‘David!’

The red car was speeding towards them. David couldn’t go any faster. They had reached the crisis: the terminal moment. No one would see. They were right above the clouds now; the sun was brilliant and dazzling, shining off clumps of unmelted snow. This was where they would die. A man and a woman in a car. Like his parents. Both dead.

But then David saw a chance. Up ahead was an expanse of bare rock. Three seconds later he slid the car onto a flank of raw limestone and did a squealing handbrake turn. They spun like they were kids in a nightmarish fairground ride, a vicious carousel.

And it worked. The red car shot right past. At once David took off the other way, descending fast and hard.

He was racing vertiginously down the mountain road – he could see the red car turning, in his mirror. But this time he had a plan, as he rounded the sharp rocky corner at eighty miles an hour and they raced into the grey forests. He took a wild right turn up a farm track.

Into the trees.

The track swung this way and that, catapulting them into the dark woodlands. The car bounced and groaned, and after half a mile the track stopped. David parked the car with a jolt, he kicked open the door and jumped out – Amy was already outside and waiting. He grabbed her hand and they fled into the woods, running between the trees and the rocks and leaping over a stream until they found a great boulder.

And then at last they stopped, and crouched down. And waited. Panting and breathing.

David’s heart was a madman clattering his prison bars; Amy’s hand was tight and clammy in his fist.

They crouched there, cold and mute. The forest crackled, under the mournful drizzle. Nothing happened. Wisps of fog drifted between the sombre black larches, like fairytale wraiths.

The low sound of a car engine throbbed in the distance. The red car, presumably – looking for them. The engine seemed to slow, somewhere on the road. Somewhere quite near. David felt Amy’s fingers tighten on his. The agonizing moments marched slowly by, like a funeral parade. They waited to be found, and shot.

Or worse.

The car engine throbbed again. It was going. The red car was taking off, heading downhill maybe. Silence surrounded them. David allowed himself to breathe.

But his relief was aborted by a singular snap: the sound of twigs, broken underfoot.

10

The old women were singing through their noses, a rising carol of weird sounds; the tremulous voice of the dark-suited man at the front – warbling and waving his hands – led and yet followed the intense humming from the choir of ululating women.

They were still in Foula, about three hundred miles from Glasgow.

Simon and Sanderson and Tomasky had spent an uncomfortable night in Foula’s only B &B, waiting for a chance to interview Edith Tait. The B &B owner, a middle-aged widower from Edinburgh, had been all too excited by the influx of glamorous tourists – of new people to talk to – and he had kept them up, over tots of whisky, with bloodcurdling tales of Foula’s weirdness and danger.

He told them of the German birdwatcher who had slipped on some lamb’s afterbirth, banged his head on a rock, and had his brains devoured by Arctic skuas; he mentioned a tourist couple who had gone to the highest cliff, the Kame, and been swept over the precipice when one of them sneezed.

All this Simon absorbed with a suppressed smile; Sanderson was openly sarcastic: ‘So the tourist death rate, is what, about fifty percent?’

But there was one thing the journalist found truly and deeply interesting: the Gaelic heritage of the isle. As the hostel owner explained, Foula was so isolated it had maintained Norse-Gaelic cultural characteristics that had almost disappeared elsewhere. They used their own Gregorian calendar, they celebrated Christmas on January 6th, and some of the locals still spoke authentic Scots Gaelic.

They did this especially at church, where the services were, apparently, some of the very last of their kind: notable for a capella nose singing, known as ‘Dissonant Gaelic Psalmody’, as the B &B owner explained – with loving relish.

So now they were actually in the kirk listening to the Nasal Celtic Heterophony, waiting for a chance to talk to Edith. Simon was distinctly drawn to this authentic, ancient, possibly pagan tradition; DCI Sanderson was less impressed.

‘They sound like a bunch of mad Irish bumblebees in the shower.’

His sidelong remark was loud. One woman turned around and gave the DCI a stare; she was singing through her nonagenarian nostrils, even as she glared.

DCI Sanderson blushed, stood up, and edged along the pew, and bumbled out of the kirk. Feeling exposed and conspicuous, Simon swiftly followed. He found Sanderson dragging on a cigarette by the graveyard.

Sanderson dropped the cigarette, crushed it under his shoe, and gazed at the Sneck o’ da Smaalie, a great ravine hard by the kirk that led all the way down to the roiling sea, which writhed like a fallen epileptic in a blue straitjacket; the earlier rain had dropped and the sky had cleared.

‘Not religious then, Detective?’

‘You guessed?’ Sanderson’s smile was sarcastic. ‘Went to a church school, because my parents were real believers. Guaranteed to put you off.’

Simon nodded. ‘My experience was absolutely the opposite, my folks were…atheists. Scientists and architects.’ An unwarranted thought ran through his mind: das Helium und das Hydrogen. He hurried the conversation along. ‘So they never forced any belief system on me at all. Now I do have…rather vague beliefs.’

‘Nice for you.’ The DCI was glaring at a white shape. A sheep had wandered into the graveyard. ‘Jesus, what a place. All these sheep everywhere. Sheep. What are they about. Stupid woolly fuckers.’

Sanderson put a hand on the journalist’s shoulder, and looked him in the eye.

‘Quinn. There’s something you should know. If you still wanna write up this case.’

‘Yes?’

‘There was another murder. This morning. Heard on the wire. We’re certain it’s related.’ He frowned. ‘So I can tell you.’

‘Where?’

‘Near Windsor. An old man named Jean Mendia. That’s why Tomasky flew home this morning. To do some knock-ups.’

The nasal singing in the church had stopped.

‘Let me guess, the victim is Southern French? Deformed?’

Sanderson shook his head.

‘French Basque, yes. From Gascony. But no, not deformed. And not tortured.’

Before he could ask the obvious question, Sanderson added, ‘The reasons we’re sure it’s connected are: his age, very old; and the fact he was Basque; and there was no robbery. An apparently pointless killing.’

‘So that’s three…’

‘Yep.’

‘Who on earth is doing it? And why?’

‘God knows. So maybe we could ask Him.’ He turned.

The service was concluded. The church door had swung open, and bonneted old ladies were parading out of the kirk into the daylight, chattering in English and Gaelic.

They quickly located Edith Tait. She was spryer than Simon had expected: despite being sixty-seven, she could have passed for fifty. But the twinkle in her eye soon dulled as they told her who they were: and their reason for tracking her down.

Edith actually looked, for a moment, as if she might burst into tears. But then she buttoned her tweed coat even tighter and ushered them back into the empty church, where they sat on a pew and conversed.

She was not the witness they’d hoped for. She admitted she had heard the odd sound on the fateful night – but she couldn’t be sure. She might have heard the whirr of a small boat in the wee small hours – but she couldn’t be sure.

Edith Tait wasn’t sure about anything – but that was hardly her fault. She was doing her best – and the process obviously wasn’t easy for her. At the end of her testimony, Edith emitted a tiny sob, which she hid with her pale hands. Then she unmasked herself, and gazed at the journalist.