Sam grew up in the shadow of the secret state. Her father was an undercover agent, full of tall stories about tradecraft and traitors. Then he died, killed in the line of duty.
Now Sam has travelled to Hoy, in Orkney, to piece together the puzzle of her father's past. Haunted by echoes of childhood holidays, Sam is sure the truth lies buried here, somewhere.
What she finds is a tiny island of dramatic skies, swooping birds, rugged sea stacks and just four hundred people. An island remote enough to shelter someone who doesn't want to be found. An island small enough to keep a secret...
Orkney, September 1989
SAM STROLLED THROUGH the graveyard to
the shore, hoping to escape the sense of being watched, but the
shifting outline of Hoy made her uneasy. She stared at its
treacherous north face of stacks and caves, shrouded by spray where
the towering cliffs plunged into the sea and met the breakers rolling
in from the Atlantic. The twilight made the isle appear more cloud
than land, a storm gathering across the water. She trailed the high
tide mark, her eyes still drawn to the island rather than watching
where she was placing her feet, and almost tripped over the rusty
corpse of the seal among the bladder wrack, starbursts scarring its
abdomen where the body had bloated and exploded leaving the brine to
preserve its hide. She leaned and stroked the leathery skin then
parked herself by the dead creature. The still presence gave her
strange comfort. She waited. A pipistrelle flitted past. The
mountains of Hoy blurred with the darkening sky. The North Star
gleamed. Surely he would have disappeared by now. She decided to risk
it, stood and retraced her steps inland along the burn. The sea
breeze buffeted her from behind and she tried to hold the gusts in
her mind, but the wind slipped away, rattled the deadheads of the cow
parsley lining the path. Left her with a knot in her stomach.
She reached the graveyard and heard
the hurried footsteps of somebody retreating as she pushed the gate.
She cut through the grey tombstones, past the yellow walls of the
Round Church, surveyed the Earl’s Bu and the field beyond for
signs. The Norse Earls had made their home here in Orphir on the
southern edge of Orkney’s Mainland, the settlement recorded in the
Orkneyinga Saga.
A place of deaths and ghosts. There had been dusky evenings when she
had stood here and thought she’d glimpsed the shadows of pissed
Norsemen fighting among the ruins of their great drinking hall, but
this evening she saw nothing apart from a hooded crow pecking among
the stones. He was there, though, she could tell. Watching. She had
been aware of his presence all summer. She had tried to ignore the
constant prickle at the back of her neck as she grappled with the
gradiometer, the new-fangled piece of kit they were using to try to
locate the buried remains of the Norse settlement. They couldn’t
dig because the ruins ran under the cemetery and they didn’t want
to disturb the graves. Geophysical surveys were a good way of
detecting sub-surface features without excavating and causing damage,
the archaeologist in charge of the site had said. Like water dowsing,
she replied. He laughed and said if they didn’t find anything with
the equipment, perhaps she could have a go with her hazel divining
rods.
The initial results were not
promising. Too many anomalous spikes in the data, either because the
ruins lay too deep to be detected or, as the archaeologist suggested
when the monitor went haywire, there was some strange force buggering
up the readings. He had looked at Sam when he said that and accused
her of having supernatural powers that interfered with the magnetic
fields. It had taken her a couple of seconds to realize he was
joking. She was the one who had mentioned water dowsing after all.
The archaeologist had invited her to come back the following summer
to help with another survey, if they could find the funding. She had
recently finished a history degree and now, at twenty-three, was
about to start a doctorate. She would love to write her thesis on the
Earl’s Bu, she had said. It would be a relief, she had added –
four years of academic study. He had raised an eyebrow. A relief? She
had corrected herself. More of a retreat than a relief. A retreat
from what, he had asked. Her father’s dodgy legacy, she had wanted
to say; Jim had been a police spy, killed five years before, and
she’d never quite escaped his shadow. She shrugged instead of
speaking. He had eyed her shrewdly and said retreating was fine as a
temporary strategy but eventually you had to turn and face the
ghosts, assess the ruins that lay below one way or another. She
wasn’t so sure. She had volunteered for the archaeological project
in Orkney, drawn back by the happier memories of childhood holidays
here with Jim, the darker recollections buried deeper. The presence
of the watcher made her fear that somebody else was digging in the
murkier corners of her family’s history, unearthing events best
forgotten. Her return to Orkney had disturbed ghosts of a more solid
and ominous kind, she feared, than the spectres of long dead
Norsemen.
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