woman might be there somewhere, crouching in a corner. When she spoke, she felt her lungs clutch.
‘Have you seen her?’ she said. ‘Maggie, I mean. Have you seen Maggie?’
‘Not recently,’ said Terry.
‘Nor me,’ Sandy added. ‘Well, not since this afternoon.’
‘This afternoon? When this afternoon?’
‘Aboot three o’clock,’ Sandy said. ‘She was in the park by the beach, not far fae the hoose.’
‘And you didn’t see her coming back?’
‘No, I just happened to look at that time. I didn’t see her ageen. I just assumed she’d gone hame.’
‘Well she’s not at home!’ Mary’s voice was louder than she’d intended. ‘We need to look for her,’ she said.
‘Is du sure dat’s necessary?’ Terry asked.
‘No, I’m not sure,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t know. But I think so. I’m going to call David.’
The two men put their boots and coats on and followed Mary outside. She shivered as the cold air clawed at her cheeks and hands.
It was only a couple of minutes before David’s pickup came down the road, and the three of them stood beside the gate in silence, waiting to be told what to do. Mary could smell the alcohol from them, and though it made no sense, she found she was angry at their irresponsibility. Drinking! Tonight of all nights!
David pulled up alongside the house, shut off the engine and opened the door, but he didn’t get out. Sam, his old Border collie, sat in the footwell of the passenger seat, mouth open, ears up. David grabbed three torches, clicking them on then off again, one after the other, just to check. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s hae a peerie look. She’s likely geen oot wi a freend somewye, but we’re mebbie best ta see. An if shu’s no hame afore twalve, Ah’ll gie da coastguard a ring, see whit dey think.’
He turned to Sandy. ‘So, du saa her in da beach park?’ he asked.
‘Aye, she was mebbie halfway across the park. But, dat was four or five hours ago.’
‘Okay, well, if wan o wis haes a look alang da beach, da idder twa can geing trow da park and up oer ta Burganess. We’ll juist hae a wander and see whit we can see. Mary, mebbie du should sit in da hoose, in case shu comes back fae whariver shu’s been. Dere’s nae use wis wanderin ower da hill if shu’s at hame in front o da TV.’
David looked out in the direction of the sea.
‘Okay, Terry, if du goes alang da beach, startin fae dis end, dat’ll wirk. If du needs wis, try me mobile, or else flash da torch a few times and we’ll come doon.’
He reached out and pressed his hand to Mary’s cheek as Sandy got in beside him, then they were off down to the end of the road. Mary watched as the men got out of the pickup, went out through the gate and into the dark field, the dog running on ahead. She could hear them for a while – the scuffling of their waterproof jackets and the thunk of their boots on the soft ground. There were no voices, though. Once he’d said what he needed to say, David would be quiet.
The two torch beams scraped this way and that across the field, then crossed the burn and began moving up the headland – Burganess. She could see the third light swinging somewhere on the beach behind Maggie’s house. She didn’t trust Terry with much, especially when he’d been drinking, but she hoped he could take the task seriously. She drove back down to Maggie’s house and went inside. From the west window in the living room she could still see the torches shifting, the strange unnatural movements puncturing the night.
This valley had been Mary’s home now for almost thirty-five years, and in all that time Maggie had been part of the place – as much a part of it, in fact, as the fields, the burn and the road itself. Mary thought back to the first time she’d been in this house, shortly before she and David married. She’d been brought to the valley to meet everyone. She was taken from house to house like an exhibit or a circus act, so that everyone could see her and speak to her and then discuss her with each other once she was gone. They came to meet Jimmy and Catherine, David’s parents, then Maggie and Walter, here, then to the Red House to meet Willie, and Joan, up at Kettlester, where she and David now lived. Lots had changed in this house, of course. They’d fixed it up in the late eighties, modernised it, with a brand-new kitchen and another bathroom. But it was still recognisable beneath all of that. The same pictures were on the wall, the same furniture, the same ornaments. It was even the same smell she remembered from that first day: a thick, comforting smell, of hand cream and dust and soap and soup.
When the door opened, Mary jumped, her heart thudding inside her. It was David, his coat and hat and boots still on. He looked at his wife and then turned away.
‘Well, did you find her?’ Mary asked, trying to sound hopeful. David shuffled, looking at the floor, then finally back at Mary.
‘Aye, we found her.’
SATURDAY,
23RD JANUARY
Alice looked up from her desk and out of the window at a snow-covered corner of the garden and a white stretch of hill beyond. This was the first proper snow in almost a year, and it didn’t look set to stay. It never seemed much at home here in Shetland and rarely lingered for long. But its presence, sometimes, felt like a blessing. This had not been a cold winter, but it had not been an easy one either. It had arrived in early November. The morning of Maggie’s funeral brought an angry fit of gales and horizontal rain, and looking back it seemed hardly to have let up since then. Week after week of wind and water, grey on grey. Now, near the end of January, this burst of clear, cold weather felt like a relief. Spring was still months away. Any brightness was welcome.
A car went past, heading out of the valley. From where she sat, Alice couldn’t see the road, but she recognised the sound of the vehicle, the whine of a loose fan belt. Terry, she thought, then went back to her work. She was distracted, trying to inspire herself to write by going back over what was already written, rereading her own words. The book in front of her was not really a book. Not yet. It was a stack of paper two inches thick, each page covered in black type, some overlaid with vermicular scrawl in two colours: red ink for edits, blue for additional notes and ideas.
She flicked through the pile, stopping at random, cutting it like a deck. She read a few lines aloud to herself – a paragraph about the carnivorous sundews that grew in the damp ground near the burn, Drosera rotundifolia, with their sticky red tendrils and lollipop leaves – and then she flicked further. This time she stopped on a passage about the social impact of the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886. Dry stuff, she thought. Important, but dry.
The book had started small. A few notes and observations about the valley made on scraps of paper. At one point Alice thought it might become a short history of Shetland. That would have been a simple job, really, which no one had yet bothered to do. Alice was no historian, but the details were already out there, they just needed to be thrown together over a few hundred pages. She could do that, no problem. But that wasn’t what happened. In the three and a half years she’d been working on it, the book had become something else, something bigger in scale and yet narrower in focus. Those initial notes just kept growing, but her attention hardly shifted beyond the confines of the valley. It wasn’t necessary to expand her view at all, she realised. This place was the story
