None but the Dead by Lin Anderson Page A

the seat opposite him.
    ‘Have you eaten?’ she said, in a verging-on-scolding tone.
    ‘I have.’
    ‘Have you eaten enough?’
    He told her what he’d had, enlarging the portions somewhat.
    She nodded as though satisfied. ‘Tea?’
    The mug by the fire was lifted, rinsed, and then he watched her go through the motions he had undertaken a short while before.
    His tea delivered, she sat down again.
    He had a question to ask her but wasn’t sure when and how to accomplish it. She normally did the talking. Telling him stories about school and walks on the beach. Tonight she sat silently
staring into the fire. He wondered if the sound and fury of the wind attacking the roof was worrying her, then remembered she’d come calling despite the storm.
    ‘You shouldn’t have come out in this,’ he said.
    ‘I had things to do.’ She looked at him with her bright blue eyes.
    He thought again how lucky he was to still be able to talk with the young. When he’d retired from the classroom, that’s what he knew he would miss the most – the everyday chat
of the children.
    But that hadn’t happened, because of the young girl before him.
    He hadn’t taught her. Sam had retired well before she’d come to the school. They had met in a different way. She’d turned up at the heritage centre of her own free will.
Declared she’d come with her mother to live on Sanday and wanted to know all about the island.
    The intensity of her desire to discover the place he felt so strongly about had made them firm friends. That and the fact that she and her mother had become tenants of the neighbouring
farmhouse. Coming from near Carlisle, they were more used to the mountains of the Lake District than the flat fertile fields of Sanday. But it seemed that two generations before, her family had
been Orcadian, as evidenced by her mother’s choice of name for her daughter, Inga.
    ‘What things?’ Sam said, returning to the conversation.
    ‘I’ve been looking for the skull,’ she told him.

15
    McNab hadn’t slept a wink and, glancing at his mobile, realized there wasn’t much time left to do so. The settee was at least six inches shorter than required, but
that hadn’t been the main impediment to sleep. He was used to dreich weather, Glasgow endured plenty of that. But in the city he was enclosed by other flats and surrounded by tall buildings.
Despite the three-foot-thick walls on this one-storey cottage, he’d never felt so exposed to the elements.
    As he’d lain there, he’d imagined the scene outside. Wind stripping everything from the surface of the earth – buildings, creatures, humans. At any moment he’d expected
the roof to be torn off, exposing the people inside in all their frailty. He’d thought of that German destroyer beached not that far away, the sea further demolishing that which it
couldn’t blow to smithereens.
    Why would anyone choose to live in such a place?
    According to the brief lecture he’d been subjected to last night by Chrissy, it appeared that people had chosen to live in Orkney before anywhere else on the British Isles. When he’d
questioned that assertion, she’d told him Neolithic remains proved her point.
    Rhona hadn’t intervened in the heated discussion, preferring to write up her notes at the kitchen table on her laptop. On his surprise arrival, he’d been greeted with a hug from
Chrissy and a questioning look from Rhona. McNab had quickly explained how he’d arrived on the last helicopter, courtesy of the boss.
    ‘Because it’s a serious crime.’
    Rhona had thrown him a look at that point which had dented his bravado somewhat.
    ‘It could have waited until the weather improved.’
    ‘What’s a bit of bad weather?’ he’d said, deliberately forgetting how his stomach had performed on board the chopper.
    It was at that point a gust of wind had hit the building with such force that he’d risen to his feet, then realizing what a prick he looked had headed for the fridge