Free None but the Dead by Lin Anderson Page A

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pleased by the attention. Chrissy had immediately extracted the fact that he was from Sanday, his family owned a farm a few miles distant and that there was a social evening in the local hotel a
few nights from now.
    ‘Will you still be around?’ he’d asked Chrissy.
    ‘It depends how long it takes to finish here.’
    Rhona had forsaken their flirtatious conversation and sought out Derek.
    ‘I’ve delivered food to the cottage for you,’ he’d told her. ‘I can run you there now.’
    ‘It’s fine, we’ll walk,’ Rhona had indicated the animated conversation still going on nearby, ‘once Chrissy’s finished her interrogation of Officer Tulloch.
I’ve stored the equipment in Mike’s shed. Did you have any luck with the skull?’
    ‘Not yet, but I’ve done the groundwork. I think we’ll know soon if one of the local kids took it. What about the rest of the remains?’
    ‘We’ll reach them tomorrow.’
    Derek had wished her goodnight at that point, promising to be back the following morning. Having removed her boiler suit, Rhona quickly put on her jacket against the cold.
    ‘You’re not outside overnight?’ she’d asked Officer Tulloch.
    ‘I’m in Mike’s kitchen with a clear view of the site.’
    ‘Don’t fall asleep,’ had been Chrissy’s final orders to him.
    With the next turn in the track, their cottage came into view, the windows bright with light. Entering a small sitting room, the warmth from a solid-fuel stove hit them after
the short but cold walk from the deposition site.
    Chrissy immediately made for the kitchen to check out the food. Minutes later she reappeared to inform Rhona that it would be curry tonight, the full works apparently, and it would be ready in
half an hour.
    The cottage was all on one level. A small sitting room, tiny kitchen, a bathroom with a shower and two bedrooms. The back window of the sitting room gave them a view of a long sandy beach which
was a two-minute walk away. It was traditionally built like the cottage on Skye, with three-foot-thick walls, and Rhona suspected its last renovation had been at least fifty years before.
    According to Derek, the owner lived on a farm in the west of Sanday and the cottage had been the original family croft house, used now for the family visits of those who no longer lived on the
island. Pictures on the walls suggested the history of the place. There was even one of the nearby schoolhouse when it had served as the local school. In black-and-white, it was a class photo taken
outside. Two rows of children, more boys than girls, a mix of ages and a woman teacher. No one was smiling.
    Maybe they weren’t allowed to smile back then.
    There were other framed scenes of the croft house before renovation, indicating that the bathroom had been an addition as had the porch and single bedroom. Further photographs looked as though
they’d been taken during wartime, with groups of construction workers, Home Guard members and smiling RAF personnel. The final image was of a beached First World War German destroyer with the
inscription
B98 Lopness Bay
. A large framed map of Sanday indicated where they were in the far north-eastern corner, just across a narrow causeway from Start Point with its famous
black-and-white-striped lighthouse.
    Rhona checked her mobile to discover there was no signal, then called through to Chrissy that she was planning a shower. Chrissy indicated she would hop in after her and revealed that there was
Orkney ale, plus a bottle of Highland Park.
    It seemed Derek had done them proud.
    An hour later, hunger satisfied, the real ale tasted, Rhona said she was planning a walk along the beach. Erling had told her that she could pick up a signal towards the lighthouse.
    ‘I’ll head for the schoolhouse,’ Chrissy said. ‘Check for a signal there. I want to call Mum and check on wee Michael.’
    Chrissy’s baby son was her pride and joy, although the relationship with his father, Nigerian medical