And when I imagined the incident, that was how I saw it: John, hurt by my cruelty, standing deliberately in the path of the oncoming car. The ultimate escape. I suppose it could have been an accident, but I left the island a week later to start college and never spoke to Donald or his friends about it. I didn’t want to know the details. There was no news about an injured young man on the Balranald road, so I could convince myself that John had been unharmed, that he had left for an easier life. Until now. Until the wind cut into the dunes and exposed his grave.
‘What should we do?’
‘What you should have done as soon as you found him,’ I said. ‘Call the police.’
‘I’ve already done that.’ Peter looked at me strangely, and I thought he knew more about John’s disappearance than he’d let on at the time. Of course there would have been rumours. It’s impossible to keep secrets in the islands. ‘I called you.’
‘Tell the local police.’ I stood up, my feet slithering through the soft sand. ‘He might have a family. He deserves a proper burial.’
‘Will they be able to identify him?’
‘Probably. Dental records. And the ring will link him with Lottie.’
And the soil, I thought, would tell its own story. There might be a belt buckle, buttons, hair. If Donald and his friends had used their own spades to dig the makeshift grave, there could be traces of peat from cuttings on their blackland. Their families hadn’t crofted the machair in the old way.
My father looked at me. ‘What will you do?’
‘What I should have done then. Tell the police what I know.’
He frowned. ‘It seems pointless, this digging around in the past.’
Then I saw that I’d been wrong about John’s disappearance. The boys who’d knocked him down would have left him where he was. They wouldn’t have bothered to haul his body down the track to the dunes. Once they’d realized he was dead, their instinct would have been like mine, to run. Peter had heard the racket that night and gone out to investigate. He’d buried John in the sand. A way of saving Balranald’s reputation.
‘I didn’t see what happened,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t in the car that hit him and I won’t speculate.’ It was the most I could promise.
My father turned away and I saw, as a sudden revelation, that he’d hidden John Ash to protect me, not himself. He must have cared about me, after all, in those strained days of my adolescence. I reached out and touched his shoulder, then walked off through the yellow light and the birdsong to make the call.
The Writer-in-Residence
It started to snow as I got off the plane: a few flurries, the flakes white against the dark sky. It was mid-afternoon, but that far north, night comes early. Sumburgh airport is very small, and arriving passengers walk across the tarmac to reach the terminal. Today a gusting northerly breeze tugged at our clothes and made us hurry inside. The runway stretches out towards the sea at both ends and is exposed whichever way the wind blows. There is no escaping from the water in Shetland.