Chapter 55
DI Flett had offered Jo his office to work in. He’d said she would need peace and quiet to finish her translation of Ivor’s notebook, and the incident room couldn’t provide that, but Jo knew that wasn’t the reason she was here.
The boss had read her reaction to Gus, despite her attempts to disguise it. He’d seen how she’d failed to meet Gus’s glance and, worse still, he’d spotted how freaked she’d been when he’d leaned over her to point at the screen.
Even now, her skin crawled at the memory of that moment.
So that was why she was in here, and one of the two reasons she was determined to succeed in what she’d been asked to do.
The other reason, of course, was Mackie.
She’d checked in already with the constable who’d been posted to the Balfour.
He’d assured her all was well, although Mackie was still drifting in and out of consciousness.
‘He’s opened his eyes once or twice, but didn’t say anything when he saw me. Maybe if you’d been here, Sergeant . . .’ he’d added apologetically.
So she had to translate this as quickly as possible, Jo decided. Then the burden of telling us what he found no longer lies with Mackie.
Focusing back on the notebook, she searched among the words for ones she recognized.
The first person pronoun, however artistically drawn, was clearly an ‘I’.
Also clear were ‘she’ and ‘her’, ‘he’ and ‘him’, ‘they’ and ‘them’.
The most used verbs were okay too, but old Orkney terms, which Mackie had dealt with so easily, had proved tricky until she located the online Scots language dictionary and its subset of Orkney words.
Now she was able to translate how Kris first made contact with Ivor, initially by reading about him in the online Orcadian.
How they’d exchanged letters in the first instance, in which Kris had told Ivor about his mother, Betty, his childhood and her death.
She spoke often of Orkney and the High Island, as she called Hoy.
The letter she wrote to him before her suicide, which had lain unopened until he was older, had revealed why she’d left Hoy and given a description of the uncle who’d abused her.
Piecing all this together, Jo could understand Ivor’s sorrow and shame at how he’d lost his favourite granddaughter. And the joy at finding his great-grandson.
Everything Ivor had done after that had been designed to give Kris his rightful place in Orkney and to punish those who were, to his mind, betraying the family and Betty’s memory.
The elderly woman who’d spoken to her at the fire station had been right when she’d said that one of Ivor’s sons was Kris’s father. But even then, she had been fearful that her husband might hear what she had to say.
The power of the branch of the family headed by Harald was still at work. Maybe even more so than before. Now Jo understood many of Hugh Mowat’s actions. Although they were too late to save his granddaughter’s life.
It was at this point that she spotted something. Something she’d missed as she’d tried to decipher the individual words. Holding the notebook up in front of her, she now saw that Ivor had sometimes used capital letters in the middle of a word.
Her excitement grew as she wrote down each of the six letters. They weren’t in order, but there was no doubt that, when rearranged, they made up the word she’d heard Mackie say three times in the hospital.
Kalfey, Kalfey, Kalfey.
The capital letters were all in the section which centred on Kris, and Ivor’s concern regarding what would happen when his great-grandson arrived in Orkney. His fear for his safety. His distrust of his family, especially the branch headed up by Harald.
If he had prewarned Kris of a likely hostile homecoming, then he’d also told him what to do should that happen.
Ethan had been right about Kalfey being Cava in Old Norse. She would call and tell him, she decided.
It was at this moment the door opened and Gus appeared. Jo rose, that old familiar decision between fight or flight taking hold of her in an instant.
‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ he said with that signature smile. ‘I was hoping to find the boss in here.’
He was lying, she was sure of it. Somehow he’d found out where she was working on the notebook and couldn’t resist capturing her on her own.
‘Well, as you can see, he isn’t here,’ she said as though in dismissal. She contemplated sitting down again, but instinct told her that wouldn’t be the right move. Facing him square on was safer.
He was trying to read her, wondering what he might get away with. She met his look, her own unflinching.
‘What did you tell him?’ he said, his voice hard.
When she didn’t answer, he began to edge towards her.
‘Come any closer and I’ll sound the alarm,’ she told him.
He smiled. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Try me,’ she said.
He gave a little laugh and turned on his heel. Exiting, he shut the door firmly behind him.
Jo sank back into the seat, her legs turned to water. Any thoughts she’d had that Gus may have volunteered to come here with the purpose of confronting her were now confirmed.
She hadn’t revealed the full extent of his animosity towards her to DI Flett. Only that they’d gone out together for a while and she had broken it off. She hadn’t told Erling that when Gus had learned of the abortion of his child, his fury towards her had doubled.
Taking a deep breath, she called the boss and told him of her discovery of the hidden word Kalfey in the section of the notebook relating to Kris and his imminent visit to Orkney.
‘There’s also stuff about Harald’s branch of the family being a possible threat to Kris when he arrives,’ she told him.
‘Right. Tomorrow, at first light, we do a thorough search of Cava,’ he told her. Then, ‘Have you finished translating all three pages, Sergeant?’
‘One more to go,’ she said.
‘Stay there until you finish,’ he ordered. ‘We can’t afford to miss anything.’
The final page, she discovered, was about the other wrong Ivor had wanted to make right.
It was the story of Stella.
It carried on from his earlier mention of ‘the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen’.
It seemed that Ivor’s dive into the past of Hoy in its war years had unlocked more of his childhood memories. The trauma of some of them had led to them being buried, perhaps to save his own sanity. Stella’s story was one of those.
She had arrived at their croft asking for milk, just as Mackie had said, and had stolen the wee boy’s heart. Loving her from afar, Ivor had had to watch as Stella and his older brother, William, became wartime lovers. That was bad enough, but what followed was much worse.
After Stella was recalled from Orkney and sent back south, William had taken up with a local girl. They’d married, and when Stella had later turned up at the Mowat croft, a baby in her arms, Ivor, alone there at the time, had told her about William’s marriage.
The effect of this on Stella had been terrible. Ivor, seeing her distress, had begged her to stay, told her he would marry her when he was old enough. That he loved her.
She’d looked at him with pity then and, turning, walked away.
He found her body later, hanging in an outhouse, the baby already dead at her feet.
His older brothers had buried Stella and the baby nearby and forbade him ever to talk of her again. Ivor, still a child, believed it was all his fault, and never did. Until he’d begun trawling his wartime memories and been contacted by Kris.
Jo wondered if he’d told Hugh this story, the night of the argument.
Did Ivor think the only way he could force a reveal of the existence of the grave was by selling the land to Maitland for the eco-house?
Perhaps Hugh hadn’t wanted the eyes of the law on the family, even about something that had happened so long ago.