The Seal King Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever believe that I would be any man’s chattel? Remember my free spirit? Well, it’s still untrammelled, still the same.’
    Out of the corner of his eye, Faro saw a familiar figure, his mother bustling along the street, carrying a basket and heading relentlessly in their direction.
    Inga saw her too. ‘I must away. Be seeing you, Jeremy. At the Kirkwall market, maybe,’ she added casually. And again on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek quite brazenly this time, obviously hoping his mother would see it.
    And Mary Faro did. He knew that by her tight-lipped expression. ‘So you’ve met that woman again.’
    ‘An old friend, Ma, an old friend.’
     
    Mary searched his face anxiously but in vain for what she most feared, some indication that his feelings for Inga St Ola had been renewed. She had been aware of his infatuation with this older woman before he left the island to join the Edinburgh City Police and could never decide which worried her most. Especially as, soon after his departure, she learnt through island gossip that Inga had also gone away to the mainland. No, she hadn’t said why – not aword to anyone. So Mary was haunted by the possibility that she might have followed Jeremy to Edinburgh.
    Every letter filled her with anxiety – would there be some mention that she dreaded? ‘Inga is here’, or worse, that they were married? There was nothing to justify her fears, however, and when Inga returned a year later saying that she preferred life on the island after all, Mary drew a sigh of relief. This was reinforced when on his brief visits Jeremy had made no mention of that woman.
    Mary was not the only one to be haunted by dreams of Inga. Jeremy, too, was haunted by dreams of a very different nature that night, of Inga and love fulfilled. He awoke to sterner reality. The main reason for his presence – Macfie’s drowned cousin allegedly bearing priceless artefacts to Edinburgh.
    What were they? An essential was to establish what the vague description implied.
    A casual question about the ferry and Mary told him that although the boatman Amos Flett worked from Stromness, he lived just streets away from their old home. A good man, devoted to caring for his invalid brother. ‘Dying of consumption, poor soul.’
    And Kirkwall was the excuse Faro needed to see Inga again. She would be at the market.All that was necessary, the invention of an imaginative selection of reasons for going there alone.
    ‘Could you not wait until my half-day and we’d go together?’ pleaded Mary.
    ‘Time is short, Ma, there’s things I want to do right away. I’d like to see South Ronaldsay again. And we can go to Kirkwall on your half-day , if you like. I’d like that fine.’
    With that plausible excuse for an early morning start, she had to be satisfied. So off he went with the carters heading for the Friday market, accompanied by the usual noisy cattle and livestock.
    His presence was readily accepted and he found an uncomfortable, cramped seat where no one questioned him or showed the slightest curiosity in a man’s private business. Farmers did not question those they considered their betters, and with a natural politeness later on they would describe him thus, ‘He kept himself to himself. He came from yon Scarthbreck – a gentleman, aye, you could tell that by his boots.’
    In Spanish Cove a few more passengers were waiting to scramble for seats, mostly women armed with baskets and produce to sell, others with empty baskets to fill from the Kirkwall market. This brief stop confirmed once more Faro’s first impression that the inappropriatelynamed Spanish Cove resembled an ugly terrace of grey-faced houses lifted bodily from some poor city district and dumped down to perch uneasily above savage rocks and wild seas on a cliff top in Orkney, its inhabitants strangers in an alien environment.
    He gave a hand to an elderly man hampered by a box, its contents obviously fragile. Taking a seat beside him the new passenger