IN RICHARD'S STUDY, I'D FOUND AN INTERPRETATION OF Melissa's runes that had finally started to have some meaning. But one of them still hadn't made much sense. I could see where the… artist (shall we call him?) was coming from with Fertility and Sacrifice, but Harvest? In medical circles we use the word Harvest when we talk about an organ being removed for transplant and I'd toyed with the idea that it might refer to the missing heart. But really, what's the likelihood of an ancient cult using a modern medical term? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Harvest was a reference not to the heart, but to the baby.
Which brought me neatly to the next key question. Generally speaking, how often do you come across a harvest of one? Use the word harvest as a noun and it's decidedly plural in its implications, conjuring images of fruitfulness and plenty. And I already knew that at least one other young woman had met an untimely death in 2004, the year Melissa had supposedly died. Kirsten Hawick, who'd been hit by a lorry while out riding her horse, had been a similar age to Melissa and had been pretty similar in appearance. Plus, a wedding ring that was probably hers had been found in my field. I'd never truly accepted that as coincidence.
Melissa hadn't died and been cremated in 2004; her body, still in the morgue, offered irrefutable evidence of that. Whilst I couldn't begin to imagine how it had been achieved, her earlier death had to have been faked; so had the same thing happened to Kirsten and maybe other women as well?
Were there more bodies to be found?
The first thing I had to find out was how many female deaths were recorded in 2004 and I accessed the General Register Office for Shetland on the Internet. It wasn't the most user-friendly of sites but after a bit of poking around, I had it: a simple table, covering deaths that had occurred on Shetland, grouped in five-year age brackets, between 1983 and 2007.
In 2004, the year Melissa's and Kirsten's deaths had been recorded, there had been 106 female deaths on the islands. Scanning across the row I found that, as you would expect, the majority of them fell into the older age groups, from age 65 upwards. Down at the lower end of the scale, of course, deaths were far less common. In this particular year, no females had died aged between 0 and 19. In the 20-24 bracket though, five had. In the 25-30 bracket, three women had died and in the next one up, 30-34, four women had died. A total of twelve young women dead in one year.
Seemed like quite a lot to me.
I looked next at 2005. Only six women in the corresponding three age brackets had died. In 2006, there had been only four such deaths.
2006 was the latest year for which stats had been collected so I went back in time. In 2003, two women in the age range had died. 2002 had been a particularly good year for young women with no deaths recorded. 2001, on the other hand, recorded eleven deaths.
I went further back. 2000 had seen six mortalities, there were just two in 1999, but an impressive ten in 1998.1997 saw a modest two, as did 1996, but – would you believe it – in 1995 eight women had met a premature end.
I went back as far as the table did, to 1983. I'm no statistician but even I could see a pattern emerging. Every three years a modest but significant blip appeared in the female death rates. Now, what the hell did that mean and, more importantly, why had no one spotted it before?
I looked again at the total column, to see if the pattern was reflected there. The number of total female deaths on Shetland ranged quite considerably from just 86 in 2003 to 154 in 1997. I looked for quite some time but there was no discernible three-year pattern that I could see; the spread of deaths, the difference in the numbers, appeared totally random. Whatever was going on in the three age groups representing young adult women was being hidden by the larger numbers involved in the female population as a whole. When you added male deaths into the equation, the chances of someone spotting what I'd just seen were non-existent.
Which might explain why no keen-eyed statistician at the General Register Office had spotted the anomaly. Taking the Shetland population as a whole, nothing was happening; and, when you considered that the death rate on Shetland is actually lower than the rest of Scotland, there'd be no reason for anyone to look more closely at the figures. The numbers were simply too small to show up on anything other than a very focused search.
I sat back to think about it.
I'd gone looking for one batch; I'd found seven. At least seven years in which the female death rate leaped way beyond the norm. If these figures were shown to someone in authority, surely they'd be enough to convince them that something odd was going on. Unfortunately, I had no idea whom to approach. Whilst I couldn't believe the entire Northern Constabulary was corrupt, without Dana how would I know whom to trust and whom not? More significantly, if some of these deaths were suspicious (or – not to put too fine a point on it – if they hadn't actually occurred), then how could some very senior people at this hospital not be involved? Could I rely on anyone to back me up? I decided I needed more details. Who were these dead women? How had they died? I'd start with 2004, the year Melissa had supposedly died.
I left the Internet, went into the hospital's own records and called up details of mortalities for 2004. There were 106 female deaths in total that year, out of which I was looking for just twelve. This was going to take some time and I was still woozy from the sedative Gifford had given me.
Fortunately, the list of mortalities included a name and a date of birth. It took about thirty minutes – of jumping out of my skin every time I heard a noise in the corridor – but eventually I had my list of twelve women, aged between 20 and 34, who died that year.
I scribbled their names, ages and an abbreviated cause of death on a notepad I found on the desk.
Melissa Gair -32 -breast cancer
Kirsten Hawick -29 -riding accident
Heather Paterson -28 -suicide
Kate Innes -23 -breast cancer
Jacqueline Ross -33 -eclampsia
Rachel Gibb -21 -car accident
Joanna Buchan -24 -drowning
Vivian Elrick -27 -suicide
Olivia Birnie -33 -heart disease
Laura Pendry -27 -cervical cancer
Caitlin Corrigan -22 -drowning
Phoebe Jones -20 -suicide
I stared at the list for five, ten minutes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing, really, except that there seemed too many of them. Otherwise, the causes of death were exactly what you might expect. When young women die, it's usually as a result of an accident or deliberate self-harm. Other than that, you might expect a few cases of heart disease and cancer and, occasionally, problems associated with childbirth.
I looked back to my first list, the one I'd printed off the General Register site. A very crude calculation told me that when you removed the blip years from the equation, the average number of young women to die on Shetland each year was 3.1. Using just the blip years, the average leaped to ten. Every three years, six or seven more women than usual were dying.
Was it remotely possible to fake that number of deaths; to spirit these women away, keep them alive for a further year, before murdering them as brutally as Melissa had been murdered? And – big question coming up – had they, like Melissa, given birth shortly before death?
I turned back to the list of twelve women who'd died in 2004. Melissa and Kirsten hadn't died natural deaths, I was sure of that now. But which of the others had shared their fate? Vivian? Phoebe? Kate? Which of these women had been abducted, kept prisoner for the better part of a year, given birth alone and terrified? What had been their biggest fear at the end – fear for themselves or for what was going to happen to their babies?
A harvest of babies. At last I'd said it. It must have been bouncing around in the back of my mind ever since the post-mortem, when we'd learned that my lady from the peat had had a baby. What had happened to that baby, I'd asked myself immediately. In Richard's study, discovering that one of the runes meant Harvest had almost got me there but it had taken Jenny's passing comment about batches to give me the shove I needed.
OK, think, Tora, think. If these women were being abducted, they had to be kept somewhere; somewhere secure and out-of-the- way, but local all the same. They were buried here – in my backyard, for God's sake – so they couldn't have left the islands. It needed to be somewhere with medical facilities, where babies could be safely delivered. Jesus! It was obvious.
I started typing again and brought up the obs and gynae pages. I'd produced this list once before, the day after I'd found Melissa: the details of all births on the islands between March and August 2005 – the time Melissa's baby would have been born. I printed it off and sat looking at it, refreshing my memory. One hundred and forty births. According to Dana, most of the women named had been accounted for, found alive and well, but I already knew I was dealing with clever, impressively resourced people. If you could fake a death in a modern hospital, you could falsify pretty much anything.
I went down the list, marking entries as I went. Soon, every birth that had taken place on Tronal was highlighted in yellow. I was looking for six or seven; I found four. It was too few to suggest an easy answer; and yet Tronal was the ideal place: remote enough to offer privacy but accessible for those with their own boats and able to cope with the difficult navigation. It had a modern maternity facility and its own resident obstetrician. I realized, with a sinking heart, that it also had a qualified anaesthetist well within commuting distance.
Oh, Christ!
My father-in-law was involved in the facility on Tronal. He had to be; that was where he went when he left the house most days. I remembered what Stephen Renney had said about Melissa being heavily anaesthetized before she was killed and nausea reared. Richard had been Medical Director at the Franklin Stone before passing on the reins to his protege, Kenn Gifford. If deaths were being faked at this hospital then the medical directors were ideally placed to oversee it happening.
Suddenly I was sure Richard was involved. Probably Kenn, too. And Dana and I had both had our doubts about Andy Dunn. One of them had watched Duncan and me set off in our dinghy, believing that I wouldn't survive the trip. They'd conspired to murder me. And they would try again.
I'd been staring down at the papers on the desk but a flickering of the screen made me look up. A message had flashed up.
AN ILLEGAL OPERATION HAS BEEN PERFORMED AND THE SYSTEM WILL BE CLOSED DOWN.
Then the screen went blank. I'd seen the message before. It might mean nothing. In any case, my time was up. I switched off the computer, gathered up the papers and grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. The papers went into my pocket. I switched off the desk lamp and walked to the door.
Standing in darkness, listening hard, I could hear the usual hospital sounds, but all at a distance. The corridor outside was uncarpeted and I was sure I would have heard someone approaching. Risking it, I opened the door and glanced left and right. Voices. The door to my own office was open and I had to walk past it to get out. No use hanging around. Thanking my lucky stars I was wearing trainers and could move reasonably quietly, I walked quickly past my door, out through the swing doors at the end of the corridor and down the stairs. Praying I wouldn't bump into anyone I knew, I went out through A & E; not the route I'd have preferred as it was always the busiest part of the hospital, but it was the fastest way out. In the car park, I paused to think. It was nine fifty-five in the evening and I needed transport. Somehow, I had to get back to Dana's house to collect my car. I started to walk through the car park and then stopped. And almost laughed.
My car was parked in the area reserved for hospital staff. My keys were still in my pocket. Someone had even put Elspeth's bicycle in the back.
It was too late to leave the islands that night, but that part of the plan had changed anyway. I was going nowhere. I had more to find out and – priority for the morning – I was going to tell people I could trust. The one person I was going to find, somehow, was Helen. Dana's Helen. She was a high-ranking detective in Dundee. If Dana trusted her that was good enough for me.
First I needed some clothes and a sleeping bag, in case I ended up spending the night in my car. I parked a quarter of a mile down from the house, tucking the car away behind some garages. Then I pulled Elspeth's bicycle out of the back and cycled, in the late twilight, up the hill. I walked round the house once, peering into all the downstairs windows, but it seemed empty. As softly as I could, I turned the key and slipped inside. The mail lying behind the door scraped against the tiled floor. I closed the door and listened. Nothing. I was pretty sure the house was empty but I was jumpy all the same. I ran upstairs, found a holdall and threw some clothes into it. My sleeping bag was on top of the wardrobe and I grabbed a pillow from our bed for good measure. My jewellery, what little I possessed, went in the bag too. Last, I found Granddad's old horse gun and tucked it away under some clothes.
I stood in the doorway of our bedroom and it occurred to me that I might never see this room, this house again. It was only polite to leave a note.
On our dresser was a photograph of Duncan and me on our wedding day. He, tall and elegant in full morning dress, was kissing my hand at the door of the church. I was draped in cream lace and, for the only time in my life, looked feminine. I'd always loved that photograph. I picked it up, dropped it and stamped down hard with my right foot. The glass shattered and the wooden frame cracked at one corner. Should get the message across.
I struggled downstairs, not entirely sure how I would balance everything on the bike. The answer machine was flickering. Five messages. They could be important. I pressed play:
'Tora, this is Richard. It's just gone noon on Tuesday. Elspeth and I are concerned about you. Please call.'
Yeah, I'll bet you're concerned. I pressed erase.
'Tor, it's me. What's going on? I've been trying your mobile all day. Will you phone me, please?'
Erase.
'Tora, look – this really isn't funny. Everybody's worried about you. Just let us know you're OK… It's really difficult for me to get away at the moment. Jeez, Tora, just phone, will you?'
Erase.
'It's me again. I just heard about Dana. I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I'll be back tomorrow morning. Can you phone, please, just to let me know you're OK?… I love you.'
Well, call me a sucker if you like, but I couldn't erase that one. I pressed the button for the last message. New voice.
'Tora, this is a bad idea. You need to come back in now. I hope to God you're not driving. Let me know where you are and I'll come and pick you up.'
Like that was really going to happen. I pressed erase. It worried me though. If Kenn had told the local police I was driving around under the influence of sedative drugs I could expect to be picked up within minutes of leaving home.
I carried my stuff to the door and bent to pick up the mail. I was planning to dump it on the coffee table in the living room but one item caught my attention. It was a lilac envelope, with Tora hand- written on the front. There was no stamp and I could feel something heavy and hard inside. I opened it, took out a gold key and read the short note; the first I'd ever received from beyond the grave.