Wishing on a Star Read online

  ‘We’ll build a snowman tomorrow,’ she told Star. ‘And throw snowballs, then maybe we could make a sledge from the tea-tray and – oh, look! There’s one of our new neighbours. Wave, Star. Wave.’

  Hilda, having stepped outside to brush the rapidly-accumulating snow from her doorstep, stared at the girl and the child waving through Ivy’s window and shook her head. Really! Brazen little so-and-so! And now what was she doing? Opening the window! Really!

  ‘Happy Christmas!’ Holly called. ‘Isn’t this lovely? A white Christmas! My name’s Holly and this is Star.’

  Lovely ? And Star? What a ludicrous name! The girl was absolutely mad. Hilda smiled a tight smile but because she knew her manners, muttered, ‘Hilda Thornton.’

  ‘Smashing to meet you.’ Holly’s breath hovered in smoky plumes. ‘Oh, and …?’

  Elsie and Myrtle, hearing voices – the first that day – had appeared on their doorsteps.

  ‘Mrs Luscombe and Mrs Bennett,’ Hilda sighed, nodding towards them. ‘Myrtle and Elsie.’

  They all stared at her, this girl who was living in Ivy’s house, with ill-concealed suspicion.

  ‘I suppose you’re all ever so busy with your families,’ Holly called along The Terrace, which was now disappearing under a glittering white cloak, ‘but I mean – well, Star and I are on our own and I wondered if you’d like to come in for a minute. I’ve made a huge cake, far too much for us. I don’t suppose you’d like to …?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, thanks all the same,’ Hilda said shortly, brushing the snowflakes from her hair and starting as she meant to go on.

  Elsie took a deep breath. ‘Well, actually, yes, thank you. I’d love to come in …’ She stepped gingerly on to the path. ‘After all, it is Christmas …’

  And without getting her coat or gloves or sensible shoes, she walked carefully towards Ivy’s house.

  Myrtle and Hilda stared wordlessly at her and then at each other. Had Elsie gone mad?

  ‘We’re all on our own,’ Elsie said defiantly, shivering in the icy snow. ‘And I think a cup of tea and a slice of cake with our new neighbour would be just grand. Don’t you, ladies?’

  Myrtle and Hilda still started, then mumbling and grumbling – they never crossed Elsie if they could help it – they followed her unsteady trail along the terrace, the snow seeping into their slippers and settling on their perms.

  ‘Oh! I’m so glad we’re all going to be friends!’ Holly opened the door wide and ushered them inside. ‘Look, Star – it’s like the Three Wise Men.’ She grinned at Myrtle, Elsie, and Hilda. ‘Star’s really into the Christmas story this year. Please come in …’

  They stepped inside, into warmth and colour and Christmas.

  The furniture was sparse, true. There wasn’t a proper carpet on the floor, and the curtains looked terrible, but logs sparked and roared in the grate, the tree sparkled in the corner, and the paper-chains danced in the draught from the front door.

  ‘Not Three Wise Men,’ Star toddled towards them, beaming. ‘Three Nannas.’

  Hilda, Myrtle, and Elsie looked at each other with moist eyes, then smiled happily at Star, then at Holly Winters, who had no right to be living in The Terrace, but who had turned Ivy’s house into a home.

  A Christmas Murder

  Marsali Taylor

  Three candles flickered gold above the Advent wreath of yew and holly, two red candles and one pink. It was Gaudete Sunday, where the solemnity of Advent was set aside for the joyous reading from Isaiah: The eyes of the blind shall be opened, the deaf shall hear, the lame will leap like a stag … My heart sang to the words. Maman was beside me, in her sweeping white wool coat, home for Christmas. I couldn’t believe it was really happening, Dad and she smiling at each other after all these years apart, but this wasn’t the season to question miracles. I hugged them both at the sign of peace, and felt Father Mikhail’s blessing fall on us like a promise.

  My Khalida, the little yacht I called home, was moored in Scalloway now I was at college. The night blazed with stars as we drove through the darkness, crossing the narrow centre of Shetland’s cross shape from Lerwick on the east, then became orange as we curved around the quarry into the lights of Scalloway, the old capital, on the west; seven minutes to drive from the North Sea to the Atlantic coast. We picked up my Cat, then headed north for the half-hour drive to Brae.

  Maman had prepared a special dinner to celebrate her return: a glass of Pinot with twists of salmon, boar pâté on crisp biscuits, and bowls of green and black olives, followed by a roast of venison and a rich, red Morgon, then a cheese board, and finally French-style patisserie, washed down with champagne. Cat thought he’d gone to heaven. He had a good shot at wrecking the Christmas tree, scoffed a plateful of venison trimmings, then curled up in front of the fire, plumed tail curled over his little nose, and purred loudly enough to be heard in Sumburgh. Dad glowed with satisfaction at having both his women under one roof at last, and Maman sang in the kitchen as she prepared each plate.

  Then Maman’s phone rang. We saw from her face as she recognised the caller that it was trouble, and soon realised what trouble, from her end of the conversation: a singer gone sick from a Christmas performance. ‘I must ask my husband,’ Maman said firmly. ‘I will phone you back.’

  She cut the caller off and gave Dad an indecisive look. ‘It is Pierre, who gave me my first big chance. He needs someone urgently to sing Junon in Platée, at Chenonceau, for the three days before Christmas.’

  ‘Well,’ Dad said calmly, ‘we’ll have Christmas in France, Eugénie. I’ll pull a string or two, see what flights I can get with BP.’

  Maman’s dark eyes turned to me. The moment of truth had come.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be here for Christmas,’ I said. ‘Gavin asked me down to meet his family.’

  Dad’s mouth dropped open. There was a heartbeat of silence, then Maman asked smoothly, ‘Gavin is who?’

  My cheeks were scarlet. ‘DI Gavin Macrae, from Inverness.’

  Maman considered the rank and respectability. ‘I think I did not meet him.’

  ‘He wore a kilt,’ Dad said. ‘Nice lad,’ he added to Maman. I suppressed a smile; he hadn’t called him that when we’d shared the honour of being Chief Suspect.

  ‘So,’ Maman said. ‘When are you going down?’

  I’d been watching the charts for a fortnight. ‘Probably a week today. There’s a nice weather window tracking its way across the Atlantic. It’s a two-day sail, with a wind on the beam.’

  ‘You are sailing down, at this time of year?’

  ‘That’s why I wasn’t sure about it,’ I said, setting aside the belly-squirming fear of going to stay with a man I liked very much but barely knew. ‘It all depends on the wind.’

  ‘But you will freeze!’

  ‘Not,’ I said calmly, taking advantage of being the restored prodigal, ‘if you get me a new Musto mid-layer suit for Christmas.’

  Maman’s mouth opened again. Dad’s hand came up to her arm. ‘We’ll see you here for the New Year.’

  They both came to drive me home: through the darkness of the Kames, past the moonlight glinting on Tingwall Loch, around the curve, and down towards the seafront. It was getting on for midnight.

  ‘Tiens,’ Maman said. ‘There is a Père Noël on the roof of your castle.’

  Dad swerved to look. ‘So there is. Wonder how they got him up there.’

  He was up on the wall-top of Earl Patrick’s ruined castle, a stuffed figure dressed in Santy’s scarlet hat, breeks, and jacket, with a black belt and bearded false-face. A sheet flapping from the gable said ‘HO HO HO!’ in spray-painted letters. We had a glimpse, then he was hidden behind roofs as Dad headed for Port Arthur.

  I pondered the ‘who’ as I put the hot water bottle in my bed and brushed my teeth on deck. I could make a guess. I’d been worried that I’d lose my head for mast-climbing with all this time ashore, so I’d taken to going along to the climbing wall at Clickimin, the leisure cent
re in Lerwick – and it just so happened that two of the Climbing Club members lived right here in Scalloway. One of them was called Derek, and he lived in one of the New Street houses. He was a doctor in Lerwick, and I suspected half his surgery was silly women inventing ailments just to see him, because he was stunningly handsome in that broad-shouldered, blond-haired way. They needn’t have bothered; I regularly saw him with his wife and their troupe of golden-haired children in the shop, at the park, or just walking along the seafront, looking like a devoted family unit.

  The other one, Ertie, lived along the Port Arthur road. He, Derek, and Derek’s wife had been students together in Aberdeen, fifteen years ago. Now he was a maths teacher, a cheery soul with brown hair and eyes. His wide grin revealed capped front teeth, a souvenir of a particularly rough rugby game. He’d kept a student sense of humour, and putting Santy on Scalloway Castle would have been right up his street.

  It was a fair height though, and I wouldn’t have cared to tackle the climb up with a dummy on my back. Much easier to have two of you, and haul it up once you’d reached the top. It was a two-person sort of fun, with secret planning phone calls beforehand, and stifled giggles and glances across at still-lit windows in the houses of Castle Street as you manhandled the dummy across the road. Now, what was the name of that dark-haired girl who hung around with the two of them? Janette … no, Janine. She was a secretary somewhere in town, pretty, and a competent climber. I’d got the impression she was single, so she’d be available for jolly japes in the run-up to Christmas, unlike Derek, who’d be busy worrying about preparations for children’s stockings and in-laws for lunch.

  I fished out my mobile and sent a text to Ertie: Ho ho ho 2 u 2, then wormed into my berth, curled over to let Cat settle into the crook of my neck, and slept.

  I was heating my lunchtime soup when I heard something bumping against Khalida’s hull. It sounded sizeable but soft, a dead seal or porpoise maybe. I grimaced, hauled my oilskin jacket on and came out through the washboards.

  It had been a clear, cold morning, as the starry night had promised, with the sun glittering on the sea. The tide had come in till midday, and was retreating again now. The bumping object had caught at the corner of the Khalida’s berth on its way seawards. I felt my heart stop, then start again, thumping as if it wanted to push its way out of my breast. For a moment I’d thought – but it was just a Guy Fawkes dummy, a navy boiler suit with knotted sleeves and trousers, stuffed to bursting with straw, and with a grey float for a head. It hadn’t been long in the water, for the straw wasn’t sodden enough to sink – dumped on the shore, maybe, after high water yesterday, and taken off by this morning’s tide.

  Then I remembered the season. Guy Fawkes was long past. Yesterday, people were getting into panic mode about last posting dates for Christmas, and whether Shetland Transport would deliver the parcels from south in time; and high water had been at eleven at night. Only one joker was doing dummies at that hour.

  I turned to face the castle, tall and grim against the green hill. The splash of scarlet was huddled in the angle between gable and chimney stack, beside the white rectangle with its black writing. I reached into Khalida’s cabin for my spy-glasses. The castle sprang up, each stone shadow-sharp. I moved my field of vision up to the gable, and found the scarlet figure. Now I could see that the black belt was a cord doubled around his waist, holding him in place. He didn’t have that stiff-armed look a straw dummy has, and there was a seagull perched on his shoulder, pecking sideways under the false face. I lowered the binoculars, feeling sick, then reached for my mobile.

  College hadn’t yet closed for Christmas. It was hard to concentrate on the Region B buoyage system when I was wondering what was going on over at the castle. They’d have to get the body down. Even with all the rules about not touching a crime scene, they couldn’t just leave it there for the gulls, in full sight of all Scalloway. Easiest, I supposed, would be to get helicopter Oscar Charlie in, and have the winchman untie it and lower it to the ground. I didn’t envy him the job.

  How had the murderer got the body up there? Now we were talking serious climbing skills, the ability to rig a working pulley and use it up at that height to haul a dead-weight body. Ertie certainly would be able; probably Derek too. Janine would have the skills, but she was my height and build, and I wasn’t sure I would have the strength.

  And what a public place to be messing around with a dead body! I wondered, between looking at the whiteboard and writing lists of countries, how long it would take. You’d have to go up, fix the pulley, go back down for the rope – no, you could attach the body, then take the pulley and rope up.

  No, more simply, you could do it from inside. A fireman’s lift to the first floor Great Hall, then up the inside, and haul your body in peace without and fear of being seen. Place him, tie him, shimmy down again. I wondered who had access to the castle keys?

  Most importantly, who was it?

  ‘Derek Broadhurst,’ DI Gavin Macrae from Inverness told me, two days later, in Khalida’s cabin,

  He was wearing his dress tartan, in honour of the season, with a Cairngorm the yellow of Cat’s eyes twinkling in the silver hilt of the dagger in his stocking. He shut the washboards behind him, then sat down on the other side of the little prop-leg table in a swirl of scarlet pleats. His hair gleamed russet in the candle-light.

  ‘I don’t expect there were any,’ I said. I’d been psyching myself up to meet him off-duty on his own ground, so it was disconcerting to have him suddenly here again in Khalida’s cabin. I poured him a glass of the boat’s emergency whisky. He sniffed it doubtfully.

  ‘Are you trying to keep the cold out?’

  ‘It can get a bit chilly,’ I admitted. I put Cat to the floor and set the kettle on the gas cooker. ‘But the gas ring soon warms it up, once you get it going. So, tell me more.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me. Dr Broadhurst, married, four children under eight, lives in Scalloway, practice in Lerwick. A ladies’ man?’

  ‘He was charming,’ I conceded, ‘but you never saw him out without his family.’

  ‘Natural charm, or calculated?’

  I considered that one. ‘Natural, I’d say. He even smarmed me a bit, and the professional womanizers don’t usually bother. What does his practice say?’

  ‘His fellow doctors were certain there was no trouble with patients. One of them conceded he might have strayed outside his marriage from time to time. The practice secretary was less discreet, even a touch embittered – she reckoned he had a girlfriend on the go most of the time.’

  I pictured his wife, trim and immaculate, and always smiling. ‘Did his wife know?’

  Gavin wrinkled his nose. ‘She seemed less surprised than I’d expect at his going out for a walk so late at night, and it was you who reported the body. She didn’t report him missing – not even the next morning.’

  ‘Nothing from the weapon?’ I’d been in a classroom that faced out to sea when the body had been taken down, but I’d heard all about it from the owner of the house opposite, an old lady who was over ninety, with good eyesight, good spy-glasses, and a gossip chain Miss Marple would envy. It had been a knife to the heart, she’d told me: ‘A straight thrust, like a doctor had made it.’

  ‘A thin, sharp blade,’ Gavin said, ‘like a surgical knife, thrust efficiently in the right place. It was taken away, but if we find it we’ll be able to match it to the wound.’

  ‘And how about how he got up there? A ladder, or one of those lift things?’

  Gavin shook his head. ‘It’s too high for a ladder.’

  ‘Even from the inside?’

  ‘It would be hard, even with two of you, to get a long enough ladder up the stairs, and I’m never keen on the two-people theory for a murder.’

  ‘One of those truck things, with the pulpit on a ladder?’

  ‘No. The lady opposite was semi-awake most of the night, dealing with a child who’d eaten too many sweeties at a party on Sunday afternoon
. She’s certain she’d have heard even a car stopping, let alone a cherry-picker. However, she did see two people, both dressed as Santa, just past the castle. One was supporting the other, as if he was drunk. She couldn’t tell the time exactly, but after eleven, and she couldn’t say what they looked like – well, they looked like Santa, and she wasn’t surprised to see him about at this season.’

  ‘So it sounds like the person responsible was a doctor, who could climb.’ I didn’t want to think it was Ertie, but I wondered if he’d done any medical training – been a member of a mountain rescue team, say.

  ‘Yes; such a pity the prime candidate’s also the victim.’ Gavin drank his whisky gloomily, and rose. ‘I’ve done all I can do for this evening.’ He paused in the doorway, suddenly awkward. ‘Are you still thinking to come down for Christmas?’

  I nodded. ‘The weekend’s looking hopeful.’

  ‘Good.’ He nodded goodbye and headed off.

  It was the next morning before I remembered the dummy. Gavin didn’t need two murderers, just one. Derek had climbed up there under his own steam, with the dummy and – someone else. They’d planned the Santa joke together, dressed as Santa themselves to make it more fun, and to hide who they were in case someone else saw them, set up the sheet (a two-man job that, I remembered the way it had flapped in the wind) then the someone else had stabbed him, tied him up, and come down with the dummy. He or she had staggered down to the Burn beach with it, just as the lady in the house had seen them, taken the scarlet Santa suit off, and thrown the dummy over for the water to take away.

  I wondered, I just wondered, if Derek’s wife had also learned to climb in their student days.

  There were fewer people on the climbing wall that evening. I wasn’t sure if it was tact, or just pre-Christmas engagements. I was almost at the top of the ‘hardest’ route when Ertie came up beside me. ‘Now then,’ he said.