White Nights - Ann Cleeves [98]
At the last minute Peter Wilding turned up. They’d just started up the track and he chased after them.
‘I heard from Martin what you were up to. I wondered if you could use an extra pair of hands.’
‘Of course,’ Kenny said. ‘The more the merrier.’ It was true that the more people there were to cover the hill, the easier it was to round up all the sheep. There was less chance for the odd beast to escape. But he couldn’t quite take to the man and he wished he wasn’t there. He thought the writer was like some sort of parasite. He only wanted to be on the hill so he could write about it later. It was the first thing to spoil the day for him.
The second was seeing Perez and a young couple on the lip of the Pit o’ Biddista. They weren’t in the way to scare the sheep – Kenny and the others would be walking the animals away from them – but Kenny found them a distraction. He’d hoped today to forget about the man hanging in the shed on the jetty and Roddy Sinclair’s twisted and broken body.
While the others lined up down the length of a gully to begin the walk, Kenny went up to talk to Perez. The young couple had climbing gear. He didn’t understand that. If they wanted to get to the bottom, why not just go down the grass slope? They were young and fit.
‘What are you doing?’
Perez turned very slowly to him. Kenny thought he was probably working out in his head how much to tell him. Instead he ignored the question.
‘You’re clipping today,’ he said. ‘If we get finished here in time I’ll come and help you.’
‘What’s going on here?’
He thought Perez would refuse to answer again. But he said, ‘I want a thorough search. Of the rockface and the tunnel at the bottom. There are some items that are still missing.’
‘How long will this go on?’ Kenny demanded. ‘When will we be left in peace?’
‘When I know what happened,’ Perez said. ‘When I know who killed two men.’
The young people had been ignoring the exchange and preparing for their climb. The woman was already at the edge of the cliff, leaning out, held by the nylon rope. Kenny turned away; if he had his back to them, perhaps he could pretend that none of this was happening.
He ran to catch up with the line of people walking slowly across the hill. The dogs chased between them, filling in the gaps. The men had their arms outstretched and whooped and called to move the sheep ahead of them. The ones at the end seemed a long way off, their voices lost in the thin air. Kenny stood beside Edith, who was waving the stick and yelling like the rest of them.
‘What’s going on up there?’ She had to shout to be heard above the noise of the men, the dogs and the sheep.
‘Some sort of search. I don’t know. I hate it. I hate all this happening so close to home.’
She seemed to be shouting back some words of comfort, but he couldn’t make them out because of the noise.
They had the sheep gathered up in a circle of drystone with a rough wooden gate held across the gap and let them out one at a time for clipping. The old men sat with an animal each, turned on its back, the front legs held firm, and hand-clipped with sure firm bites until the fleece was free. Then the poor bald beast was let loose to run away. The men’s hands were brown and soiled and calloused. Kenny looked at his own and saw that they were going much the same way. Edith’s hands were soft and he thought she’d have a few blisters by the end of the day, but she was just as accurate as the men, and as strong as most of them too. She had a fine deft way with the clippers and she could keep her sheep calm. But she wasn’t as quick as they were. Sometimes they looked over and teased her about how slow she was and she laughed back at them, not minding at all.
At midday she brought out flasks of tea and thick sandwiches made with cheese and a ham which she’d cooked herself. They ate, although their hands were still greasy with lanolin, just rubbing them on the cropped grass to get rid of the worst of the muck. Peter Wilding sat with them,