Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(110)

On the way back we passed the sunken radar bunker. If they’d had any sense they would have sought shelter in it. We slipped in and saw the brand new visitors’ book. They had all signed it and written, “Here for midnight 2015! Happy Yule!”

I groaned inwardly at that.

We went home to phone and tell everyone. Then the cops came from the neighboring island. Two incomers, both transferred up here from Glasgow. They asked after Shirley. They knew her from there. Said she had worked with them before.

They went off to see the campsite. They were there for a while. They came back with Shirley: they’d picked her up on the way back. Awkward, they said, to bring it up but they’d heard on the ferry that there was an argument in the bakery yesterday when Margie refused to sell them pancakes?

“No,” I corrected, “Margie refused to sell them all of the pancakes. That was the point. They wanted to clear the bakery out of pancakes and leave none for the rest of us. That’s not on.”

“I see,” said the one policeman thoughtfully. “Thing is, we looked in the car and found three pancakes on the back seat. It seemed strange.”

I suggested that the pancakes could have come from elsewhere. They seemed quite selfish, those men. Maybe they already had pancakes before they came into the bakery and were just being really greedy?

No one answered, but Margie looked uncomfortable. They took out a phone and showed her a photograph of the pancakes in situ. Yes, she said, they did look like her pancakes. She makes them big and half an inch deep. They left to go back and see the scene again and took Shirley with them. She might have something to add, they said. Margie sat crying in the front room.

An island is a self-selecting community, and that attracts a lot of oddities. People move here without really knowing anything about it. If an incomer mentions getting away from the rat race you know they won’t last. Give them one winter. They’ve usually argued with everyone, wherever they were before, and think other people are the problem. It takes coming here for them to realize that they’re the problem. We get cast in this uncomfortable psycho-drama every so often. When anyone comes here you wonder why. You wonder what their motive is. Not me though. I’m from here, as is Margie. Shirley isn’t, but we know she’s here for peace and quiet. And now the police are taking her to Saxa Vord and that’s the opposite of peace and quiet.

I like Shirley. I was a bit worried about her. That’s why I followed them.

Up across the hills and heaths, over the headland and down into the shallow valley, I followed the cops in my car. The wind was pulling and shoving my old Mini. It’s built for a city and not this exposed rock on the very edge of the Arctic Sea. It was already getting dark, still only early afternoon but the night glowered on the horizon, the sea clawing viciously at the cliffs. I drove with my lights off. No point in giving them a rear view warning.

Just before the Vorde there’s a small cove in the hillside. I parked there and watched, keeping low.

The cop car had stopped on the cusp of the hill. The lights went out. I could see the three of them silhouetted in the windows, chatting for a while in the twilight. The doors opened, front and back, and they all got out. Shirley put her flashlight on first. She was watching the ground, her waxed Inverness Cape flapping in the frantic wind. She went into the radar bunker first. When she came out her shoulders were slumped. She walked slowly along the path to the Range Rover. The flashlight flicked up, catching the rope whipping under the wheels. She followed the ground markings to the tent pegs and the flat rectangle of grass. She brought her flashlight up to the ground beyond it, at the edge of the cliff. I knew she could read it all. I think I started blushing.

The vicious wind bullied her sideways, her cape snapped around her face, and, as she lifted her hands to push it down, she saw me.

“Get her!” she shouted.

I didn’t run. There’s nowhere to run on an island.

It seemed to take the police officers a long time to get to me, but I stood still, waiting, my hands out to the side. They walked us all back over to their car and we got in. They asked Shirley to explain, the way Margie and I had asked her about the Golden Lab and the septic tank. She looked at them and told them what had happened step by step. It was uncanny.

I arrived after midnight: she knew this because the visitors’ book had been signed. I crept around the headland so that the camping men wouldn’t see me, tied the rope to the door handle, and left the door open. I set the rope on the ground and covered it with leaves. Then I held the rope and waited in the dark, watching the warm lights flickering in the tent. Shirley pointed to the flattened thicket. “She waited there. Didn’t you, Alison?”

She’s so smart. It’s weird how clever she is. It must be exhausting.

“I did,” I said. I was looking at where the Range Rover was fading into the darkness, and I told them, the visitors were only here for one night. I knew they wouldn’t unpack completely, they were bound to come out for something they’d left in the car. I described how the wind changed direction, carrying the sound of the men singing towards me. How I’d crouched, rain lashing my cheeks, thinking about selfishness and anarchy and the island. I was cold, I told them, so cold that my teeth went numb when I smiled, thinking about what I would do.

I told them how I saw the light change as the tent door was unzipped. A man crept out and turned back to zip it up before making his way to the car.