Read Online The Trowie Mound Murders by Marsali Taylor - Free Book Online

– mothers didn’t like him near their lasses – and then he’d added, as if it were a clincher, He goes along to the old Nicolson house.
    Dir a bit o’ meeting going on … Brian’ll maybe be asking for his keys back. I said the last phrase aloud, and Anders jumped like a startled sheep.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜It’s something Magnie said, yesterday, that Norman, the jet-skier, went along to the old Nicolson house, as if that told me all I should know about him. Alex and Graham started playing dodgems, so I didn’t ask what he meant.’
    Anders looked sideways at me. ‘You are too young, Cass. You are hopeless at seeing the world.’
    â€˜What am I missing, then?’
    Anders went pink again. I watched with interest as the tide rose, and subsided. But he changed the subject. ‘I suppose it would not do any harm to look for them. But if we do not see them?’
    â€˜Let’s look first,’ I said. I glanced out of the window at the tide, inching its way up the slip, and reached for the navy tidal atlas for Orkney and Shetland that lived above the chart table. Low water had been just after three, so it was now high water minus four, an hour to get out into the Atlantic, high water minus three, then plus two to put it back to high water Dover – I flicked through the pages and considered the arrows. The tide in the sweep of St Magnus Bay would be against me going, but not by much, a knot or so, and it’d help me coming home. With the wind still a southerly force 3, I could sail all the way.
    It was a bonny sail. Khalida tugged impatiently under my hand as I trimmed the mainsail, glad to be out on the water instead of being used as a houseboat. We surged steadily down the two-mile long voe and around the corner into the deeper Rona, the channel between the red cliffs of Muckle Roe and the island of Vementry with its World War I guns, twenty-foot barrels protecting St Magnus Bay, where the British fleet was anchored before the battle of Jutland. Beyond them was the Atlantic. Already Khalida was rising and falling to the larger swell. Gulls swooped and dived at the water just ahead of me. I hooked the autopilot chain over Khalida ’s tiller, and got out the handline. It would be a shame to waste a shoal of mackerel. By the time we left the Rona I’d caught five medium-sized ones, glinting green and iridescent silver as they came up through the water, flapping tiger-striped in the bucket. We’d have grilled mackerel for supper. I was hungry now, though. I filleted two and put them under the grill. I’d eat one right away, and have the second in a roll up by the trowie mound, looking out over the bay.
    I sailed on around the corner. Papa Stour was out to my left; beyond it, the distant three-shelved smudge of Foula, and after that nothing but sea for two thousand miles. I turned right and headed up the coast, keeping a wary distance from the red cliffs with their gaping underhangs, like shark mouths. There was a white motorboat in the distance, a good two miles away, anchored just off where I was headed. I reached for the spyglasses, and focused. Yes, it was David and Madge’s boat, right enough, with its high, flared bow, and someone in a red Musto jacket messing about with a couple of rods in holders on the stern. There was no sign of Madge on the foredeck, but it was more exposed out in the Bay here, and too chilly for sunbathing. I watched for a bit longer, but there was no sign of movement from below. I wondered where they’d spent the night. There were pontoons at both Aith and Voe, as well as sheltered, isolated bays if you wanted a night under the stars, although they hadn’t struck me as night-under-the-stars people. They’d want their shore power to run all those gadgets.
    He stayed put until I was within five cables, then upped anchor and roared off, still with no sign of Madge. I wondered where