cough up a lung, Nightingale wouldn't hear of me heading out to Griminsta by myself. Pointing out that Sandy would be there too didn't seem to help either. Griminsta had been where our magical rocks had been found and the archaeological report on then had suggested that they might have been part of a set. If our museum thief had stolen them because of their magic storage properties and was looking for the rest, then we could run in problems of a variety that your average copper couldn’t deal with. He had a point and it wasn't like I could order him not to go.
The main reason for the visit to the station was to check whether there was any CCTV anywhere near where we were going. There wasn't. In fact as far as I could tell there was only widespread CCTV in Lerwick and Scalloway, plus whatever individual companies had arranged for themselves elsewhere. The only other thing of note was that the Up Helly Aa thing was happening in a couple of days which meant that Shetland was currently full of people who weren't locals. So asking people about anybody who wasn't local wasn't likely to help. Assuming of course that Trolhoulland wasn't local to start with. For all we knew his thieving trip to London could have been the first time he'd ever left Shetland. The DVLA hadn't got back to us either about the landrover, so we headed out to Griminsta to have a look round.
The Tesco at Clickimmin was open when we drove past and Nightingale actually went in and got some cough mixture. He took as much of it as he could, not that it seemed to make much difference. I hoped he'd picked up some painkillers as well, although if he had they weren't touching the headache that I knew he'd got. I could always tell when he had one as he'd be snappier than usual and rubbed his temples when he thought I wasn't looking. I guessed he didn't want me to worry about him, not with the whole manky cauliflower magic brain thing. But after everything that had happened it kind of hurt that he didn't feel able to let his guard down around me and admit he wasn't feeling great. I mean what did he think I was going to do? I wasn't going to go all Lesley on him. Did he really think that I might? I hoped not. It had been hard enough losing Lesley over what she'd done without ending up losing Nightingale over it as well.
I tried not to think about it by looking out of the window and trying to remember the route out to Griminsta, in case Nightingale and me needed to make our own way out here at some point in the near future. I gave up after a while. Everywhere looked the same. Narrow roads with views of rocky inlets and wide sandy beaches, there were a few fields along the coast, but for the most part it looked like grim, featureless moorland with the occasional rock poking up out of the peat for variety. If I'd thought Lerwick was pretty small for a town then the villages that we drove through Griminsta were tiny. How half a dozen houses clustered together around a small beach or along the side of a road qualified as a village I didn't know. I couldn't imagine living in a place like this. I wondered how young people in Shetland occupied themselves or whether they moved to somewhere like Edinburgh as soon as they were old enough for a bit of life and excitement.
I thought about asking Sandy, but starting a conversation with 'How to do manage to live here without dying of boredom?' isn't ever likely to go down well. If Nightingale was thinking anything he wasn't sharing it with me. Which was something that was happening with worrying frequency these days.
"Here we are," Sandy said suddenly. He pulled the car into what looked like a passing place on a narrow road in the middle of nowhere.
Even Nightingale looked surprised. "Are you certain? There doesn't seem to be anything here."
Sandy actually looked offended at that, although he didn't sound it when he said, "I'm sure. I've been here a couple of times before. Not recently, but the site has been here since the Bronze Age. I doubt it has moved."
It was a bit of hike out to where the stones had been found. Sandy lead the way, looking totally at ease with the place. He'd not even bothered to bring a map with him. The path, such as it was, was just a narrow line where the grass was marginally shorter than it was elsewhere, and I doubted I've have noticed it without him having pointed it out first. That said, I suspected that had our situation been reversed he'd have been as out of his depth in the heart of London. But at least London came with road signs and people.
Griminsta was empty. I'm not sure I'd ever seen a place that was quite so full of nothing. Why had anybody ever chosen to live there? Had the weather been better? Did Shetland have its own weird backwards global warming? Anti warming? Or had something happened to the place? Could it have been connected with the Pictish stones? Maybe Robbie Leask had been right about rocks controlling the weather up here? It was at that point I decided that the emptiness was getting to my brain if my brain was agreeing with Leask.
There was nothing to indicate that anybody else had been up here recently, so after a little bit of discussion we spread out, walking about ten metres from each other across the site, looking for anything out of place. If nothing else it gave me and Nightingale a chance to check for vestigia or anything else weird about the place.
I'd not expected to find anything and after about ten minutes I decided that if I didn't find anything soon I'd ask Nightingale if there was some other way we could do a search of the place. I hoped he'd get what I meant, as it was pretty awkward having Sandy along now we were here.
Sandy waved and then called out, "I think I've found something."
We hurried over to him. Well I hurried, Nightingale walked and still seemed a bit out of breath. Although a glare from him stopped me from asking him if he wanted me to slow down.
What Sandy had found was a small hole. The sides were too neat for it to have been made by an animal. Nothing in nature digs square holes apart from a person with a spade. There was always a chance that it was completely unconnected, but I doubted it.
I crouched down, combining having a look at it with a quick check for vestigia. There was a hint of something magical. Nothing particularly strong, although I suspected that if we'd had Toby with us he'd have been able to follow it or find more.
Somebody and I was willing to be that it was Trolhoulland or maybe landrover driving friend, had either got something magical out of the ground here or been doing something to site. What I had no idea, the vestigia was faint, I got the smell of salt water and feeling like mossy stones. Closing my eyes, I tried to get something more. Sadness. There was definitely a sense of loss there, not painful like it had just happened. Something old that had never gone away.
"Peter." I heard Nightingale say rather more sharply than he usually would. "Have you found anything?"
I looked round sharply to see both Nightingale and Sandy staring at me. Nightingale I could understand, he was probably trying to figure out what the vestigia meant too. Sandy looked hurriedly elsewhere like he didn't want to be caught looking. At what? I wondered. Not the hole, he'd already looked at that? At me? Had he been checking me out? Okay, now that was embarrassing all round. Being checked out by another guy or anyone else for that matter in front of Nightingale wasn't something I wanted. I was still flattered, I guess, but I wasn't interested in that kind of thing at the moment.
There was the outside chance I guess that he was staring because he realised that I was looking for magic and it had taken him by surprise, but it seemed a whole lot less likely that him checking me out. I mean a copper is far more likely to be gay or bi than he is to have magical ability.
.
We were saved from any further weirdness by me spotting that we weren't alone. Standing on low rise about thirty metres away and looking back at us was a man. It didn't take a genius to figure out who the short, slight, tweed wearing and spade carrying individual was. “That’s him, Trolhoulland," I said.
"Well get after him," Nightingale said.
I didn't need telling twice and after calling "Stop, Police!" I ran towards him. There was a brief moment when I was moving and Trolhoulland wasn't and then he turned and ran like hell.
I'm no slouch at running and neither was Sandy who was keeping pace with me, but running over the uneven ground, where your feet suddenly sunk into the peat under you or tangled grasses threaten to trip you up did slow us down. It should have slowed Trolhoulland down as well, but he easily outstripped us both, almost seeming to fly across moorland and he was soon lost from view amongst the deep peat cuttings higher on the moor.
Sandy stopped first. Leaning forward, hands braced on his knees as he got his breath back. There wasn't any point tearing off by myself, I had no idea where we were. In London I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but here, where I knew there were peat bogs I could sink into without trace I didn't want to chance it. I'd never hear the last of it from Nightingale if we missed catching Trolhoulland because he'd had to come and get me out of some mud.
"Where's your DCI?" Sandy asked as he looked past me and back the way we'd come.
That was a damn good point. I'd expected Nightingale to be just a few paces behind us now we'd stopped, but he was nowhere to be seen. Which was odd as there didn't seem to be anywhere much that he could have gone. The landscape was bare apart from the rough, knee-high grasses that spread out all around us.
"Would he have gone off the path?" Sandy asked. He sounded worried and I couldn't find any fault with that.
"I don't know." If he'd though he had a chance of cutting the guy off he would have or if he wanted to use some magic to try and slow the guy down without Sandy seeing. I'd not felt any formae so I guessed it hadn't been that. It didn't make any sense for Nightingale to have left the path either. He didn't know the place any better than I did. I gave one last look in the direction of where we'd lost our potential suspect and then headed back to find Nightingale.
As we reached the top of a slope, Sandy suddenly broke into a run. It took me a second to see why, and then I pelted down the track after him.
Nightingale was sitting on a tumble of stones at the edge of a track. Hunched forwards, he had one hand pressed to his chest, the other pushed against his knee in an attempt not to fall forwards and face plant in the mud.
As I stopped in front of him, Nightingale looked up and glared at me. "Please tell me you didn't let him go on purpose."
I wanted to snap 'Why the hell would I do that?' at him, and ask him if he thought all this was all somehow my fault. I didn't because I was more worried than I was pissed off. The last time I'd heard him sound this rough was after he'd picked up a chest infection following my first fight with Faceless. He'd been laid up for a few days and not right for a couple of weeks afterwards. "We'd already lost him," I said. "It was like chasing Usain Bolt."
Nightingale gave me a baffled look that I recognised as one of his 'I have no idea what you are talking about, and no I don't want it explained to me either' stares. He could say as much with a stare as Molly could, and I suspected that they could probably hold a whole conversation without saying word if they wanted to.
"I don't think I've ever seen anybody run so fast, not across the peat hags like that," Sandy said. He looked back up the track to were we'd lost sight of Trolhoulland. "He can certainly move for a little old guy."
"Apparently so," Nightingale said, then hurriedly muffled more coughs into a handkerchief.
"Are you going to be able to walk back the car?" Sandy said, when he'd done. "If you don't think you can I'll call..." He paused for a moment, looked around, like he was deciding exactly where we were before finishing, "Pauly Hanson, he's got one of those quad bikes for getting out to his sheep. He won't mind giving you a lift. His brother Davy is one of the Special Constables."
I guessed this was what they meant by community policing. Everybody knew everybody else and was probably related to them or worked with them or something. It was also why it wasn't likely work anywhere that had a bigger or more mobile population than an island the size of Shetland.
"I am quite capable of walking, thank you," Nightingale said irritably. He got to his feet, waving dismissively at Sandy who'd offered him assistance.
Why Nightingale was in such a mood at Sandy I wasn't sure. Although when I thought about it he had been a bit short with him after the thing with Belle Gillespie's CCTV. I didn't get it. Sandy seemed like a nice helpful bloke who and Nightingale was normally Mr politeness itself when dealing with people. Well unless said people started throwing magic about and then he was probably
Nightingale managed to get back to the car, but it was a close run thing and I suspected that he was running on nothing but sheer bloody mindedness by the time sat down in the back. Which would have sort of been okay if we'd been at the end of an investigation and he been able to take it easy for a while. We didn't, so after a brief stop at Lerwick Central, to record the fact that we'd seen Trolhoulland at Griminsta, we headed back Sea View, where we could talk in private about Trolhoulland, Griminsta and the vestigia without anybody else listening in.
Sandy dropped us off at the end of the street where our B&B was, and said he'd pick us up at eight the next morning, unless we preferred to walk to the station. Nightingale had spoken first and told him yes, we would prefer it. Sandy looked a little hurt, but had said that the weather would be better and maybe some fresh air would be better than his car.
I was going to ask Nightingale what had got him in such a mood when, about half way up the street, he began coughing again. And he went on coughing until he had to sit down on low wall that ran in front of the houses. I was seriously starting to worry that he wasn't going to be able to stop or breathe or something when he finally did.
Red in the face and sweating and shivering, he had a hand pressed against his chest again. All in all, I decided, he really wasn't well and running about after Trolhoulland hadn't helped. Neither had the cough mixture from the sounds of things. I sat down next to him. "Are you going to be alright? Do you need anything?" Apart from Dr Walid to talk sense into you about resting, I thought, because he seemed to be the only person who Nightingale listened to with any degree of frequency.
"I just need a moment to get my breath back," Nightingale replied. He still sounded wheezy and about to start coughing at any moment. "You're making fuss about nothing."
"You call this nothing?" I said. I was surprised at just how annoyed I sounded and I hoped that he got I was worried rather than angry. Actually scrap that, I wasn't just worried I was scared for him, and I really didn't like how that felt. "You can't breathe properly. You're in pain too, aren't you?"
"You're being ridiculous," Nightingale said irritably. "It's only a cold. One you gave me as I seem to remember."
Way to make be feel even worse, why don't you? "And what if it's not? I can't do this by myself," I said. Okay that had sounded far more personal that I'd meant it to. Or was that wanted it to? I wasn't sure what I meant, because all I could see was Nightingale being too bloody stubborn to get chest pains checked out. All the same I felt I had to backpedal a bit out of it and I added. "I mean I don't have the authority to lead the case if you can't. Perez or Tosh could overrule me or take me off the case if they wanted to. I'd have no say in it. We're not in London anymore. We've not got Seawoll or Frank Cafferty or even Dr Walid to back us up if this goes wrong. Sir, please. For the case, if nothing else, just to make sure you're alright."
I'm not the sort of person to beg anybody to do anything, and I'm sure Nightingale knows that, as the next thing he said was, "Perhaps you're right, Peter. The case must come first."
So after phoning for a taxi we spent the rest of the afternoon in Lerwick's A&E department waiting for Nightingale to be checked over. Maybe that was a bit of an over reaction on my part, but there was nowhere else that would see him at such short notice and once you mention chest pain doctors generally start listening. It helped that weren't that many people in the A&E either. If every where had population levels like Shetland I suspected that the NHS would make its waiting time targets every time.
I don't like hospitals much. They have a noise and smell to them that I just can't ever get used to.
"Just a chest infection," Nightingale said, making a poor job of not sounding relieved that it hadn't been anything worse. "Nothing to worry about. A few days of antibiotics and I'll be fine."
I didn't point out that I'd been right and he had needed seeing, it was a pretty hollow kind of victory. So I said, "Do we need to wait for them to write a prescription or anything?"
Nightingale nodded, sat down on a seat next to me and handed me the bit of paper he needed to hand in at the dispensary. "If you wouldn't mind, Peter."
I didn't, I was just relieved he trusted me to do it. It was early evening by the time we headed out of Lerwick General and picked up something to eat on the He looked absolutely worn out by the time we got back to the B&B, but made enough of an attempt at eating it that I wasn't quite so worried about him.
We'd ended up eating in my room as Nightingale said he didn't want the lingering smell of sweet and sour chicken lingering in his room. I didn't really either, but I opened the windows for a bit, before deciding it was too cold. Then Nightingale went back to his to try and sleep.
This meant that I was alone in my room with more thoughts than I liked. It didn't have a telly and with Nightingale asleep and no useful access to anything to do with the case and no transport I decided to the only thing open to me to avoid those thoughts. I'd go to the pub and see what people were talking about. Maybe I'd get a lead. It seemed about as likely to succeed as anything else we'd tried. Maybe I'd bump into Trolhoulland again.
The first pub I came across was the Thule Bar on the Esplanade overlooking Victoria Quay. It looked like the sort of place you wouldn’t go into without backup back in London, but I saw a couple of students types heading over there, so not to be out done by a couple of eighteen year old girls I decided why the hell not and went in as well.
It was a pub. Not a trendy bar, just an old fashioned style boozer with a solid wood bar, slightly tacky floor and dartboard in one corner and a jukebox in the other. The beers on offer weren't familiar. Three hand pull ales from a brewery somewhere in Shetland and McEwans lager. I think it was the first time I'd been to a pub and not seen Stella or Carling at the bar.
"What sort of thing do you normally drink?"
I turned to see Sandy, sitting at one of the corner tables. Drinking alone after the end of a shift either meant you were Billy No-Mates because you'd done something to massively piss off everybody in the station or it had been a tough one where you wanted to get ratted and not have any comments from well meaning colleagues about it. It wasn't after a shift and Sandy didn't seem to be doing either. If he'd been trying to get hammered beer wasn't the way to go, but he was definitely alone and nobody was paying him any attention. All in all he seemed to be fitting into the place about as well as I was.
"Lager, usually," I replied.
"I'd go with the Simmer Dim then," Sandy said. "White Wife is a bit heavier and Auld Rock is more like Guinness."
"Thanks." I ordered my pint, was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it was about half the price I'd pay in London and then said, "Do you mind if I join you?"
"No. I...No," Sandy said not sounding entirely sure. But he moved up so that there was room on the tatty leatherette bench seat for me to sit next to him.
"Look if you're waiting for a date or something I can go somewhere else," I said, hoping that it wasn't the wrong thing to say and that he'd not just been dumped or something. Although that would have explained the down in the dumps look about him.
"No, nothing like that." He looked into his pint and said glumly. "Not much chance of meeting anybody here."
Given that I had the suspicion he'd been checking me out earlier, I had an idea of what he meant, and I doubted Lerwick or anywhere else in Shetland for that matter had much of a gay scene. I didn't Sitting in a pub by yourself isn't all that much fun unless you're out on the pull. Sitting in the pub with somebody who you barely know and who is about as chatty as a barstool is worse. He drank his pint, offered to get me one, which I declined, and bought another for himself.
I guess he must have realised that the whole sitting there drinking in silence thing wasn't much fun, so after having drunk about a quarter of his new pint he said, "How's your DI? He didn't sound too good earlier."
"Trying to sleep," I said, hoping that was the truth. It didn't feel right to mention the trip to hospital. What if Sandy told Perez and we ended up off the case? "I think he over did it bit today."
Sandy gave me a sympathetic look. "I hope he feels better in the morning."
Despite my earlier intentions to try and find a lead I found I didn't want to always be talking shop. I mean there did have to be a line between on and of duty, didn't there? It wasn't possible to maintain that with Nightingale. He never seemed to be off duty. Without Lesley there to talk about normal stuff, like films or music, what you fancied doing with your day off or what you'd buy if you won the Lottery, everything had ended up being about work or magic. Which for me came down to the same thing. So I talked to Sandy about anything else I could think of. I found out a lot of random facts about Shetland in the process. Like it doesn't have a cinema, although one was opening soon. That the Scandinavian feel about the place was down to the fact that it had belonged to Norway until about five hundred years ago, and unlike much of the British Empire they'd not had to fight for it. They were given it as part of deal made over a royal wedding.
Jimmy Perez had been right about Sandy, he really did seem to know just about everything about Shetland. He had the sort of memory for facts that made me wonder just why he was still a constable. He had to be a good ten years older than me. There generally was a reason why somebody got stuck at constable, either they hadn't got the ability to rise to a higher role or they had no ambition to do so.
I couldn't see either applying to Sandy. There was always the possibility that he started late in the police. I'd gone to Hendon straight after sixth form. Maybe he'd worked for a few years first doing something else? I knew his accent was Scottish and I knew enough about Scottish accents to know the difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but that was about it. He seemed to know a lot about Shetland and Perez had said as much when he'd been assigned to them. So I decided to go with safe, “Have you been working here long?”
“As a detective only eight months, but I’ve been in the force for nearly ten years.”
Now that was odd. If you stayed on the beat that long it was because you liked it. Either that or he’d stuffed up his exams for detective constable about a dozen times. He didn’t seem like an idiot to me, so I was about to ask why the change of direction, when he told me.
“You’re wondering why, aren’t you?” he said and then sighed. “I might as well tell you. It’s common knowledge around the station. It was because my Grandmother died.” He looked down. “She was murdered.”
“That’s awful,” I said. What else was there to say? "I wouldn’t have thought there was much of that up here.”
“There isn’t,” he said and drank some more of his pint. “I never expected to see that sort of violence here. To find her…” He stopped, hand tight on the glass that I was worried it would break. “I’d never seen what I shotgun could do until then.”
And now I felt spectacularly crappy for bringing it up. Sandy seemed like a good bloke. A bit quiet and by the rules, but sound. Finding your granny done in with a shotgun was pretty damn hard core awful anywhere, even in the worst bits of Brixton or Tower Hamlets people didn’t go round wasting old ladies with a twelve bore.
Sandy sighed and pushed his drink away. "I expect things like that are common in London. Violent crime. Murders. You probably deal with them all the time."
"Only because there are more people," I said, still feeling awful for him. "It doesn't mean it's easier when you do. And never with family. Not like that."
He was quiet for a moment, then sighed again and got up. "I should go home. I'm not very good company tonight."
Now I'm the first to admit that I'm shit at dealing feelings and stuff, regardless of whether they are my own or other peoples. However, Sandy looked so unhappy I couldn't help but blame myself for bringing up the subject in the first place. I doubted he was likely to do much more than go and get drunk in private and it wasn't my business how he coped with it, but he'd been assigned to me and Nightingale, and if he wasn't in a fit state to work tomorrow and it screwed up the case as a result I was going to blame myself. Nightingale might too and I could do without that.
"Hey, wait! I shouldn't have asked," I called after him as I followed him out of the pub. "It's none of my business."
Sandy turned and then shoved his hands into his pockets against the cold and leant back against the wall. "It was a year ago yesterday. That I found her. It's not your fault. I thought if I worked, if I was busy..." He shook his head. "I think Perez was more worried about me being alone than working. He let me work back then too. Not on that case, but other on other things. I needed to, I don't do sitting around."
Now that I could understand, I didn't do waiting and letting stuff happen either. If anything like that had happened to somebody I knew I doubted I'd have been able not to look into it. That took some dedication to the rules be able to step back like that and not get involved. My earlier worries about him not being able separate work and his own opinions on Scottish independence seemed pretty well unfounded now.
I looked at the warm glow coming from the chip shop just down the road. It wasn't that long really since I'd eaten with Nightingale, but I'd not had any lunch and something to help mop up the two and bit pints I'd had wouldn't be a terrible idea. So we ended up getting fish and chips and sitting in the bus terminal waiting room out of the rain to eat them. We didn't talk any more about the case or about whether Sandy had been checking me out earlier, because if he had he certainly didn't seem to be doing it now and I didn't want to lead him on. Instead, Sandy told me more about Shetland, about how he'd grown up on an island just off the mainland and how he could never imagine living elsewhere. So I'd told him about London, about how different it was from Lerwick and how I couldn't see myself working anywhere else.
Eventually we had to call it a night as we both had to be up for work in the morning. Sandy headed off home which was apparently a flat somewhere nearby to where the ferry went over to the island of Bressay, where his family lived, and I went back to Sea View.
TBC Hopefully on Thursday 25th Sept, but no later than Sunday 28th Sept.
Notes:
The Thule bar is a real pub in Lerwick and I drank in it a few times. I'm not sure what the bar normally has on tap now, but seeing all the local stuff as draft and very little seemed to be the norm when I was there (although that is getting on for 15 years back) Well the local beers and vodka. Lots vodka. Shetland is the only place I've been where the standard measures for vodka were doubles or triples.
The murder of Sandy's gran, Mima Wilson, is how the first episode of the first series of Shetland starts, with him out on his beat as a uniformed police constable on his bicycle.
Sandy being gay is not canon. Him being single and there being no mention of any form of relationship past or present is. All the other main characters relationships have been shown - Perez is a widower with a teenage step-daughter who he shares custody with with her biological father. While Tosh's ex boyfriend, who dumped her not long before they were due to get married, still works in a hotel bar in Lerwick. In the first two episodes we meet pretty much all of Sandy's family (dad, aunts, uncles, grandfather, cousins etc) due to plot.
The relatively small population and number vehicles on Shetland is used as a plot point in of the Shetland episodes - when they are looking for a car.
As to why Sandy was staring at Peter, well that will be revealed in time. All I'll say is that things are really not as they immediately seem.
Sunday morning dawned cold, grey and wet. Not that seeing the sunrise meant getting up early, not here at this time of year, it didn't start to get light until about half eight in the morning. I hadn't particularly wanted to leave my bed when my alarm went off at seven, it was warm and dry and I suspected that once we left the B&B I wouldn't be that again until evening. I didn't really have much choice as I could already hear Nightingale moving about and coughing. So I made the effort to get up and look something like presentable and went down for breakfast.
Nightingale was already there and he looked rough. Not rough by most peoples’ standards admittedly, he was still dressed and smart in one of those three piece suits that look so good on him, his hair combed and his tie done in a fancy knot that I'd probably end up choking myself with if I attempted it. He still looked worse than when we'd got of the St Clair, all grey and pasty from not enough sleep, and that was saying something.
I knew he must be feeling dire as he didn't attempt to discuss the case with me over breakfast, something we'd got into a habit of at the Folly. Not that you could really call it eating breakfast, he hardly touched his, and I could imagine Molly giving him one of her deeply unnerving stares should he have left so much at home. I wasn't sure when I'd started calling the Folly home, but it felt right, so it didn't bother thinking about it. What did bother me was Nightingale, or rather the fact that he was ignoring the fact he looked like death warmed up. So after a short discussion, which was mostly me trying to talk sense and him not wanting to listen, I somehow managed to persuade him that we should stop at Boots or whatever it was they had up here and get something so he didn't spend the entire day coughing over everybody.
As it was we didn't, mainly because we couldn't find anywhere open. Well not apart from a pub on the quayside which seemed to catered to men coming in off the North Sea oil rigs who wanted a double vodka at nine on a Sunday morning. As we walked up to Lerwick Central I soon came to the conclusion that nothing happens in Shetland on a Sunday. I think that they should have that printed on the top of any tourist brochures to give any would be holiday makers fair warning. Fortunately for us Sandy seemed to be only too happy to give up his day off and drive us around, and he'd agreed to meet us there at about eleven. We could have hired a car had anywhere been open to do so, but having somebody who actually knew where they were going was something that money couldn't buy. Especially as anywhere that sold maps of the island was also closed.
Despite sounding like he was attempting to cough up a lung, Nightingale wouldn't hear of me heading out to Griminsta by myself. Pointing out that Sandy would be there too didn't seem to help either. Griminsta had been where our magical rocks had been found and the archaeological report on then had suggested that they might have been part of a set. If our museum thief had stolen them because of their magic storage properties and was looking for the rest, then we could run in problems of a variety that your average copper couldn’t deal with. He had a point and it wasn't like I could order him not to go.
The main reason for the visit to the station was to check whether there was any CCTV anywhere near where we were going. There wasn't. In fact as far as I could tell there was only widespread CCTV in Lerwick and Scalloway, plus whatever individual companies had arranged for themselves elsewhere. The only other thing of note was that the Up Helly Aa thing was happening in a couple of days which meant that Shetland was currently full of people who weren't locals. So asking people about anybody who wasn't local wasn't likely to help. Assuming of course that Trolhoulland wasn't local to start with. For all we knew his thieving trip to London could have been the first time he'd ever left Shetland. The DVLA hadn't got back to us either about the landrover, so we headed out to Griminsta to have a look round.
The Tesco at Clickimmin was open when we drove past and Nightingale actually went in and got some cough mixture. He took as much of it as he could, not that it seemed to make much difference. I hoped he'd picked up some painkillers as well, although if he had they weren't touching the headache that I knew he'd got. I could always tell when he had one as he'd be snappier than usual and rubbed his temples when he thought I wasn't looking. I guessed he didn't want me to worry about him, not with the whole manky cauliflower magic brain thing. But after everything that had happened it kind of hurt that he didn't feel able to let his guard down around me and admit he wasn't feeling great. I mean what did he think I was going to do? I wasn't going to go all Lesley on him. Did he really think that I might? I hoped not. It had been hard enough losing Lesley over what she'd done without ending up losing Nightingale over it as well.
I tried not to think about it by looking out of the window and trying to remember the route out to Griminsta, in case Nightingale and me needed to make our own way out here at some point in the near future. I gave up after a while. Everywhere looked the same. Narrow roads with views of rocky inlets and wide sandy beaches, there were a few fields along the coast, but for the most part it looked like grim, featureless moorland with the occasional rock poking up out of the peat for variety. If I'd thought Lerwick was pretty small for a town then the villages that we drove through Griminsta were tiny. How half a dozen houses clustered together around a small beach or along the side of a road qualified as a village I didn't know. I couldn't imagine living in a place like this. I wondered how young people in Shetland occupied themselves or whether they moved to somewhere like Edinburgh as soon as they were old enough for a bit of life and excitement.
I thought about asking Sandy, but starting a conversation with 'How to do manage to live here without dying of boredom?' isn't ever likely to go down well. If Nightingale was thinking anything he wasn't sharing it with me. Which was something that was happening with worrying frequency these days.
"Here we are," Sandy said suddenly. He pulled the car into what looked like a passing place on a narrow road in the middle of nowhere.
Even Nightingale looked surprised. "Are you certain? There doesn't seem to be anything here."
Sandy actually looked offended at that, although he didn't sound it when he said, "I'm sure. I've been here a couple of times before. Not recently, but the site has been here since the Bronze Age. I doubt it has moved."
It was a bit of hike out to where the stones had been found. Sandy lead the way, looking totally at ease with the place. He'd not even bothered to bring a map with him. The path, such as it was, was just a narrow line where the grass was marginally shorter than it was elsewhere, and I doubted I've have noticed it without him having pointed it out first. That said, I suspected that had our situation been reversed he'd have been as out of his depth in the heart of London. But at least London came with road signs and people.
Griminsta was empty. I'm not sure I'd ever seen a place that was quite so full of nothing. Why had anybody ever chosen to live there? Had the weather been better? Did Shetland have its own weird backwards global warming? Anti warming? Or had something happened to the place? Could it have been connected with the Pictish stones? Maybe Robbie Leask had been right about rocks controlling the weather up here? It was at that point I decided that the emptiness was getting to my brain if my brain was agreeing with Leask.
There was nothing to indicate that anybody else had been up here recently, so after a little bit of discussion we spread out, walking about ten metres from each other across the site, looking for anything out of place. If nothing else it gave me and Nightingale a chance to check for vestigia or anything else weird about the place.
I'd not expected to find anything and after about ten minutes I decided that if I didn't find anything soon I'd ask Nightingale if there was some other way we could do a search of the place. I hoped he'd get what I meant, as it was pretty awkward having Sandy along now we were here.
Sandy waved and then called out, "I think I've found something."
We hurried over to him. Well I hurried, Nightingale walked and still seemed a bit out of breath. Although a glare from him stopped me from asking him if he wanted me to slow down.
What Sandy had found was a small hole. The sides were too neat for it to have been made by an animal. Nothing in nature digs square holes apart from a person with a spade. There was always a chance that it was completely unconnected, but I doubted it.
I crouched down, combining having a look at it with a quick check for vestigia. There was a hint of something magical. Nothing particularly strong, although I suspected that if we'd had Toby with us he'd have been able to follow it or find more.
Somebody and I was willing to be that it was Trolhoulland or maybe landrover driving friend, had either got something magical out of the ground here or been doing something to site. What I had no idea, the vestigia was faint, I got the smell of salt water and feeling like mossy stones. Closing my eyes, I tried to get something more. Sadness. There was definitely a sense of loss there, not painful like it had just happened. Something old that had never gone away.
"Peter." I heard Nightingale say rather more sharply than he usually would. "Have you found anything?"
I looked round sharply to see both Nightingale and Sandy staring at me. Nightingale I could understand, he was probably trying to figure out what the vestigia meant too. Sandy looked hurriedly elsewhere like he didn't want to be caught looking. At what? I wondered. Not the hole, he'd already looked at that? At me? Had he been checking me out? Okay, now that was embarrassing all round. Being checked out by another guy or anyone else for that matter in front of Nightingale wasn't something I wanted. I was still flattered, I guess, but I wasn't interested in that kind of thing at the moment.
There was the outside chance I guess that he was staring because he realised that I was looking for magic and it had taken him by surprise, but it seemed a whole lot less likely that him checking me out. I mean a copper is far more likely to be gay or bi than he is to have magical ability.
.
We were saved from any further weirdness by me spotting that we weren't alone. Standing on low rise about thirty metres away and looking back at us was a man. It didn't take a genius to figure out who the short, slight, tweed wearing and spade carrying individual was. “That’s him, Trolhoulland," I said.
"Well get after him," Nightingale said.
I didn't need telling twice and after calling "Stop, Police!" I ran towards him. There was a brief moment when I was moving and Trolhoulland wasn't and then he turned and ran like hell.
I'm no slouch at running and neither was Sandy who was keeping pace with me, but running over the uneven ground, where your feet suddenly sunk into the peat under you or tangled grasses threaten to trip you up did slow us down. It should have slowed Trolhoulland down as well, but he easily outstripped us both, almost seeming to fly across moorland and he was soon lost from view amongst the deep peat cuttings higher on the moor.
Sandy stopped first. Leaning forward, hands braced on his knees as he got his breath back. There wasn't any point tearing off by myself, I had no idea where we were. In London I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but here, where I knew there were peat bogs I could sink into without trace I didn't want to chance it. I'd never hear the last of it from Nightingale if we missed catching Trolhoulland because he'd had to come and get me out of some mud.
"Where's your DCI?" Sandy asked as he looked past me and back the way we'd come.
That was a damn good point. I'd expected Nightingale to be just a few paces behind us now we'd stopped, but he was nowhere to be seen. Which was odd as there didn't seem to be anywhere much that he could have gone. The landscape was bare apart from the rough, knee-high grasses that spread out all around us.
"Would he have gone off the path?" Sandy asked. He sounded worried and I couldn't find any fault with that.
"I don't know." If he'd though he had a chance of cutting the guy off he would have or if he wanted to use some magic to try and slow the guy down without Sandy seeing. I'd not felt any formae so I guessed it hadn't been that. It didn't make any sense for Nightingale to have left the path either. He didn't know the place any better than I did. I gave one last look in the direction of where we'd lost our potential suspect and then headed back to find Nightingale.
As we reached the top of a slope, Sandy suddenly broke into a run. It took me a second to see why, and then I pelted down the track after him.
Nightingale was sitting on a tumble of stones at the edge of a track. Hunched forwards, he had one hand pressed to his chest, the other pushed against his knee in an attempt not to fall forwards and face plant in the mud.
As I stopped in front of him, Nightingale looked up and glared at me. "Please tell me you didn't let him go on purpose."
I wanted to snap 'Why the hell would I do that?' at him, and ask him if he thought all this was all somehow my fault. I didn't because I was more worried than I was pissed off. The last time I'd heard him sound this rough was after he'd picked up a chest infection following my first fight with Faceless. He'd been laid up for a few days and not right for a couple of weeks afterwards. "We'd already lost him," I said. "It was like chasing Usain Bolt."
Nightingale gave me a baffled look that I recognised as one of his 'I have no idea what you are talking about, and no I don't want it explained to me either' stares. He could say as much with a stare as Molly could, and I suspected that they could probably hold a whole conversation without saying word if they wanted to.
"I don't think I've ever seen anybody run so fast, not across the peat hags like that," Sandy said. He looked back up the track to were we'd lost sight of Trolhoulland. "He can certainly move for a little old guy."
"Apparently so," Nightingale said, then hurriedly muffled more coughs into a handkerchief.
"Are you going to be able to walk back the car?" Sandy said, when he'd done. "If you don't think you can I'll call..." He paused for a moment, looked around, like he was deciding exactly where we were before finishing, "Pauly Hanson, he's got one of those quad bikes for getting out to his sheep. He won't mind giving you a lift. His brother Davy is one of the Special Constables."
I guessed this was what they meant by community policing. Everybody knew everybody else and was probably related to them or worked with them or something. It was also why it wasn't likely work anywhere that had a bigger or more mobile population than an island the size of Shetland.
"I am quite capable of walking, thank you," Nightingale said irritably. He got to his feet, waving dismissively at Sandy who'd offered him assistance.
Why Nightingale was in such a mood at Sandy I wasn't sure. Although when I thought about it he had been a bit short with him after the thing with Belle Gillespie's CCTV. I didn't get it. Sandy seemed like a nice helpful bloke who and Nightingale was normally Mr politeness itself when dealing with people. Well unless said people started throwing magic about and then he was probably
Nightingale managed to get back to the car, but it was a close run thing and I suspected that he was running on nothing but sheer bloody mindedness by the time sat down in the back. Which would have sort of been okay if we'd been at the end of an investigation and he been able to take it easy for a while. We didn't, so after a brief stop at Lerwick Central, to record the fact that we'd seen Trolhoulland at Griminsta, we headed back Sea View, where we could talk in private about Trolhoulland, Griminsta and the vestigia without anybody else listening in.
Sandy dropped us off at the end of the street where our B&B was, and said he'd pick us up at eight the next morning, unless we preferred to walk to the station. Nightingale had spoken first and told him yes, we would prefer it. Sandy looked a little hurt, but had said that the weather would be better and maybe some fresh air would be better than his car.
I was going to ask Nightingale what had got him in such a mood when, about half way up the street, he began coughing again. And he went on coughing until he had to sit down on low wall that ran in front of the houses. I was seriously starting to worry that he wasn't going to be able to stop or breathe or something when he finally did.
Red in the face and sweating and shivering, he had a hand pressed against his chest again. All in all, I decided, he really wasn't well and running about after Trolhoulland hadn't helped. Neither had the cough mixture from the sounds of things. I sat down next to him. "Are you going to be alright? Do you need anything?" Apart from Dr Walid to talk sense into you about resting, I thought, because he seemed to be the only person who Nightingale listened to with any degree of frequency.
"I just need a moment to get my breath back," Nightingale replied. He still sounded wheezy and about to start coughing at any moment. "You're making fuss about nothing."
"You call this nothing?" I said. I was surprised at just how annoyed I sounded and I hoped that he got I was worried rather than angry. Actually scrap that, I wasn't just worried I was scared for him, and I really didn't like how that felt. "You can't breathe properly. You're in pain too, aren't you?"
"You're being ridiculous," Nightingale said irritably. "It's only a cold. One you gave me as I seem to remember."
Way to make be feel even worse, why don't you? "And what if it's not? I can't do this by myself," I said. Okay that had sounded far more personal that I'd meant it to. Or was that wanted it to? I wasn't sure what I meant, because all I could see was Nightingale being too bloody stubborn to get chest pains checked out. All the same I felt I had to backpedal a bit out of it and I added. "I mean I don't have the authority to lead the case if you can't. Perez or Tosh could overrule me or take me off the case if they wanted to. I'd have no say in it. We're not in London anymore. We've not got Seawoll or Frank Cafferty or even Dr Walid to back us up if this goes wrong. Sir, please. For the case, if nothing else, just to make sure you're alright."
I'm not the sort of person to beg anybody to do anything, and I'm sure Nightingale knows that, as the next thing he said was, "Perhaps you're right, Peter. The case must come first."
So after phoning for a taxi we spent the rest of the afternoon in Lerwick's A&E department waiting for Nightingale to be checked over. Maybe that was a bit of an over reaction on my part, but there was nowhere else that would see him at such short notice and once you mention chest pain doctors generally start listening. It helped that weren't that many people in the A&E either. If every where had population levels like Shetland I suspected that the NHS would make its waiting time targets every time.
I don't like hospitals much. They have a noise and smell to them that I just can't ever get used to.
"Just a chest infection," Nightingale said, making a poor job of not sounding relieved that it hadn't been anything worse. "Nothing to worry about. A few days of antibiotics and I'll be fine."
I didn't point out that I'd been right and he had needed seeing, it was a pretty hollow kind of victory. So I said, "Do we need to wait for them to write a prescription or anything?"
Nightingale nodded, sat down on a seat next to me and handed me the bit of paper he needed to hand in at the dispensary. "If you wouldn't mind, Peter."
I didn't, I was just relieved he trusted me to do it. It was early evening by the time we headed out of Lerwick General and picked up something to eat on the He looked absolutely worn out by the time we got back to the B&B, but made enough of an attempt at eating it that I wasn't quite so worried about him.
We'd ended up eating in my room as Nightingale said he didn't want the lingering smell of sweet and sour chicken lingering in his room. I didn't really either, but I opened the windows for a bit, before deciding it was too cold. Then Nightingale went back to his to try and sleep.
This meant that I was alone in my room with more thoughts than I liked. It didn't have a telly and with Nightingale asleep and no useful access to anything to do with the case and no transport I decided to the only thing open to me to avoid those thoughts. I'd go to the pub and see what people were talking about. Maybe I'd get a lead. It seemed about as likely to succeed as anything else we'd tried. Maybe I'd bump into Trolhoulland again.
The first pub I came across was the Thule Bar on the Esplanade overlooking Victoria Quay. It looked like the sort of place you wouldn’t go into without backup back in London, but I saw a couple of students types heading over there, so not to be out done by a couple of eighteen year old girls I decided why the hell not and went in as well.
It was a pub. Not a trendy bar, just an old fashioned style boozer with a solid wood bar, slightly tacky floor and dartboard in one corner and a jukebox in the other. The beers on offer weren't familiar. Three hand pull ales from a brewery somewhere in Shetland and McEwans lager. I think it was the first time I'd been to a pub and not seen Stella or Carling at the bar.
"What sort of thing do you normally drink?"
I turned to see Sandy, sitting at one of the corner tables. Drinking alone after the end of a shift either meant you were Billy No-Mates because you'd done something to massively piss off everybody in the station or it had been a tough one where you wanted to get ratted and not have any comments from well meaning colleagues about it. It wasn't after a shift and Sandy didn't seem to be doing either. If he'd been trying to get hammered beer wasn't the way to go, but he was definitely alone and nobody was paying him any attention. All in all he seemed to be fitting into the place about as well as I was.
"Lager, usually," I replied.
"I'd go with the Simmer Dim then," Sandy said. "White Wife is a bit heavier and Auld Rock is more like Guinness."
"Thanks." I ordered my pint, was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it was about half the price I'd pay in London and then said, "Do you mind if I join you?"
"No. I...No," Sandy said not sounding entirely sure. But he moved up so that there was room on the tatty leatherette bench seat for me to sit next to him.
"Look if you're waiting for a date or something I can go somewhere else," I said, hoping that it wasn't the wrong thing to say and that he'd not just been dumped or something. Although that would have explained the down in the dumps look about him.
"No, nothing like that." He looked into his pint and said glumly. "Not much chance of meeting anybody here."
Given that I had the suspicion he'd been checking me out earlier, I had an idea of what he meant, and I doubted Lerwick or anywhere else in Shetland for that matter had much of a gay scene. I didn't Sitting in a pub by yourself isn't all that much fun unless you're out on the pull. Sitting in the pub with somebody who you barely know and who is about as chatty as a barstool is worse. He drank his pint, offered to get me one, which I declined, and bought another for himself.
I guess he must have realised that the whole sitting there drinking in silence thing wasn't much fun, so after having drunk about a quarter of his new pint he said, "How's your DI? He didn't sound too good earlier."
"Trying to sleep," I said, hoping that was the truth. It didn't feel right to mention the trip to hospital. What if Sandy told Perez and we ended up off the case? "I think he over did it bit today."
Sandy gave me a sympathetic look. "I hope he feels better in the morning."
Despite my earlier intentions to try and find a lead I found I didn't want to always be talking shop. I mean there did have to be a line between on and of duty, didn't there? It wasn't possible to maintain that with Nightingale. He never seemed to be off duty. Without Lesley there to talk about normal stuff, like films or music, what you fancied doing with your day off or what you'd buy if you won the Lottery, everything had ended up being about work or magic. Which for me came down to the same thing. So I talked to Sandy about anything else I could think of. I found out a lot of random facts about Shetland in the process. Like it doesn't have a cinema, although one was opening soon. That the Scandinavian feel about the place was down to the fact that it had belonged to Norway until about five hundred years ago, and unlike much of the British Empire they'd not had to fight for it. They were given it as part of deal made over a royal wedding.
Jimmy Perez had been right about Sandy, he really did seem to know just about everything about Shetland. He had the sort of memory for facts that made me wonder just why he was still a constable. He had to be a good ten years older than me. There generally was a reason why somebody got stuck at constable, either they hadn't got the ability to rise to a higher role or they had no ambition to do so.
I couldn't see either applying to Sandy. There was always the possibility that he started late in the police. I'd gone to Hendon straight after sixth form. Maybe he'd worked for a few years first doing something else? I knew his accent was Scottish and I knew enough about Scottish accents to know the difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but that was about it. He seemed to know a lot about Shetland and Perez had said as much when he'd been assigned to them. So I decided to go with safe, “Have you been working here long?”
“As a detective only eight months, but I’ve been in the force for nearly ten years.”
Now that was odd. If you stayed on the beat that long it was because you liked it. Either that or he’d stuffed up his exams for detective constable about a dozen times. He didn’t seem like an idiot to me, so I was about to ask why the change of direction, when he told me.
“You’re wondering why, aren’t you?” he said and then sighed. “I might as well tell you. It’s common knowledge around the station. It was because my Grandmother died.” He looked down. “She was murdered.”
“That’s awful,” I said. What else was there to say? "I wouldn’t have thought there was much of that up here.”
“There isn’t,” he said and drank some more of his pint. “I never expected to see that sort of violence here. To find her…” He stopped, hand tight on the glass that I was worried it would break. “I’d never seen what I shotgun could do until then.”
And now I felt spectacularly crappy for bringing it up. Sandy seemed like a good bloke. A bit quiet and by the rules, but sound. Finding your granny done in with a shotgun was pretty damn hard core awful anywhere, even in the worst bits of Brixton or Tower Hamlets people didn’t go round wasting old ladies with a twelve bore.
Sandy sighed and pushed his drink away. "I expect things like that are common in London. Violent crime. Murders. You probably deal with them all the time."
"Only because there are more people," I said, still feeling awful for him. "It doesn't mean it's easier when you do. And never with family. Not like that."
He was quiet for a moment, then sighed again and got up. "I should go home. I'm not very good company tonight."
Now I'm the first to admit that I'm shit at dealing feelings and stuff, regardless of whether they are my own or other peoples. However, Sandy looked so unhappy I couldn't help but blame myself for bringing up the subject in the first place. I doubted he was likely to do much more than go and get drunk in private and it wasn't my business how he coped with it, but he'd been assigned to me and Nightingale, and if he wasn't in a fit state to work tomorrow and it screwed up the case as a result I was going to blame myself. Nightingale might too and I could do without that.
"Hey, wait! I shouldn't have asked," I called after him as I followed him out of the pub. "It's none of my business."
Sandy turned and then shoved his hands into his pockets against the cold and leant back against the wall. "It was a year ago yesterday. That I found her. It's not your fault. I thought if I worked, if I was busy..." He shook his head. "I think Perez was more worried about me being alone than working. He let me work back then too. Not on that case, but other on other things. I needed to, I don't do sitting around."
Now that I could understand, I didn't do waiting and letting stuff happen either. If anything like that had happened to somebody I knew I doubted I'd have been able not to look into it. That took some dedication to the rules be able to step back like that and not get involved. My earlier worries about him not being able separate work and his own opinions on Scottish independence seemed pretty well unfounded now.
I looked at the warm glow coming from the chip shop just down the road. It wasn't that long really since I'd eaten with Nightingale, but I'd not had any lunch and something to help mop up the two and bit pints I'd had wouldn't be a terrible idea. So we ended up getting fish and chips and sitting in the bus terminal waiting room out of the rain to eat them. We didn't talk any more about the case or about whether Sandy had been checking me out earlier, because if he had he certainly didn't seem to be doing it now and I didn't want to lead him on. Instead, Sandy told me more about Shetland, about how he'd grown up on an island just off the mainland and how he could never imagine living elsewhere. So I'd told him about London, about how different it was from Lerwick and how I couldn't see myself working anywhere else.
Eventually we had to call it a night as we both had to be up for work in the morning. Sandy headed off home which was apparently a flat somewhere nearby to where the ferry went over to the island of Bressay, where his family lived, and I went back to Sea View.
TBC Hopefully on Thursday 25th Sept, but no later than Sunday 28th Sept.
Notes:
The Thule bar is a real pub in Lerwick and I drank in it a few times. I'm not sure what the bar normally has on tap now, but seeing all the local stuff as draft and very little seemed to be the norm when I was there (although that is getting on for 15 years back) Well the local beers and vodka. Lots vodka. Shetland is the only place I've been where the standard measures for vodka were doubles or triples.
The murder of Sandy's gran, Mima Wilson, is how the first episode of the first series of Shetland starts, with him out on his beat as a uniformed police constable on his bicycle.
Sandy being gay is not canon. Him being single and there being no mention of any form of relationship past or present is. All the other main characters relationships have been shown - Perez is a widower with a teenage step-daughter who he shares custody with with her biological father. While Tosh's ex boyfriend, who dumped her not long before they were due to get married, still works in a hotel bar in Lerwick. In the first two episodes we meet pretty much all of Sandy's family (dad, aunts, uncles, grandfather, cousins etc) due to plot.
The relatively small population and number vehicles on Shetland is used as a plot point in of the Shetland episodes - when they are looking for a car.
As to why Sandy was staring at Peter, well that will be revealed in time. All I'll say is that things are really not as they immediately seem.