Northern Lights (4/7)

[silver_sun]

Northern Lights part 4.

Monday morning turned out to be just as wet, cold and grey as Sunday had been and I didn't want to get out bed anymore than I had then. I did though, because I didn't want to be late and have Nightingale on at me about going out drinking when I had work in the morning. Not that I usually did, but he was always grumpy when he was ill, so playing it safe was the preferred strategy.

I got down to breakfast, looked around at all the new faces in the small dining room who'd arrived for Up Helly Aa and realised Nightingale wasn't there yet. I hoped he was having a lie in, he could certainly do with it. I ate my breakfast, listened to what the other people staying there were talking about, which was mainly that they hoped the weather would be better tomorrow, and waited for him to show up. When he hadn't appeared by ten to eight, I went up to his room and knocked on the door.

There wasn't a reply and I was about to knock again when he opened the door. Despite having lived at the Folly for the best part of three years seeing Nightingale in his pyjamas wasn't something that happened, so I ended up staring and generally being relieved that my boss's idea of nightwear was old fashioned, stripy, blue and white flannel pyjamas like the guy in the toothpaste advert, rather than just pants.

He looked vaguely annoyed at the fact I'd woken him up and then not told him why. Then he looked back at clock in his room.

If Nightingale swore, I'd never heard him, but he looked like he wanted to right now. That and hurl a tank busting size fireball at the offending alarm clock that had failed to wake him up. Personally I thought the clock had done him a favour, he didn't look like he should be getting up and going to work at all. My only consolation was that he didn't look worse than he had last night, so maybe that was a sign that the antibiotics would kick whatever bug he had out in short order.

"I am sorry, Peter," he said letting me into his room. "I can't remember the last time I overslept. I will be ready shortly."

That really didn't sound like the best of ideas as far as I was concerned. "Why don't I go in and find out if we've got any more leads and then I'll come get you when it's time to go to the Amenity Trust to look at their rocks?" I suggested. Then, seeing that he was trying to his the fact that he was shivering, added, "Or I could do that too and you could stay here and phone Greenwich and see if there's be anything happening around the museum? There's probably loads of leads to follow without you going to the station."

"While I appreciate what you are trying to do, it really isn't necessary. I am quite..." His protest that he was fine was cut short by a bout of coughing which ended up with him wheezing and generally looking like death warmed up.

"I think you should call in sick," I said as I handed him a glass of water from his bedside table. " I know you don't want to, but it might be for the best."

"Don't be ridiculous. I am quite capable of working. However, you might be right that my time might be best served away from the station," he said as he sat down on the end of his bed. "And while I would rather not send you out alone with Constable Wilson this is our third day here and we have no more idea what Trolhoulland doing than when we arrived. So please be careful and think before you act."

I still didn't get his dislike of Sandy. I was willing to put it down to the fact that he was under the weather and not liking having to work with somebody who we had to keep the magic side of our work secret from. If he kept on with it though, I knew it would get annoying pretty fast. I mean didn't he trust me to show any common sense at all? Or was that it? He didn't trust me anymore. I'd been the one who'd shown Lesley a werelight so maybe it was my fault that set her heading down her current path. Didn't he think that I felt awful enough about that as it was? Feeling awful about stuff seemed to be my default state lately and I was getting pretty tired of it, but I didn't know how to make any of it any better.

"Of course I will," I said, suddenly glad at the idea of spending at least part of the day away from him. I felt bad about thinking it, but then I knew I'd feel bad if I stayed or if I got him to come with me. I hate no win situations. "I'll see you later at the Amenity Trust. If anything comes up I'll call you."

The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle by the time I left the B&B to walk to Lerwick Central. It only took about fifteen minutes and I was looking forward to a hot cup of tea or coffee when I got there, followed by a bit of phoning around and chasing up the DVLA about the landrover.

"No DCI Nightingale this morning?" Sandy asked, looking around.

I wasn't sure whether he was relieved about that or not, and if he was why? I didn't want to start getting suspicious about him simply because Nightingale had. "Not yet. He's going to check out the Amenity Trust's rocks. He'll join us later, unless he finds something he needs to check out." I decided not to mention that the appointment with them wasn't until eleven and that I hoped he was going to try to rest as much as he could until then.

"Right. Has he told us what were supposed to do until then?"

Nightingale rarely gave me anything more than a vague outline of what needed doing. I was lucky to have such a hands off boss really, I knew there were some who tried to micro-manage everything about their team and that would really piss me off after a while. That said, sometimes it really did feel like he expected me to be a mind reader.

"Well," I began. "We need to see if the DVLA have got back to us and if they have if there's a way to narrow down the list, and I thought maybe I'd have a check of the electoral roll to see if Trolhoulland's on it. I don't suppose you still have phonebooks with people's names in it, do you?"

"We're not that far behind the times unfortunately." There was a slight smile on Sandy's face as he added wryly, "Although you'd never know it. We even have this thing called the internet."

He seemed happier than he had last night and I wondered how often he really got to talk to anybody. He seemed really friendly, but more than ninety percent of what he talked about was work or local trivia related. There was almost nothing about him, about what he liked or what he wanted. Whether it was because he was trying to be secretive about himself or whether he felt like people didn't want to know and he'd given up trying, I wasn't sure. I didn't like either option. I couldn't imagine him being into anything dodgy, but I didn't want to think that he was secretly horribly lonely and being ignored by everybody unless they wanted something from him. I suspected Nightingale would tell that if I put as much thought into my studies I'd be ready to learn some new formae, rather than keeping practicing the same few over and over again.

"I could get a map of the area around Griminsta and we could try to work out were Trolhoulland was running to," Sandy suggested. "He must have had a car parked nearby or his friend with the landrover did. There aren't many houses in that area and fewer roads. Perhaps we might be able to find somebody who saw something."

It sounded like a long shot, but we didn't have much else, so I said, "Right, you get the maps and I'll get some coffee."

Any plans immediately went out of window as we walked into the station. Sergeant Billy, his collie dog bounding about his feet, met us at the door. "There had been a report of a burning vehicle out on the Scousborough Road, near Bigton," he said, getting hold of the dog's collar and stopping it from leaping up at Sandy. "There's a fire crew in attendance. Perez and Tosh just left as there's reports of a body in the car. Only it's not a car it's a landrover. So this might be your case, they said to tell you. So you'd better be heading over there."

Well that was a crap start to the morning. If it was our mystery driver or Trolhoulland himself our only decent lead was going up in smoke. Literally.

"Thanks, Billy," Sandy said. Then turning to me said, "Do you want to call this in to your DCI?"

I should, I knew it. I also knew that it was terrible weather out and having Nightingale standing around in it would do him no favours at all. "I'll wait until we're sure it's connected," I said, feeling terribly disloyal about it. "His visit to the Amenity Trust might still be a better lead than this, I mean this might be nothing to do with it."

"Do you really think so?" Sandy said and we hurried out to his car.

I stopped and shook my head. "No, but it's worth making sure."

He gave me one of his slight smiles and said, "He's lucky to have somebody like you working with him."

"Like me?"

"Sensible and able to prioritise things. I can see why you got picked for a special unit," Sandy said as we pulled out of the station car park. "I expect there must have been some disappointed teams when you got picked for Social and Economic."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "Not at all. It was Nightingale who wanted me. I was headed for doing everybody else's paperwork at the Case Progression before he saw me."

The look Sandy gave me was priceless and for a second I wondered why, then I realised how it had sounded. Now I have my suspicions about what Nightingale was doing loitering about Covent Garden at one in the morning in his best suit, and it wasn't ghost hunting. But he'd never once done or said anything to me that suggested he wanted to do anything more with me than teach me magic and grumble about how nobody learns Latin these days.

"Not like that. I mean me and him, we aren't like that and that wasn't why he was interested in me," I said hurriedly, knowing the kind of rumours that would start to circulate if I didn't. "It was a case. I'd noticed something else about it and found a new witness and line of enquiry. He thought I'd be better working with him than stuck behind a desk."

"Sorry, I...Sorry," Sandy said, keeping his eyes firmly on the less than busy road. "I shouldn't have assumed something like that. It wasn't a professional thing to assume about your Inspector or you."

I mumbled something along the lines of it was okay, I could have put it better. I was just glad I'd not mentioned we lived together, now that would have been awkward to explain. We sat in silence for a while as we drove out of Lerwick and into the empty, tree-less moorland than seemed to cover most of Shetland.

The silence was almost as awkward, so eventually I said, "So this Up Helly Aa thing that's on tomorrow, you said it was a fire festival the other day. I don't suppose that it's got anything to do with this?"

"Why would it?" he replied as he slowed the car to avoid half a dozen sheep that had wandered into the road. "This is a burnt out car. Up Helly Aa has in one form or another been going on for centuries without incident. It's only the longship we burn."

"Oh, right." I looked out of the car window at the line of hills that abruptly ended in massive cliffs and tried not to think about the Wicker Man film. The original that is. Not the Nicholas Cage one. That shouldn't be thought of either, but that was because it was shit. But yeah, the whole Scottish Island, weird locals and ancient festival about burning things was actually a bit worrying. Maybe that was why Trolhoulland had picked this time of year to head up here; he was planning to do something at Up Helly Aa.

I decided not to share that idea with Sandy, as without going into the fact the rocks were magic and admitting I was getting my idea from classic horror films I had no reason to suggest it. I’d run it past Nightingale later. Maybe he'd even know what the Wickerman without me explaining it. There must have been some point in his life where popular culture was something he got.

The land rover had picked a pretty spectacular spot of coast to burn up on. Parked in a layby at the side of the road, there was a clear view up and down the coast for a couple of miles at least in either direction. One way was a wide sweep of a sandy beach and in the other was a sand bar that linked a small island just off the coast to the mainland.

"That's Scousborough Sands down there," Sandy said as we walked over to where the fire crew were making their final checks of the land rover before declaring it was safe. "The other one is Saint Ninian's Isle. It's a shame it's winter, this area is popular with hikers and campers in the summer. Not much chance of witnesses at this time of year."

Perez and Tosh were already firmly in charge of the situation, directing a few uniformed officers to check the area and put out some cone so people weren't driving through the crime scene. The person who'd called it in, a middle aged woman, was sitting in one of the police cars, her dial-a-ride mini-bus was parked behind it. There was no way I was going to get close enough to the landrover to check for vestigia, on the off chance that the fire had had a magical origin and I suspected that I'd have to wait until it was towed to where it would get thorough check for the how, where and when it caught fire.

We were quickly drafted in to help find any witnesses. I didn't mind too much as it was, with the exception of checking for magic the most useful thing I could be doing. There weren't many houses nearby and only two that were close enough that whoever lived there might have seen something. So Sandy and me took one and Perez went to the other taking a uniform with him, while Tosh stayed at the scene to liaise with the fire crew and wait for the coroner to arrive.

Our potential witness turned out to be an old lady who was busy feeding half a dozen chicken that milled around her front door. After checking the fact that we really were both police officers, she let us into her bungalow. Her name was Elsie Mowett and she was nearly eighty seven as she told us about eighteen times before we sat down in her kitchen. A quick chat, as I couldn't really think of it as an interview, later and we'd found out she'd seen the smoke from the fire, but thought nothing more about it. Her reasoning being it was too wet to hang the washing out, so it wasn't going to spoil anything, which made it none of her business. She seemed genuine and tried to offer us tea and biscuits. We didn't have any in the end, but Sandy did end up changing the lightbulb in her living room for her, because she couldn't reach.

After thanking her and Sandy making sure there wasn't anything else she needed a hand with, we headed back to the burnt out landrover and it decidedly crispy driver. Even though I'd not managed to get a good look at it I didn't think it was Trolhoulland. Even sitting down they appeared taller. Which brought me squarely back to the fact that this might be nothing to do with Trolhoulland at all.

As the body was in the drivers seat there was the possibility that maybe this was a tragic accident or even suicide. I didn't think this last option was very likely. Why choose self-immolation when there was a massive cliff not a hundred metres away that would have lead to a far faster and less painful end? Setting light to yourself was a statement, something that people did as a final, desperate way to get people to notice them and their cause. People didn't do it in a quiet layby, overlooking a picture postcard seascape. Or at least that was what we'd been taught at Hendon. There was something else going on here, I was sure of it.

I knew I was probably over stepping what somebody my rank should be asking, but Perez wasn't back and Tosh was talking to the ambulance crew who'd been sent to collect the body. So I took the opportunity to talk to senior fire officer and get an idea of what he thought was going on.

"There will have to be a thorough investigation," he said, taking off his helmet, now he was away from the charred remains of the landrover and its unfortunate driver. "But I can tell you that the fire was fiercest in the front of the vehicle, centred on the driver's seat. To get that kind of combustion an accelerant would have been needed."

"Deliberate?" I asked. "Or could it have been an unfortunate accident with cigarettes and bottle of vodka?"

The fireman shook his head.

"You don't think so?" Sandy asked, looking at where Tosh was organising photographs to be taken of the body before it was removed from the land rover.

"A burn this fierce is more indicative of lighter fluid or petrol."

"But that's not all, is it?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "I've been putting out fires here abouts for nearly twenty years and this is the first time I've ever seen the drivers hands tied to the wheel."

I looked at where the body was still sitting in the driver's seat, the mouth in its charred face open in a silent scream. I knew that could have been down to heat doing things to the muscles. At least I hoped so, because otherwise it meant the poor sod had been alive when somebody had set the fire.

Left messages at the the B&B and with Sergeant Billy that if Nightingale came in he was to call me back. One day I'd really have to work on convincing him that having his own mobile phone was actually a good idea. Maybe this would actually be a good example of why.

Perez and the uniform arrived back shortly after I'd left the messages. The occupants of the house he'd been to had seen nothing either. The husband was away on the rigs, not due back until a week on Thursday and the wife had been trying to get three children under ten ready for school.

Tosh was the one who provided us with our first solid bit of information. She'd called through to Billy and he'd made whatever calls he needed to and we'd got a hit on the number plate. The land rover was registered Andrew Sholto, no previous convictions and who lived about ten miles down the coast from where we were at a place called Virkie. Fortunately or possibly unfortunately if it turned out to be a waste of time Sholto's number plate had a B as its last letter. Just like the one that picked up Trolhoulland. It wasn't proof it was the same landrover, but it didn't rule it out either.

Without Nightingale there and no quick way of contacting him I knew I'd have to make a decision about whether I was going to get more involved in this investigation. Luckily for me when I mentioned it to Perez he was happy enough for me to come with him and Tosh to Sholto's house. This left Sandy without anything to do as it really didn't need all four of us to go and check out Sholto's place. So before I headed out with Perez, I said, "Sandy, could you go back to the station and see if the DVLA got back to us and then find those maps of Griminsta, so we can look at them later? And if Nightingale calls in tell him where I've gone."

"Alright," he said. "I've been thinking about yesterday, there might be a person or two I could as about whether they'd seen Trolhoulland the other day. A bit of a long shot, but I could go and talk to them, if that would be okay with your DCI."

"I don't see why not?" I said. I was too busy wondering about what we'd find at Andrew Sholto's house to give too much thought to why Sandy hadn't mentioned those potential witnesses yesterday when we'd been there. Unless it was the sheep farmer with the quad bike and his special constable relation, in which case he had mentioned them and me and Nightingale hadn't given it a second thought. I'd give Nightingale a pass on that, but I should have thought about it.

With the body loaded into the ambulance and Sandy heading back to the station I went with Perez and Tosh to Sholto's house. It looked rather like a larger, neater version of Robbie Leask's place. A single story, stone built cottage that looked like it had grown out of the landscape rather than been built into it. There was the question of whether he lived there alone and if he had whether we could assume that his body was the one currently smouldering in his landrover.

That particular tricky question was neatly solved by the fact the door to the house had been left wide open and there was boss-eyed looking sheep currently stood in the doorway eating a pot plant. So doing our duty to see if Andrew Sholto was still inside, we shooed off the sheep. It bleated mournfully at us, then promptly pooped on the doormat and left.

A quick look around the hall and living room revealed that Mr Sholto would not have approved of incontinent sheep anywhere in his home. The place was organised with a capital O. Everything had its place, and for the most part the everything in question was books. There were books neatly stacked on just about every available surface and, when we looked at bit further, under them as well. Maybe we really were dealing with disgruntled archaeologists who'd been running a personal feud about the Pictish rocks after all. Except that didn't explain Trolhoulland's super sprint.

There were a few photographs on a seriously old looking Welsh dresser. One, a black and white print, was of a young man graduating from university. The next one, in faded colour this time, was of the same man. A little older than before, it was clearly a wedding photo and he smiled at the young woman beside outside a small, stone church by a wind swept bay. The only other photograph was on a small table that had been left free of books, maps or leaflets. It was of Sholto's wife, taken a little earlier than the wedding photo, she had a late Fifties or early Sixties beehive hairdo that made her look bit like the woman in Breakfast at Tiffany's. There was also a bunch of fresh carnations in a glass vase next to it.

Now I might still be a lowly police constable, rather than a top rank detective, but everything about it said loss. Maybe that was it. Sholto had lost is wife recently, buried himself in books and final couldn't deal with it anymore. It would have worked as a theory apart from the fact his hands had been tied to the steering wheel. I mean there's making sure, but it just didn't fit. The guy must have been in his mid to late seventies going by the photos, and as much as I don't think relying on stereotypes is the way to go, he just didn't fit the profile of the sort of person that would douse themselves in accelerant and light a match. Not least was how could he do that with hands tied to the steering wheel. Everything pointed to murder, even if it didn't currently point to Trolhoulland. It was a pretty horrible way to kill somebody, to burn them alive, you had to hate them with level of passion that defied reason to do such a thing in my opinion.

Not that I had any evidence that Sholto, if it was Sholto had been alive at the time. Maybe he'd been killed in a different way and this was cover it up and destroy the evidence? Maybe they'd thought the material tying his hands to the wheel would burn away and it would look like the landrover fire happened by accident. There were too many questions that I was worried that we wouldn't get any answers to until it was too late to do any good with them.

Perez was checking out the kitchen and I was looking at the stacks of history books and carefully collated newspaper clippings about local history when Tosh shouted from the bedroom, "Sir, you'd better come and take a look at this!"

Sholto's bedroom was just as full of neatly stacked books as the rest of the house, but that wasn't the surprising thing. No, that went to the entire wall that was covered with maps of Shetland. The maps had about ten different coloured push pins stuck all over them. Some were linked together with lines of coloured thread, some stood alone, while others had reference numbers pinned to them. Although what the numbers corresponded with was a mystery. To the side of the maps was a writing desk which had open on it a couple of books about folklore and myths and legends of Shetland.

Some unfortunate uniforms who'd end up with cataloguing all this stuff, but that would take a while and if there was anything of interest, magically at least, it would probably get missed. I couldn't feel anything in the room, it was just an old guy's bedroom. The lack of any woman's clothing, even a neatly folded nightie on the pillow by Sholto's pyjamas seemed to bear out that the photo and vase was there as a kind of memorial.

Tosh looked at a few of the books picking them up, flicking through and them putting them back down. Perez was still studying the maps, a frown on his face. Hoping that the pins and notes didn't correspond to unsolved crimes or missing people or something that would get the case pulled away from me and Nightingale in short ordered, I went over to him. "What do you think we've got?" I asked.

"I was hoping that you might have an idea," Perez said, "I know some of this are historical sites." He pointed to a small island, then to somewhere down at the southern end off Shetland and finally to somewhere over on the south west coast. "The others might be the same. Sandy would probably know. Is your site on there?"

It took me a minute or two, but I eventually found Griminsta marked with a yellow push-pin and connected to another half dozen yellow pins with yellow thread, and also to some blue pins with red thread. Yeah, Sholto had obviously been working something out about these places, connections between them, but what completely baffled me.

"It's on there," I said, wondering what Perez would say to that. "But I don't know why."

He ran his hands through his hair before answering, leaving it sticking up and looking a lot like a surprised ginger hedgehog. "I think from now on we should run this as a joint investigation. I will need to talk to DCI Nightingale about how he wants to play it, I don't want to start treading on toes, but murder has to come first over theft, even if that might be part of the motive."

It wasn't an ideal solution, but under the circumstances it was the best we could hope for, so I said I call Nightingale and get him to get in contact.

It took rather longer to do that than I'd expected and it was shortly after three in the afternoon when I managed to get him on the phone. Much to my surprise he told me he already knew and to keep working on the Sholto case, as he'd got a lead of his own and that he'd see me later when he'd want a full account of what was happening. No indication of what it was, where he was going, how he was getting there or when to worry if he wasn't back. Surprised, and after I put down the phone, a little annoyed at how off hand he'd been with me, I went to find Sandy and see where his possible leads had taken him.

It only took me a couple of minutes of talking to Sandy to put me in an even worse mood. Nightingale had chosen to call Sandy instead of me, had spoken to him about his leads and then completely failed to mention it to me so now I looked like an idiot for not knowing. Okay, that wasn't true and Sandy didn't seem to mind going over all the stuff he'd told Nightingale, but it still felt uncomfortably like Nightingale didn't trust me anymore. I wanted to put it all down to him being ill, but I felt like I was lying to myself, and I wondered how long I could go on making excuses for him. Part of me wanted not to go down that road in the first place. The other, who saw how happy his mum and dad were because she could make excuses, to herself at least, about his past drug taking, said sometimes making those excuses and ignoring the truth worked out for the best. There was no way I should have been comparing me and Nightingale to my parents marriage, but bizarrely it somehow seemed to fit.

Sandy's leads had turned up nothing definitive, although a farmer had said he'd seen a landrover on a road near to Griminsta at about the right time did point to Trolhoulland having continued contact with the person, presumably Sholto, who'd got him from the car park. Through the afternoon we received more information on Andrew Sholto. He'd been a seventy two year old retired English teacher, who'd worked in the same comprehensive over the road from Belle Gillespie's car park. He'd lost his wife three years ago and had no family, apart from an older sister who'd emigrated to Australia in the mid Seventies, but nobody knew if she was still alive. There was nothing to suggest that he had ever been involved in anything dodgy, he'd never had so much as a parking ticket.

The coroner would have to fly in from Aberdeen to do the autopsy on the body, but the preliminary checks done by staff at the hospital in Lerwick suggested that the body was that of Andrew Sholto and that he had been alive when the fire was lit. There was a pretty sombre mood in the station for the rest of the evening after that revelation. We kept on working, trying to find out what we could about Sholto. Tosh went out with a group of uniforms to talk to the occupants of the dozen or so houses that could reasonably be called Sholto's neighbours, while Perez tried contacts from Sholto's address book and tried to talk to as many of his old teaching colleagues as possible.

Me and Sandy got to work on all the places listed on the map. By and large they were archaeological sites, mostly prehistoric, Iron Age and earlier, a few seemed to have a legends associated with them or some bit of folklore. There was nothing that seemed relevant to the case and eventually we came to the conclusion that Sholto's research could have been for a book. It didn't rule out that maybe Sholto had stumbled across something during the course of his research that had brought him into contact with Trolhoulland and had eventually given somebody the motive for murder.

Dinner was eaten at the station an we continued working well into the evening, trying to get something positive to report by the time the local paper was all over it in the morning. Nothing said headline news to a local paper like the savage murder of a well respected retired teacher.

It was after ten when Sandy drove me back to the B&B still with nothing useful to report and the promise that he'd pick me and Nightingale up at seven the next morning. I thanked him and then headed up to my room. As I past Nightingale's door I thought about knocking and seeing if he wanted to listen to what I'd found out, but after listening for a moment outside and hearing snoring, I decided not to wake him.

I went to bed hoping that tomorrow would bring us closer to closing the case, and that hopefully with a resolution in sight there'd an improvement in Nightingale's attitude. I'd think up a reason why I'd waited until morning to give him a rundown of the case when I finally saw him. One that didn't include the snoring part: There was no way I was going to be the one to point out that he sounded like somebody sawing wood when he had a cold.

 

TBC.

Next part hopefully on Thursday 2nd October, but no later than Sunday the 5th.

A/N
Things will start to get clearer from the next part about what is going on, what Nightingale is up to and why he's being like he is with Sandy and Peter.

As before most of the places mentioned as real locations in Shetland. Scousborough Sands and St Ninians's Isle really do look nice in the sun, and Bigton and Virke are both real villages. Shetland Amenity Trust is in charge of the archaeology on Shetland.

Needing to get a coroner in from Aberdeen to work on a murder case is something that happens in the series. Whether this is true of real police procedure in Shetland I don't know, but as it is canon for Shetland the series, so I went with it.

You will probably have noticed that the chapter count has gone from 5 to 7, this is purely down to the fact that when I edit things they have a habit of getting about 25% longer than before I started, rather than the fact that I have no idea where the story is going. I do, and it is pretty much done (I hand write on paper and type up) bar the editing. It shouldn't increase to more than 7 parts, well okay 7 and maybe an epilogue type thing.