Red Bones - Ann Cleeves [43]
‘It’s just a couple of exploratory trenches. At this stage there won’t be any more disruption than this. If we find anything really interesting we’d apply for funding to extend the dig, but of course we’d need your permission to do that. Mima had already given it in principle. The initial results have been fascinating. And Evelyn thinks it would be a great boost for the island.’
She looked at Joseph anxiously. Sandy could tell she was hoping for reassuring words from him. Of course you must go ahead with your dig. Mima’s death won’t change anything. I can see how important it is.
But the man frowned again as he had in the kitchen.
‘Is this where you found the skull?’
‘Yes, in this practice trench here. Outside the wall of the main house. It’s gone off to a lab in Glasgow for dating. I hope we can date it at fifteenth-century. That would fit in with my theory about the place. Of course it could be older. We know there’s been a settlement in Lindby since the Iron Age. But it was quite near the surface so we don’t think it’s that old.’
‘Could it be younger?’
‘I suppose so, but it seems unlikely. There’s no record of a more modern building here.’
Joseph was quiet for a moment.
‘I think it’s too early to be making any decision about the future of the dig just yet. There’s no rush, is there? We can talk about all that later.’
Sandy wondered why his father, usually so easygoing, especially if a pretty lass was around, should be so discouraging about this. There were no crops in that part of the croft and it wasn’t needed for grazing. What would it matter if a dozen people came to make holes all over it? Joseph was sociable, he loved a party, a few new folk to chat to. Again he wondered if the man had his own plans for Setter and what they might be.
Sandy’s phone rang. It was Perez calling from his mobile. Sandy walked away from the group so he could talk without being overheard.
‘I’m at Laxo,’ Perez said. ‘I’ve just missed a ferry. I wondered if it was worth bringing my car or if you’d be able to meet me in Symbister.’
‘I’ll meet you.’ Sandy felt his mood lift. He had an excuse to run away from the family for a while, even if it was just to the end of the island. It was only as he was driving down towards the pier that he thought Perez’s arrival on the island might be a bad sign and that he could be here to arrest Ronald Clouston.
Chapter Fifteen
Hattie’s feelings were spiralling out of control. She loved being in the islands but whenever she imagined Mima lying in the rain, shot by Ronald Clouston, she started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her imagination was a curse.
Perhaps she was ill again. Depression had first appeared when she was at school, but then it had been insidious, almost gentle, so for some time the people around her hadn’t recognized what had been going on. When her mother had finally bullied her into seeing her GP, he’d prescribed medication, talked about stress, said it was unlikely to happen again. But at university there’d been a major breakdown and there’d been a couple of short episodes since.
It usually started with an obsession, an inability to let go of one thought or idea. At eighteen it had all been about her schoolwork, the individual project that was submitted as part of the history course. She’d been relatively relaxed about the other subjects. She’d wallowed rather in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, but her English teacher had told her anxious mother that many adolescents did that. No, it was her work on a nineteenth-century almshouse close to her home that had taken over her life and her dreams. She’d stumbled on to the original records by chance through a friend of her mother’s, and from reading the first page of neat and tiny writing she’d been hooked.
The