Free Sacrifice by Sharon Bolton

leaving someone here overnight.’
    ‘I suppose.’
    We stood staring out into the darkness, waiting, but the light didn’t appear again.
    ‘Did they hurt her?’ asked Duncan after a minute or two, so quietly I could barely hear him.
    I turned in surprise, glared at him. ‘They cut out her heart.’
    Duncan’s pale face drained. He stood back, arms falling to his sides. Instantly I regretted being so brutal. ‘Dunn didn’t tell you that? I’m sorry . . .’ I began.
    He shushed me. ‘It’s OK. Did they . . . he . . . was he cruel?’
    ‘No,’ I said, remembering everything Dr Renney had told us about the strawberries, the anaesthetic. ‘That’s the strangest thing. He . . . they . . . they fed her, gave her pain relief. They almost seemed to . . . care for her.’ They cared for her. Before they tied her up and carved Nordic symbols into her skin, of course. What kind of sense did that make? I shut my eyes, but the image was still there.
    Duncan rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Jesus, what a mess.’
    There didn’t seem an immediate answer to that, so I said nothing. Duncan made no move to go back to bed and neither did I. After a while I started to feel the chill. I closed my eyes and leaned against him, seeking warmth rather than intimacy, but he wrapped his arms around me and his hands started to move down my back. Then stopped. ‘Tor, would you consider adoption?’ he said.
    I opened my eyes. ‘You mean a baby?’ I asked.
    He squeezed one buttock. ‘No, a walrus. Of course I mean a baby.’
    Well, he’d certainly taken me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about adoption, hadn’t considered we were anywhere near that stage. We had any number of boxes to tick first. Adoption was the last resort, wasn’t it?
    ‘It’s just there’s a good programme on the islands. Or, at least, there always used to be. It’s not difficult to adopt here. A newborn, I mean. Not an emotionally screwed-up teenager.’
    ‘How can that be?’ I said, thinking that the adoption laws here were surely the same as for the rest of the UK. ‘How can Shetland have more babies than anywhere else?’
    ‘I don’t know. I just remember it being discussed when I lived here before. Maybe we’re more old-fashioned about single mothers.’
    It was possible. Churches were better attended here than on the mainland and, on the whole, moral standards seemed comparable with what they’d been in the rest of the UK some twenty or thirty years ago. In Shetland, teenagers stand up on buses to let old ladies sit down. On the roads, drivers wait by passing spaces instead of racing to beat the oncoming car. Maybe this was a real possibility that I hadn’t considered.
    Then Duncan took hold of me round the waist and lifted. He put me down on the window ledge. The glass was cold and slightly damp against my back. He lifted my legs and wrapped them around his waist. Iknew exactly what was coming. The ledge was just the right height and we’d done this before.
    ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we could just keep trying.’
    ‘For a little while longer maybe,’ I whispered, watching him lower the blind.
    And we kept on trying.

6
    SARAH SAT ON the edge of her chair. She had the look in her eye: angry, ashamed, impatient; the one that would increase in intensity month by month, anger gradually giving way to despair as the arrival of each menstrual period signalled a fresh failure. Of course, it could also disappear, completely and for ever, the second she knew she was pregnant. I knew that look so well. I saw it all the time. And not just on the faces of patients.
    Robert’s expression, on the other hand, I couldn’t read. He had still to look me in the eye.
    Although this was their first meeting with me, Sarah and Robert Tully had already run the gauntlet of tests, examinations and interviews with counsellors. They were running out of patience. He wanted the pats on the back down the local and the weekends browsing through model-train brochures.