And so we head for the poll with HMG, Hannah Mary Goodlad basically saying ‘vote for me, I’m not really SNP, and anyway, it’s only for five years,’ and Emma Macdonald, channelling Big Al Carmichael, claiming that the Liberal Democrats are the only barrier to evil Indy-dependence and rampant Swinneyism. HME - the Hypnotic Mammary Expansionists, aka Greens - are likely to come third, with everyone else trailing in lost deposit territory.

The Greens miscalculated the effect of what in Shetland dialect is known as claag - noisy cackling, as of a flock of birds - as opposed to braag or bragd, which means to mark ownership by cutting a permanent incision, usually in the ear of a sheep. Or braa (same as Scots-via-The-Broons braw) meaning very good, lovely or excellent, against voust, which means to boast or brag; ‘windy voust’ is particularly boastful bragging . ‘A claag o’ windy voust’ as a description of your political campaign, would not be a good thing.

(By the way, if some of the campaigners for ‘Shaetlan-as-a-distinctive-language’ are reading this, it’s worth pointing out that ‘a claag o’ windy voust’ is exactly the same in Scots as Shetlandic.)

There is a particular sensitivity in Shetland culture to people who are seen as noisy, strident and generally rather too proud of themselves. Partly this is about survival in a small, vulnerable rural  community. Do Not Rock the Old Rock. Shetland has always been a place where secrets are both open and unacknowledged. Best to pretend indifference to a slight or a betrayal if you’re going 40 miles out to sea fishing in an open boat with that betrayer next day. Or on the other hand, wait until you’re 40 miles out at the haaf until a convenient drowning settles things…

That is perhaps part of the reason for the reaction to the very public demonstrations against Nigel Farage’s arrival in the isles. And the infantile verbal aggression (anonymous, online and written drunkenly on a stolen campaign placard) against the Greens and their extremely noisy candidate.

The Greens will get something of a sympathy vote because that is also part of the Zetlandic character, an emotional attachment to the underdog - but the voust will stick and in many eyes and ears has already become claag. The question is, has HMG’s consummate campaigning trespassed into that territory too, simply by being too brilliantly visible and audible? Has HMG been too annoyingly good? Too noisy, too much her intimidatingly assured, publicly humble and overwhelmingly nice self?

Someone locally psephological who should know the score is firmly of the opinion that despite a brilliant campaign, HMG will be defeated by deeply entrenched Lib Dem Carmichaelism, with crucial teenage SNP votes going Green and possibly tipping the balance. Every candidate is claiming expressions of support ‘on the doorstep’ but as traditionally most Shetlanders would rather die than disagree with a visitor face-to-face in or outside their own house, that is nonsensical.

For what it’s worth, I  think it’ll be close but Hannah Mary will cut the mustard. Or incise the sheep’s ear. Probably. Would that be braa? I couldn’t possibly comment. But if she does, with Big Al set to retire, it could be the beginning of the end for the LiboCrats in the Northern Isles.

I first came to Shetland in the deepest of January darkness, 47 years ago. The Sullom Voe oil terminal was nearing completion and I had been sent north by the oil industry newspaper I worked for to interview some of the contractors involved. 

The weather was particularly bad that week. I’d been supposed to fly to Sumburgh but the British Airways Viscount from Glasgow had stumbled through an emergency  landing at Dalcross by Inverness instead. Passengers were bussed to Aberdeen and herded aboard the old P&O ferry St Clair. I was expecting a short crossing on the boat, like to Arran. I should have suspected something different when I was offered a cabin and a complimentary steak. Fourteen excruciatingly turbulent hours later I arrived in Lerwick. The steak long departed.

Of course it was still night. It never became truly light during that first visit. Mirk or murk seemed to rule, with the colossal construction project that was Sullom Voe seemingly covering everything on the Shetland mainland in a layer of sticky peat. You could taste it on your teeth. A workforce of over 7000 had been imported to the isles on what was a no-limits “cost plus” contract to bring the oil ashore and, essentially, kill coal mining. Thatcher triumphed and Scargill crumpled on the shores of Orka Voe.

In a quarry Portakabin I spoke to a man from Kirkcaldy who’d come to Shetland for a fortnight and swore he’d never leave. “Never met hospitality like it,” he said, as the wind howled and he offered me a nip of Stewart’s Rum. At Sullom Voe itself there was no security, and I had driven my hired Mini onto one of the loading jetties before I realised it was probably a good idea to stop. I dropped what remained of that car off at the airport before my flight home, with the windscreen wipers dead, the electrics intermittent. Inevitably, it was afternoon. And dark.

“Wish I had a grey Cortina…”

A decade later Iarrived in Shetland off the ferry, this time in a borrowed Cortina Estate crammed with books, records, a guitar and a few clothes. No job, on the run from the kind of troubles no-one ever leaves behind. Into more winter darkness. And bit by bit, week by week, everything changed. Working at The Shetland Times opened up a career. And the light began to break.

But it was hard, that island winter darkness. Yes, there was the whole concept of ‘foys’ and ‘peerie foys’ - the Shetlandic winter habit of partying hard and soft, from Up Helly Aa fire festivals to “in aboot the night” visits to folk's houses for homebakes and drams. A lit Rayburn, peat reek, music and stories. But adjusting to the lack of daylight was difficult. Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, was very real. I bought a “daylight” therapy lamp to banish the inner and outer shadows. It didn’t work as well as time.

A tale of two winters

Two winters, they say. Give yourself two winters if you’re moving to Shetland. If you can handle that you’ll be OK. Maybe you’ll stay. But you have to play the long game. Because the slow shift from winter to spring suddenly accelerates and you find yourself in a world of almost eternal light and space. Everything expands. The sky gets bigger and by the time midsummer arrives, you can find yourself  very nearly drugged, blinking and disorientated by the sense of openness and clarity. Some visitors find it overwhelming. Frightening.

A final burning

I’m writing at the true turning of the year, the spring Equilux (when hours of day and night are equal) having passed and the Equinox (when the sun appears directly over the equator) still a day away. The final Up Helly Aa (“the coming of the light” it means) is this weekend, just down the road at Delting, near Sullom Voe, which means A Place in the Sun. Daffodils are blooming, the ground is at least showing signs of drying out, and there are hints of warmth in that actual sunlight. 

Yet it’s a troubled time for some people in the archipelago. Mental health is always affected by the seasons, and maybe the coming of the light stirs and exposes thoughts and feelings we shut away in the darkness of winter. Sometimes we’re afraid to see clearly. But unless we do, there’s no growth. No resurrection. No spring.

Next week I head south, hoping to get to the launch of Yvonne Lyon and Boo Hewerdine’s excellent new album Things Found in Books, at Culzean Castle. The title track finishes my hour-long playlist for these lightening days, which you can find below if you have Spotify. It features  songs on an obvious darkness and light theme, but also one or two from Shetland that have meant a lot to me over the years. 

Because in the end, if the light possesses the power to heal, it needs a soundtrack.

The story so far: A hoax which seemed to be the  decapitation of Feargal Birkadale, suave, not to say greasy communications officer for the massive Shetland windfarm known as Archie, short for Archipelagic Renewables, was followed by the actual removal of the real Feargal’s head (and hands, but that’s not important right now). A murder inquiry saw an elite  team of the usual drunken hack coppers flown up from Inverness, meaning that local sergeant Mary Lou Everly and her sidekick Detective Constable McKinstry have been sent to Fair Isle, in pursuit of possible suspect and anti-windfarm campaigner Louise Finlayson, head of SOW (Shite on Windfarms). She has already admitted perpetrating the original de-heading hoax.

Arriving on Fair Isle courtesy of the seriously dodgy Swaabie Airways, Mary and McKinstry are met by Louise herself, who breaks the news that Shetland’s chief forensic crimes investigating officer, Greta Skolosovinski, who everyone thought was on leave recovering from trench (or foot) mouth, or foot in mouth, or foot in trench, has also been found, decapitated and on this, the second most remote island in Shetland after Foula, which is halfway to America instead of Orkney.

Apparently Greta’s head is missing. Which is, after all, the meaning of ‘decapitation’. It’s also become evident from embarrassed flushes and flashing glances, that something has been going on between Louise and McKinstry.

Now Louise is taking McKinstry and Mary for coffee. Or something. Possibly…

They climbed into the ancient Bentley Fiona had guided them to , having fought their way through the still-skirmishing twitchers, one of whom had torn open a tin of baked beans with a penknife and was spooning the orange delights into his mouth with his fingers. Another was slugging Lagavulin like lemonade.

“Birdwatchers,” muttered McKinstry. “What would we do without them?”

“Have more Lagavulin and baked beans to ourselves, no doubt,” said Mary, who was more of a Speyside woman, being particularly partial to heavily-sherried Aberlour cask strength, known as A’Bunadh, which she had found was extremely effective at removing stickers from car bodywork, dissolving warts and silencing annoying men. One sip and they were stricken dumb, sometimes requiring hospital treatment for laryngeal abrasion..

“Nice car,” said Mary. She didn;t mean it. It may have once been a prestigious motor but this large contraption was held together mainly by rust and fertiliser bags. The seats were essentially sacking and beachcombed fishing nets, while the windows and windscreen were so scratched and dirty it was almost impossible to see out. Only the engine, a gigantic 7-litre affair, roared with intention and power. As was the case on all the outer Shetland Isles, neither an MOT test for roadworthiness nor road tax was necessary. This was known as the Grimond amendment to the Road Traffic Act, and the only reason Orkney and Shetland - still - voted LIberal Democrat. Cars were driven until they stopped working, and were then turned into animal accommodation or art installations, or both. All over Unst, for example, there were Rolls-Royces and Mercedes abandoned due to mechanical failure, painted in garish colours - one reputedly by Banksy - and used for housing pigs, goats and in one case, an entire order of Albanian Orthodox monks.

“We’ll head for Malcolm's Head, for the processing plant,” said Linda. “The office there has a very acceptable Rancilio Silvia coffee machine someone stole from the Radio Shetland offices. And they import beans from one of the Edinburgh roasters. 

“No chance of a civet shit coffee,?” Mary was joking. The only place in Shetland you could get coffee made from beans that had been eaten and defecated undigested by civets was Mareel, the arts centre in Lerwick, and then only on Fridays. Someone in North Roe was currently pioneering coffee production made from beans eaten and shat out by pedigree Shetland sheep, but three teams of consultants were required before the necessary grants could be applied for. And the grants necessary to employ the consultants had yet to be awarded.

The processing plant had been set up, Marty knew, by grants channeled  from the windfarm through the Zetlandic Community Bribery Fund. The idea was that the many thousands of birds that perished due to collision with the whirling blades of Archipelagic Renewables’ wind generators could be recycled into something useful and environmentally practical, if questionable, namely feed pellets for fish farms. Fair Isle was chosen as it had a small number of birds constantly being shot by renegade armed birdwatchers and a constant difficulty with stray whales killing themselves  after getting lost on the way to Orkney. All could be recycled in the Malcolm’s Head meal factory. Protein was protein.

“It was good to have the last surviving Antarctic whalers training up young men to flense the blubber off the dead humpbacks,” said McKinstry.

“No, it was not,” said Mary.”Those whales only got lost due to their sonar being buggered by the underwater heavy metal disco broadcasts they have in Scapa Flow.”

“I heard the Peter Maxwell Davies one they had was especially hard on swans and dolphins,” said McKinstry. “Classical music’s a bastard for birds and cetaceans.”

The ancient Bentley bumped and rattled to a halt outside a massive metallic building which, oddly for Fair Isle, was marked by the complete absence of bird life around it. Louise led them through a small door into a comfortable office which smelled deliciously of coffee.

“Ethopian beans,” said Louise.”I’ll just grind some for us.” when she turned around from the Rancilio machine she had a long, wicked-looking knife in her hand. “I suppose it’s time I owned up.”

“Och, Louise,” said McKinstry. “This is all so unnecessary. You’ve lost your head completely, woman.”

“More than one head, I fear,” said Mary. “Explain yourself, McKinstry. Or let me guess: this is not an anti-windfarm head-removal protest is it? It’s all about ill-advised sex.”

“That’s correct, came a voice, lightly accented with the Polish of her parents and roughened by the trench mouth she had been diagnosed with, though it was actually a condition caused by chewing Gauloise cigarettes.

“Greta Skolovinski, as I live and breathe,” said Mary. “Louise, you fibber. She’s completely attached to all her various appendages. Some heads-up that turned out to be.”

“I am indeed,” said Greta, a six-and-a-half foot Amazonic type with hair liked barbed wire caught in a goat. “And if you’re looking for the head and hands of the bastard Feargal, they are already on their way to a Norwegian salmon farming concern, where they will nourish some oily fish, salmon, or possibly halibut, in a way that conniving mouthpiece for the pillagers of Shetland’s landscape never nourished no-one!”

“Bad grammar,” said McKinstry. “Always a problem with you Greta. I tried to prevent this. Louise, you know, I…I …I love you. Well, I quite liked you. Please, this folie a deux with a forensic scientist has already led to one death. Surely you can see you can go no further?”

“We have a boat ready to head for North Ronaldsay,” said Greta. “From there, we can go anywhere. Possibly Wick. And you speak of love? Louise and I have a passion beyond love, sealed in the blood of that weasely creature Birkadale, who threatened to come between us. And now you too, indeed you two too, will join him as organic fish feed, along with whales, birds, cows and one or two dogs and cats the locals wanted rid of.”

She threw open a door, produced another long-bladed knife, and with Louise herded McKinstry and Mary through it. Along a corridor they went, through another door and immediately they were hit by a wave of mechanical sound and the smell of surprisingly fresh flesh. It was like being in a butcher’s shop at Christmas. Below them something like the drum of a massive washing machine, only with vicious looking blades and no fabric softener, spun slowly.

“You won’t get away with this,” said McKinstry. “Louise, doesn’t that night in the Hrossey’s linen cupboard mean anything at all to you?”

“How did you get the heads and hands here?” said Maqry. “And why?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Louise, I had the head on my hold baggage and the hands…

“As hand luggage, yes I get it,” said Mary. “McKinstry, where did you get that gun?”

Lousie and Greta turned to look at McKinstry, who looked at his empty hands in puzzlement, then at Mary, who shook her head. “Ah well, it was just an idea.”

Suddenly silence fell, and the great machine below them ground to halt, leaving a somewhat dishevelled sea eagle corpse shedding feathers at the bottom. The door behind them burst open  and with a series of drunken shouts, a couple of inebriated birdwatchers burst in, waving empty Lagavulin bottles, their faces stained red with baked beans and tomato sauce.

“Islay coffee!’ one cried. “Urgent! Urgent! More beans! More beans! Stuff the whimbrels!”

“I’m bored with this,” said Mary, grabbing a bottle and smashing it over Louise’s wrist. The knife went flying. Holding the jagged remains of the bottle she jabbed it forcefully in Greta’s direction. “Trench mouth,” eh? I’ll give you trench mouth. Who  eats French cigarettes anyway? And what did you do with all the filters?”

The machinery below them started up with with terrible grinding screech. The two birdwatchers stumbled forward in fascination and in a terrible dance of death, they, Louise and Greta fell into the greedymaw of ill-advised recycling technology, and within minutes, were reduced to perfectly acceptable salmon food, on their way to pelletisation and the great circle of edible life.

“Well, that’s that then,” said McKinstry.

“What on earth did you see in her?” asked Mary.

“Well, neither of us could get a cabin on the Hrossey that night, so we both bedded down in the linen cupboard next to reception and one thing led to another,” he said. “I admit I should have mentioned it.”

“Oh, fair enough,” said Mary. “let’s go and get that coffee.”

But just then the rumble and squelch from the flesh recycling machinery was subsumed by a greater vibration. The ground itself was shaking and all the interior lights went out as the entire plant ground to a halt. There was a roar from outside and a flash visible even in the depths of the factory.

“That’ll be a Russian tactical nuclear attack on the Unst missile launching site,” said McKinstry.

Mary shrugged.

“Another one?”

“Just as well it’s so windy here,” said McKinstry. “A stiff south easterly should send the radiation firmly towards Faroe as usual.”

“Serves them right for eating all our puffins,” said Mary. “Fancy an orca steak for supper if we’re stuck here? It’s a well-known Fair isle delicacy.”

“Whale meat again?” said McKinstry. “I hope not.”

THE EN

D

The Scalloway Fire Festival, first of the Up Helly Aas, has come and gone. Lerwick, the mighty viking prince of the season’s dozen or so burnings, is upon us. Perhaps it is time for me to visit once more some of my researches into the strange community of Virdablutt, and the evidence, such as it is, that the origins of Up Helly Aa may lie not in end-of-Yule tar barrel burning, the quirky Baptist-socialist-Norseman romance of J Haldane Burgess, or the teetotal politics of soldiers returning from the First World War, but in something much older. And darker.

There was another festival of fire, a lost burning, and it took place in a remote and now depopulated part of the western mainland of Shetland. If you go to Virdablutt these days, and it’s hard to get to, with only an unmaintained track over some sizeable hills and across a tidal causeway, there is little to see but the remains of two or three ruined and roofless crofthouses, one prettily sited in a lovely bay, with a shingle beach stretched in a crescent before it, facing out west to the Atlantic. A beautiful place to watch the sunset. It’s the kind of house you would imagine might have been restored, even as just a holiday home. But no-one has. Not even the salmon and mussel farmers have descended on this...I was going to say unspoilt spot. But unspoilt is perhaps not quite the right word.

Virdablutt was all about fishing, the far haaf, where groups of men would row six-oared, square sailed boats, sixareens, far out 40 miles to sea in search of fish, especially ling. It thrived for many years, it seemed. And then it failed, as many of Shetland’s fishing communities did, dependent as they were on a risky and fragile form of economy.

The late 18th century kirk lacks a roof now and is crumbling, but is famous for the carvings on ancient, heavily worked stones in its sheltered eastern wall which indicate that it was built on something much older. The Virdablutt carvings are the reason a number of tourists make the difficult trek there every year, partly for the ‘sheela nan gigs’, the only examples in the isles of these giant female fertility symbols, perhaps best known for their unembarrassed presence at Rodel in Harris in the Western Isles. These are hugely important, the only examples of these sexualised female caricatures in the isles. But it’s the other carving that interests me more. It shows something which indicates Up Helly Aa’s origins could lie not in the drunken antics of rowdy Lerwick tradesmen, or even in the simple illumination of winter-darkened townships, but in the desolation of Virdablutt. In a stranger, more sinister ceremony.

My attempts to research Virdablutt at the excellent Shetland Museum and Archives proved frustrating. There are, strangely, few references to what had been after all, at one point an entire parish of Shetland, and, with the fishing, an important one. It had been nominally under the ownership of the Busta estate but a succession of landlords seem to have largely ignored it, taking their minimal crofting rents and presumably the usual punitive share of the fishing income, and doing little if anything in return. There are some references to World War One and the forced removal of the population for military reasons, but no references to what actually happened there.

Church of Scotland Presbytery records did indicate, however, that the kirk as such - had been closed “due to evacuation” in 1914, and there are various red-faced references to the sexual archaeology and “symbols pertaining to fishing rituals, aimed at securing the beneficence of nature”. On my own single trip to Virdablutt I found, where in a higher form of church there would have been an altar, a broken stone cross, with some withered flowers placed next to it. Protected from sheep, wind and rain by one of those glass domes you see in cemeteries. Next to gravestones. Oddly, there are no grave markers in the remains of Virdablutt.

It took a search through the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, the Church of Scotland’s vast and sometimes damning history of each and every minister who has been called to it, to reveal something of what had happened at Virdablutt. And even then, the ministers who served Northmavine, from the 16th century on, did not spend much time visiting the place, based as they were in the much more thriving and rewarding community of Hillswick, over the pass, across the causeway, and many miles south of the westward track’s beginning at Collafirth.

There were references, though, to ‘rumours of exceedingly sinful and dark activities’ concerning the Virdablutt folk, - about 350 of them according to one census from 1762. And there was a Rev Peter Christopher Oswaldson from the early 1820s who left his charge in Northmavine for a presumably less demanding one in Fife, but not without a final sermon “noted by many for its condemnatory tone as to the infamous boat burning rituals of Virdablutt.” Further back, one minister referred to ‘The Virdablutt conflagration’ and how he had banned any of his congregation from attendance or observation. “To no avail, as they are steeped in the damnable consequences of their superstition.”

This ritual, clearly much much older than any of the modern Up Helly Aas, is illustrated in the carving on the kirk’s eastern wall: A boat, crudely rendered, with what appear to be flames surrounding it. The boat is resting on a prone, plainly human figure.

My researches took me, eventually to Professor Sigurd Hakonsson at the University of Oslo. In Edinburgh for a conference, I spent a fascinating afternoon with him. He was familiar with Virdablutt, and indeed had visited during one of his many trips to Shetland. The prefix ‘Vi’ was significant, he said, in viking archaeology, meaning the place of a shrine. And then he told me about the viking concept of blot, or blood sacrifice. Usually aimed at appeasing the gods, notably Odin, these rituals saw animals killed and often burnt. As the raiding and exploration parties began to move westward, these sacrifices became functional aspects of setting out to sea, and were part of a blessing for the boat carrying them on their latest adventure.

“The blot, according to our excavations from Norway and Denmark as far as Newfoundland and mainland Canada, developed and became quite specific” Professor Hakonsson told me. “The availability of conquered or enslaved communities meant several people could be slaughtered in its name for the gods. But thought to be more effective was the death of a young woman.”

I was dumbfounded. If this was so, it meant that the colourful and largely innocent tradition of Up Helly Aa was based on human, and indeed female sacrifice. But then the professor said something which shocked me even more.

“Our researchers in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland discovered that some, but not all of the fishing communities there practised a symbolic form of ‘blot’ until comparatively recently. Just before World War Two, in fact, when it appears to have been stopped by the authorities. As I say, symbolic of course; these things are always about symbols. But the burning of an old fishing boat with a kind of puppet or life size doll beneath it on the fire was common. And there was a young girl elected, every year to be the queen of the festival. The Blood Queen, they called her, apparently.”

The Professor had to leave. We parted on good terms, but not before he shook my hand and said, oddly enough, that of course there was no archaeological evidence that Virdablutt had ever been the site of such blood sacrifices. ‘Symbolic,’ he said, ‘or otherwise.’ And he added: ‘Take care. The idea of the blood sacrifice is a very potent one.’ I felt there was much he had failed to tell me.

I travelled home, my mind reeling... Why was the ‘blot’ and its fairly recent symbolic manifestation not more commonly known? The Professor’s research was, strangely, not easily accessible on the internet - it was behind a paywall at the University of Oslo, and an expensive, Scandinavian one.

It was two weeks later that the package arrived. Postmarked Edinburgh, but anonymous. Inside were several sheets of paper clearly scanned using a smartphone. Part of it was a report, redacted as we’ve learned to call it, with passages and names blacked out. But it was headed: ‘Evacuation and resettlement of Virdablutt community, Zetland, 1914” and it had come from within what was then the War Office.

Only 100 people had been left in Virdablutt by 1914. The haaf fishing was fading, steam drifters were beginning the process of industrial catching with which we are all familiar. Men were in the process of being called up for military service. One paragraph stood out:

“It has been decided that, following longstanding reports of irregular social activity including practices deemed sacrilegious, and the complaint of one mother about the kidnapping and unexplained disappearance of her daughter” - and here the name had been erased - “ the best if drastic solution is the removal of the entire population of the communtiy known as Virdablutt, and the imprisonment under wartime strictures of these male persons.” A list of names, again redacted.

The other piece of paper was a paragraph torn from a newspaper, placed on an A4 sheet, photographed and printed. It referred to the trial of one Cowan Ernest Sipsmith, trawler skipper, in 1919 at St John’s, Newfoundland, on charges of child kidnapping, murder and ‘engagement in acitivities of extremely barbarity likely to cultivate superstition and terrorisation within the community of Viblod.’ Viblod. I looked it up. On the extreme western tip of Newfoundland, a deserted village near the curiously named bay called Salvage once known for its thriving economy, entirely based on fishing.

Nothing about Virdablutt. On the other side of the Atlantic. Nothing but 2000 miles of clear water between the two communities with almost the same name.

Up Helly Aa lives and grows and is largely, these days, portrayed as a series of inclusive community festivals. Eventually, one assumes, the main Lerwick event, having reluctantly allowed women to join the parading squads and even dress as Viking ‘princesses’, will crack completely open and allow all-women squads, even a female jarl. There will be grumbling and some heckling and abuse, but Shetland is essentially a welcoming place where equality is treasured and many women take leading and warmly appreciated roles in the community.

I watch old videos of the galley burnings, now, on the internet, and I feel...anxious. Circles of men and, more recently, women, each bearing a flaming torch, marching sunwise, always sunwise, never widdershins around the blaze. Sending some invisible viking to Valhalla in flames. The Guizer Jarl is always safely removed from the galley just before it is set on fire.

Another package arrived yesterday. A Canadian postmark. A large padded envelope and inside a plain cardboard box which held, wrapped in tissue paper, what was, even to my unpractised eye, a Barbie Doll. A vintage model, I later discovered. Her chrome viking helmet and chainmail glittered. Her plastic axe, however, was broken.

The label on the box, professionally printed, said: ‘An Up Helly Aa Souvenir, hand-made in Shetland’. And then two words, ‘good luck.’

I sold her on eBay for £167, to a collector of such things, somewhere in Australia. I have never returned to Virdablutt. It is, after all an extremely inaccessible place, and even the track leading west from Collafirth is very hard to find. Indeed, some have found it impossible.

Others who did find it have never returned.

The contract to run an air service between Fair isle and the mainland had recently gone to a start-up aviation company based in Ollaberry called Swaabie Airways, owned, run, piloted and maintained by a family of former circus performers. They had moved to Shetland after a big top accident in Guernsey involving the permanent disfigurement of a koala bear. They were called the Adolphos, Gus, Tasmina and a sullen teenager named Cotswold, who looked after ticketing and obligatory rudeness. Their act had combined clowning with trapeze and tightrope work.

“Why Cotswold? He was conceived in Bourton-on-the-Water” Gus told Mary Lou while revving the little Islander aircraft’s engines, “and born in Chipping Norton. We could have called him Jeremy, after that Clarkson yokel, but I mean. Jeremy? Can you imagine the bullying?”

“Wold for short, I suppose,” said Mary Lou, “or Woldy. Mouldy Woldy…” As a constable she had twice warned Cotswold for vandalising sheep when he was a pupil at Brae High School. Gus shook his head.

“I prefer the multiplicity of syllables, Or duality. Anyway, seeing as this is an official contractual flight, do you mind if I detour via Scalloway and buzz the harbour? Someone’s having a Shetland Bus birthday lunch at the museum and they want me to pretend to be a Nazi fighter-bomber. You know, like in World War Two, when the Norwegians used to escape the Germans in fishing boats?”

“We know what the Shetland Bus was,” said McKinstry, who was strapped substantially into the seat behind Mary Lou, nervously sucking a Werther’s Original.

“As long as you don’t hit the Lobster College, “ Mary Lou sighed, “ and don’t drop anything explosive.”

“Oh, just a flour bomb. Organic,” said Gus. “It’ll only take us five minutes out of our way.” And with a clattering roar the aeroplane, which despite having no-one else on board was heavily loaded, went skittering down the Tingwall runway. Mary never felt nervous during the short inter-island flights. Even when Gus, who had learned to fly, he said, as a substitute for the death-defying trapeze work ended by the koala bear incident, demonstrated his elan and general insouciance by putting his feet up on top of the instrument panel and demonstrating how he could steer an aeroplane with his nose. He did have a very pronounced nasal instrument. “I learned that from a Loganair pilot,” he had insisted. “It’s part of their official training.”

The Teuchter investigative force of rumpled police, otherwise known as the Scottish bastards, had arrived the previous day from Inverness, five assorted ranks (“silent ‘w’, muttered McKinstry) led by the officious and oddly aromatic Superintendent Arthur (“and not perfumed in a good way,”McSkimming had whispered darkly; “I suspect leakage”). They had brusquely taken over, as was their officious wont, making disparaging comments about the quality of takeaway Indian food and drinking the Grand Hotel dry of Aftershock. Partly to get them out of the way, what with their annoying local knowledge,on the spot insights and alleged liking for puffin stew, Mary Lou and McKinstry had been ordered to Fair Isle in pursuit of the missing Louise Finlayson. All attempts to contact her or indeed anyone on the island, just 10 miles south of Sumburgh Head, had failed. The backup semaphore apparatus at Sumburgh had been hit by a flock of befuddled cormorants, while the relatively new Fair Isle ferry, a roll-on-roll-off catamaran powered by methane and a carbon fibre sail, had recently gone aground at Higginbotham’s Geo, and then been sunk by a mass orca attack, which was becoming more and more common. The island had been left with only the replica longship Dim Riv, normally hired for hen nights and seal kidnapping, to bring in supplies. A mechanical problem - “it was a mistake to try and run this thing on used cooking oil,” Gus had said - had meant this was the first flight into Fair Isle since Louise Finlayson had made her hurried departure. It was packed with cases of Heinz beans, Co-op Chardonnay vinegar crisps and 16-year-old Lagavulin whisky, all of which were considered essential to the welfare of the several dozen birdwatchers who had been on Fair Isle for weeks, hoping for a sighting of an itinerant rarity, the Globular Faroese Albatross.

“Only the meal boat has been getting in and out by sea as usual,” Gus shouted back at the two police persons as the engines rattled and, Mary noticed, smoked alarmingly. “Don’t worry about the smoke. It’s just residual chip fat burning off.”

“The meal boat?” Mary turned to McKinstry.

“Aye. The factory at Malcolm’s Head where they process waste fish from by-catch, as well as all the birds the twitchers catch in their nets and kill before they identify them. Seventeen Hooper Swans in June alone, I hear. They have a special Government licence for turning the whole lot into feed for the farmed salmon industry. Dead cows too, anything that’s too diseased for the human food chain. They have some really high-tech sterilisation equipment that makes it safe for the salmon. And whatever they’re doing, the feed makes the farmed fish very resistant to parasites.”

“Malcom’s…Head? That doesn’t strike you as a bit of a coincidence, seeing as we’ve just found Feargal Birkadale’s bonce, detached and with nearby hands?”

McKinstry thought for a moment. “No,” he said, and lapsed into a brow-furrowing silence.

After a few minutes Gus began his bombing run over Scalloway, getting perilously close, Mary thought, to stalling speed as he heaved a couple of bags of flour at the shrieking crowd of elderly Shetland Bus celebrants on the ground. As the flag atop Scalloway Castle passed at eye level, she did wonder if they were just a tad low. They turned south for Fair isle, and Mary could swear at least two of the party were now lying prostate on the ground. The birthday lunch was probably for one of the century-old widows of Norwegian Shetland Bus veterans who had settled Shetland after the war. She hoped they were all right.

Suddenly, Gus was shouting at her in a thoughtful fashion.

“I’ve never asked you, but…it’s Mary Lou, isn’t it? Mary-Lou Everly. Are you the offspring of one of the brothers…offspring? A grandchild perhaps? As in Flight Twelve-O-Three? That’s one of my favourites”

She sighed. She tried hard to keep that ‘Lou’ hidden.

“Ebony Eyes, it’s called. No.” She didn’t feel like explaining that her father, whose original surname was Beverly, had changed it by deed-poll to Everly because he worshipped every harmonious note produced by Phil and Don back in the 1950s and 60s. And then inflicted one of their songs on her as a moniker. As a result she’d been mercilessly teased all the way through school and hated country-tinged energetically strummed pop music with a vengeance.

In a few minutes the Islander was circling the Fair isle Airstrip and beginning its approach, if you could call it that. Basically, Gus dropped the plane like a stone and skidded onto the untarred runway in clouds of peat-dust and dead migrant bird life, chopped up by the propellers.

“Ah well,”: he said, “more meat for Malkie! The Malcolm’s Head factory. They have to sweep the runway every day. Just as well they’ve got an outlet. What would the salmon industry do without Fair isle, nowadays?”

They slewed to a halt and in the sudden aching silence after the engines stopped, Mar glimpsed a crowd of birdwatchers, easily identifiable by their camouflage Gore-tex clothes and gigantic camera lenses, lurching towards them, screaming something that sounded like “Lagabeans! Lagabeans!” She’d always thought twitchers were a bit mad.

They clambered out through the milling crowd of desperate avian enthusiasts, and it was then Mary noticed Louise Finlayson shouldering her way towards them, her face pinched with what looked very like terror.

“Peter! Peter!” She cried, her eyes fixed on McKinstry. Suddenly he had his arms around her and was was stroking her hair. Aha, though Mary. Or possibly oho. Here was a clear infringement of investigative interests. McKinstry said something in Louise’s ear and she pulled away from him, turning to Mary and shaking her head.

“Thank God you’re here,” She said. “There’s been another murder.”

“Another head?” Louise shook hers. At least it was still attached to her body.

“No. The head’s missing. It’s…just the body.”

“Is it Birkadale’s?” Mary wondered how what was left of the handless, headless communications officer had managed to get to Fair Isle.

“No, it’s…it’s a woman.” Louise sighed. “ and her hands are attached. I think it’s Greta Skolosovinski. Dear God, I feel responsible. That hoax head was the start of all this. Shit on Windfarms’s reputation will be down the toilet.”

“But…but she’s got trench mouth.” What was the Shetland force’s scenes of crime specialist doing in Fair isle, heavily headless? And what on earth would Hyphen, Superintendent Arthur and the rest of the hoity tot Scottish bastards says? Especially when they found out that, as was clearly the case, Detective Constable McKinstry was shagging Louise Finlayson, chief murder suspect? Oh well. There was only one thing for it.

“Can you still get a decent coffee at the bird observatory, or have these mad twitchers used up all the espresso?”

A fight had broken out among a group of Gore-texed birdwatchers over a bottle of Lagavulin and a hastily-opened tin of Heinz Beans with Mini Sausages.”

“There’s only one kind of beans they’re interested in,” said Louise. “Come with me.”

To be continued….

I do not like a whitrit, I do not love a ferret

Unless you’re hunting rabbits they have very little merit

They’ll raid your outhouse, kill your hens

They slither and they slide

Like snakes with fur and feet and very nasty teeth besides

I met one in the garden and said “greetings, Mr Stoat

I think you visited last night and did not leave a note.”

He sneered: “it wasn’t me. I haven’t been here since last week

Don’t make false accusations or I’ll clamber up your breeks

And savage your appendages which I don’t think you will favour

Though frankly I’m not certain that I will enjoy the flavour.”

I replied “I don’t debate with feral mustelids

I know your weasel ways well and you keep the truth well hid

My Staffordshire Bull Terrier will clamp his jaws so tight

On your tiny squirming head that you will cease to see the light.”

“That would be Boris,” the stoat replied

“He and I are quite good friends

He turns a blind eye every time I take some of your hens

He’s partial to a wing or sometimes a chunk of breast

While I prefer the liver I find offal is the best.”

“Who can I trust?” I moaned, “my dog betrayed me for a piece

Of this disgusting semi-rodent’s illicit midnight feast.”

He laughed: “for this rural crofting life I think you are unfit

You should depart and cede control

To us. The whitrits.”

*whitrit: Shetland dialect/Scots name for a stoat

Shetland wildlife rhymes, 2: Otters are rotters

Otters are rotters

They’re cannibalistic

And what’s more they’re nasty and vicious

They don’t turn a hair, if no alternative’s there

Of finding their offspring delicious

They kill for the thrill

My hens ducks and geese

Just to watch the poor animals die

Then they pose and they preen

If any tourists are seen

“How cuddly and cute” they all sigh

Otters are basically whitrits, or stoats

You’ll admit the resemblance lingers

Even though they can swim

They’re essentially grim

Terry Nutkins: one bit off his fingers

I blame Gavin Maxwell

(That basking shark killer)

Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter

Pure sentimentality

When the reality’s

Very far from a Ring of Bright Water

Some say the pests

Should be eradicated

And hunt them with crossbow and trap

But when visitors stay

We’re content to display

Our great love for the furry wee chaps!

Shetland wildlife rhymes, 3: The vegetarian orca

I like to go wild swimming

I wear a swimming suit

It’s black and made of neoprene

It comes with special boots

And gloves, I’m insulated

nothing could be better

All told I’m warm as toast

Although I’m somewhat wetter

One day an Orca sidled up

And said pray tell me please

Why are you dressed up like a seal

Is your intent to tease?

Some say I am a killer whale

But There are limits to my diet

I’ve never tasted human

I’m tempted now to try it

Oh, Mrs Orca I replied

Or maybe you’re a Miss

I would advise: from munching me

You really should desist

This rubber covering I wear

Would not be to your taste

I think the indigestion caused

Would be a dreadful waste

That may be true, so said the whale

But how am I to know?

And with a gentle nibble

She bit off my big toe

And swallowed. Then, without a word

She turned and swam away

I suppose the flavour

Left her unimpressed that day

I swam back to the beach

My rubber boot now torn and bloody

And to the hospital I went

And there my foot was studied

A doctor stitched and bandaged me

And said I hope you’ll feel

In future somewhat less inclined

To dress up like a seal

I nodded. Yes, indeed I said

I know I’ve been a fool

In future my immersion

Will be in a heated pool

No mammals there are dangerous

Or would cause me injury

All but those who are incontinent

And cannot help but pee

Months passed. And finally it seemed

Wild swimmers swam in fear

For it seemed that locally

several toes had disappeared

Orcas had been hunting seals

In their vicinity

Perhaps the taste for neoprene

Acquired because of me.

Shetland wildlife rhymes 4: The Otter hunters

The otter hunters filled their boots

With ash, gravel and sand

To stop the draatsies* nibbling their feet

They couldn’t bite their ankles

So they chewed off half their hands

Which left the hunters somewhat incomplete

*draatsie: Shetland dialect name for an otter

Shetland wildlife rhymes, 5: Tirrick*

Tirrick, Tirrick

A second summer’s call

Swooping and flicking

The timebomb’s ticking

Tirrick, Tirrick

Sea swallow, free-fall

Arriving in such style

60,000 miles

Tirrick, Tirrick

They dive, swoop, stall

Fathers and mothers

Sisters and brothers

One good tern deserves another…

*tirrick: Shetland dialect name for an arctic tern. The birds breed in Shetland but migrate each year to and from the Antarctic. The longest migration of any creature on earth.

Shetland wildlife rhymes 6: An unkindness of ravens

Ravens in a flock:

That’s called ‘an unkindness’

A name so unfair

Only human blindness

Could slander a bird

So faithful and clever

It chooses a mate

Then keeps it forever

They gather together

They wheel, dive and swoop

Flirting and flighting

Dancing in a group

Until in sweet mystery

Partners are found

While unkindly, jealously

We’re confined to the ground

Chief Inspector Fotheringham-Smith, perhaps having been emotionally prepared by what Mary now thought of as the Latex Feargal Incident, acted with reasonable fortitude and calm when informed that this time, yes really, Birkadale was well and truly dead, but mostly missing and certainly in pieces. Hyphen fainted, though later blamed over-indulgence the previous evening in one of the experimental reestit mutton burgers being sold door-to-door by a team of illegal Skald butchers.

Roadblocks were set up and people diverted as they turned up for the daily grind at the North Ness Business Park, the Mareel arts centre, cinema and centre of therapeutic face-painting (workplace for Evangeline who had stumbled on the hands and head) and the Museum. Mary wondered if another notice would be written and erected: Closed due to cuts.

But no-one thought to tell Geordie Piltock, a creel fishermen who habitually landed his lobsters and crabs at the old Hay’s Dock, and had done for 40 years, through both its slow decay and rapid gentrification into a maelstrom of digestible heritage. His boat, an ancient double-ended Shetland Model named Dirty Bonxie, was a known hazard to visiting cruise ships, at whose massive hulls Geordie would often aim his tiny craft, its Stuart-Turner 2-stroke engine sputtering and Geordie shouting with rage about shoplifting tourists.

Geordie came tramping right through the taped-off crime scene wearing scaly, watery, oily wellies and waving two lobsters, their claws clamped in rubber bands, one in each hand. It was like a piece of Daliesque surrealism, Mary thought, watching him remonstrate with McKinstry. So much for the integrity of the crime scene. Besmirched by crustacea. He was taken aside by Jeffries and McKinstry, who was examining one of the lobsters carefully, salivating slightly.

Back at the station, and in conjunction with a constabulary communications officer in Inverness, tracked down in the toilets of the Phoenix Bar, where he was asleep in a urinal, a press release was cobbled together, which said only that enquiries were under way into the discovery of certain body parts, thought to be human, at the North Ness Business Park, Lerwick. Police Scotland’s Shetland Command duly apologised for the inconvenience to the citizenry of Lerwick, but urgent enquiries were continuing. At this juncture. So to speak.

But the Lerwick rumour mill had already gone into hyperdrive. Pictures of the head were on the internet (far too many would-be Don McCuilins with DSLRs and long lenses, not to mention iPhones) and the redoubtable, revived Hyphen was now involved (and delighting in) an endless conference call with his mainland superiors; meanwhile the Lerwick police station switchboard was threatening to melt under siege from journalists, bloggers, TV stations, podcasters and Geordie Piltock’s wife, whose name was not Mrs Piltock but, oddly enough, Mrs Cow. No-one knew exactly why. She wanted to know where her husband was (in custody, having hit PC Alwyn Jeffries with a lobster; McKinstry had bought the other one and had been seen Googling Thermidor recipés).

Doctor Sharon was in a much more sombre mood than during her previous encounter with the Latex Feargal, and had just about finished a painstaking survey of the herring barrels and their immediate surroundings. The position of the Birkadale hands and head had been photographed from every conceivable angle. Glenda Skolovinski, super SOCO, was still signed off sick, her trench mouth apparently unimproved.

“Sleazy bastard loved being photographed,” muttered Sharon. Mary, hovering by the Gutter’s Hut wall, could just about make her out. “He’d have loved all the attention. Maybe he did it himself.”

“Tricky,” said Mary, “Which first? Head or hands?”

“Just a tad difficult,” said Sharon. “In fact, quite a feat. Right, I’m going to bag up the bits. I can tell you this, though. He was cut up by someone who really knew what they were doing. And with very good equipment, near-surgical. Not like that chainsaw dismemberment in Unst two years ago. Or the North Roe rotavator business. Also, a lot of the blood had gone, obviously before the hands and head were moved here. So you’ll be looking for a garage with good drainage. Or a shed, or a barn. Or a house I suppose.”

“Or maybe just some red staining, somewhere in the Shetland Islands,”

“Or, you could just check the CCTV footage,” said Sharon, nodding at the single camera, high on its accusatory stalk, that clearly covered the entire scene.

“Gosh, I’d never’ve thought of that,” said Mary. Thank God we have a forensic genius to hand.”

Sharon nodded. “I’m a good noticer. Always have been. Noted for it.” She gave a tight little smile. “Just call me Dr Doolittle.”

To be continued…

A week later, on midsummer’s eve, there had been something of a development in the case.

It was a Friday and The Shetland Times had just been published, bearing the front page headline “How to get a head” above a photograph of the fake face, half-out of its bag, apparently taken by someone with access to the police station, wi-fi and a smartphone. The individual most suspected was the station cleaner, Jean Montgomery-Trump, a vivacious Mancunian incomer with special constable fantasies and a liking for WKD Blue, with some less than smart money on PC Alwyn Jeffries, who had contacts at the paper as its shinty correspondent. “Hoax ‘just a bit of pointed fun’ says teacher responsible” ran the subheading.

The development was a major one, not to say earth-shattering and for Mary, potentially career-forming or destroying. Because now Feargal Birkadale really was dead. And violently. The call had come direct to her at home, from one of her occasional jogging partners, who had been out running at the godless hour of 5.30am and had phoned Mary in hysterics, still running, her breath coming over the mobile network in great gloopy gasps. Her name was Evangeline Goodright-Smith, she was one of Shetland’s 37 arts officers (a specialist in dance-as-conflict -resolution and therapeutic face painting) and she was currently at the Gilbert Bain Hospital being given tea and diazepam.

“I think, on the whole,” said McKinstry, “we can assume that Birkadale is really and truly deceased this time.”

“I think, Peter, that’s a fairly safe leap of what passes for logic at this time of the morning, actually,” said Mary. It was now just after six, and to his credit, McKinstry was present, summoned by text, and even appeared to have showered. He smelled faintly of Drakkar Noir. “And that doesn’t look like latex to me.”

Mary had always liked Laureen Johnson’s poem ‘Rhythms’, which captured in urgent Shetland dialect the activities of the fishwives, who had populated Lerwick’s waterfront during the herring seasons a century or so ago. This had once been one of Europe’s great fish landing sites, a so-called herringopolis. Before the fish had been eaten to the edge of extinction by Russians. The poem was inscribed onto the ends of 10 barrels piled into a pyramid on Lerwick’s North Ness, just along the harbourside from the Museum at Hay’s Dock, in a small estate of offices and workshops built to resemble the old corrugated iron sheds that had once accommodated the gutters and filleters. One was even called The Gutter’s Hut. Which now seemed sickeningly appropriate

Feargal Birkadale’s now very pale face regarded them solemnly from the top of the pile of casks. Which were meant to represent herring barrels but were in fact small whisky butts. Nobody but mad Norwegians intent on producing surstrōmming, the rotted fish beloved by Scandinavians partial to a roasted puffin or two, used wooden barrels to pickle herring these days.

The head was pale because it was bloodless, and it was bloodless because it had been neatly removed from the rest of his body. He looked less like the crude model found in the museum, thought Mary, than, for some reason, Basil Brush. Ginger hair, thick and beginning to fade to that late middle age pepper and salt. And that beard, she thought. It had always been ill-advised. The midlife crisis jazz goatee. But there had always been a certain foxiness to Feargal.

Most of the rest of him was missing. However, one barrel had been daubed with apparently random splotches of blood and two severed, ringless hands, presumably the Birkadale’s, had been attached to it with butcher’s hooks. They swung gently, dripping gore.

“So many inconsistencies,” said Mary. “Butcher’s hooks and fish gutting. Whisky casks when it should be herring barrels.”

“That’s just two,” said McKinstry. “Consistent with the poem, though. Especially the lines on that particular barrel.”

Mary read them aloud: “‘In. Rive. Gut. Haand. Basket, Nixt?’”

“It means…”

“I know what it means, Peter. She’s describing the process of gutting a fish.” She sighed. “It’s that ‘nixt’ that bothers me. What now? Another victim? A mask first? Presumably that was some sort of warning?”

“Or another bit of the partial Birkadale? Do you think we’ll find the brucks of him gutted like a haddock?”

“Or a herring. Filleted. Boneless. Sometimes they’re left whole, aren’t they, guts intact? I believe in Japan they’re eaten like that.”

“That strikes me as a little extreme,” said McKinstry. “Though don’t they eat blowfish, there, with the constant risk of dying from the toxins?”

“It’s the same here whenever we get one of those pre-packed salads from the supermarket. The folk who harvest them in Spain have no toilets or washing facilities, so they shite among the lettuce. Seriously. You know how it says ‘washed and ready to eat?” They rinse them with hoses and that hardly deals with the filth, does it? That’s why hundreds of vegetarians die every year in Lerwick alone.”

McKinstry, whose eldest daughter, Joanna, had just announced that she would no longer eat meat, regarded Mary gravely.

“I will pass that observation on to my daughter, Sergeant. She will doubtless be fascinated.”

“Do. Now, better get hold of Sharon. She’s back from Paris. No lumber, but I think she had quite a few croissants. And croques monsieurs. And this time the Great Hyphenated Inspectorate will go completely demented. We’ll definitely have to call in the Teuchters.” She sniffed the air. “Difficult to tell with all these stray blood products, but I can’t detect any fog in the air. Let’s get the crime scene secured and hand this over to the sooth bigwigs as soon as we can.”

“One thing,” said McKinstry. “On that barrel. The final line from Laureen’s poem. ‘Aald hands awful fast.’

“I know,” said Mary Lou. ‘Experienced gutters can rip fish apart very quickly. We may have an accelerating situation.”

“Let’s hope things don’t get out of hand,” said McKinstry.”Or haand.” He’d hesitated. “You ken Louise is an ex-gutter herself?”

“Let’s say it had occurred to me.”

As McKinstry lifted his mobile from one Dickies denim pocket, Mary thought back to the conversation she’d had with Birkadale at Hay’s dock. No, he had received no direct threats up to this point. He had met Louise Finlayson previously, of course. But he thought they had a fairly professional, if combative relationship. Mary Lou wondered about that. There had been scurrilous and unlikely rumours of a sexual relationship, albeit brief, during the last Lerwick Up Helly Aa, but the thought was unappetising in the extreme. Particularly as Birkadale had been in a squad of guizers dressed as contestants in Ru Paul’s Drag Race. On the other hand…she shook the idea away.

“Now sergeant,” Birkadale had concluded. “I will email you a formal statement, if you like. But for now I must away to continue the fight for clean, sustainable energy.” Hmm…

Former fishwife Miss Louise Finlayson (herring a speciality?) had cheerfully admitted the bouncy rubber head prank and been charged with a not-particularly-punitive breach of the peace, as well as littering and several minor environmental health infringements. Since then, she had not returned Mary’s calls. A visit to her wooden chalet in Voe had proved it to be empty, and according to the school secretary Miss (not Mizz) Finalyson had gone to the Fair Isle Bird Observatory, taking a few days leave of absence in order to recover from her “considerable upsettedness”. While the inter-island air taxi service had confirmed her presence aboard the flight to Fair Isle, calls to the island were impossible due to severed cables, an absence of mobile phone signals due to sparrow and sea-eagle infestation, and the Sumburgh semaphore station being out of service. The elusive Miss Finlayson would have some questions to answer now. Rubber heads stuffed with sponge were one thing. Decapitated communications officers quite another. If the pair had engaged in subsequently-regretted Up Helly Aa-related sexual activity, that was really not much of an excuse. She had flown to Fair Isle yesterday morning, though, and surely someone would have noticed The Head of Birkadale (it sounded like a coastal cliff face) yesterday, if Louise had been responsible?

“Tricky business to get your head around,” muttered McKinstry.

Mary nodded.

To be continued…

She parked next to McKinstry’s standard-issue Aygo; there was a blue ‘Police: Accident’ sign at the entrance to the car park and a hastily hand-drawn placard on the bridge across the boatshed slipway saying only ‘closed today due to spillage’. The strange Teletubby sound generator funnels on the quayside were still operating, though, pumping out their bizarre soundscapes of Shetland voices and scraps of meaningless noise, reproduced with the quality of a hypermarket Tannoy system coupled to an old-fashioned clockwork gramophone. It was an art installation few understood and fewer liked. But its vast cost had been covered by a grant and so far, the weather had not damaged it enough to necessitate its removal. The funnels themselves were made of moulded stone chips and fibreglass, and had built-in lights that wavered more or less brightly depending on the season and the meteorological murk. Strands of what could have been wool lurked within glass compartments. It was all a bit like something a child might make in school project, from melted Lego and old jumpers. Many locals lived in hope that someday the salt and wind would destroy it completely, or that global warming would raise the sea level to such an extent that they would be submerged forever. But as that would also have meant most of Lerwick being under water, it was just a passing fancy, except in the most extreme of morbid minds. Like Mary’s, in her darker moments.

Most of the time, she loved the museum She’d been especially fond of the old Hay’s Dock Café on its first floor, where you could once sip cappuccino and eat scones made by the legendary Burra wife Florrie Edwardson. But the café had closed suddenly just as the tourist season began. A new operator was due to be announced shortly, Florrie’s contract having been terminated after it was found fumes from her reestit mutton soup had irreparably damaged old manuscripts in the adjoining Shetland Archives. Florrie was rumoured to be starting a mobile soup-and-scone operation in an old horsebox.

Mary could have done with a scone. Of all the home-baked scones in Lerwick, Florrie’s had come in a number two to the Olive Tree in the Toll Clock shopping centre, what passed for a mall in Shetland. That muesli bar she’d gobbled at the Knab had barely appeased the demanding sensation in her gut, and facing a decapitation while hypoglycaemic was neither appealing nor wise. Maybe she was suffering from a rare condition and would begin devouring herself. That would be quite an effective diet, she pondered: the ‘let your body eat yourself thin’ regime. Coffee. Good coffee. The best coffee in the isles came from her own home Gaggia, and sometimes she thought her morning flat white using imported Thomson’s beans was sometimes all that stood between her and that application for a post in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Or Wick. Or anywhere but Shetland.

The museum’s electric revolving door still revolved in its unpredictably threatening way and there, in the flagstoned foyer, was Constable Alwyn Jeffries, Welsh would-be Shetlander, lunging determinedly to stop her coming any further, until he saw who it was. Perhaps she should have changed. The trackie bottoms and fleece top were less than official. She snifffed. Inasmuch as she could tell, the Dove-and-Versace perfume combo was still holding up. But a shower was definitely required. Jeffries smelt of Old Spice, which was disgusting. The museum reeked of cleaning products and history.

“Sorry Sergeant,” said Jeffries, his Welsh lilt fragmented by four years of attempted Shetlandisms. Jeffries had come to the isles, been seduced by the local culture, taken up the fiddle and failed to find a local woman prepared to put up with his terrible playing. He was now the only remaining practitioner of Shetlandic native tushker dancing, a variant on Morris Dancing only with bare feet and the rhythmic brandishing of tushkers, the peat-cutting implements that resembled and were reputed to be descended from the flensing tools used in the past to cut up whales. It was so dangerous that Jeffries was now forced to perform tushker dancing solo, following an incident at the Aith Hall when two of his fellow dancers had suffered chest injuries and in one case, a severed finger.“Boy, boyo, dis is a right ramstam an’ no, nae, never no more a mistake, aye aye,”

“Shut up Alwyn” said McKinstry, who was close behind Mary. “Wheesht. Du sounds like an Orcadian on helium. Is everyone through by?”

“Right enough,” replied Jeffries, his voice seesawing madly from the Welsh valleys to the Northern Isles. “Du’ll need tae get dy...your forensic gear, on, though, bach. It’s a crime scene.”

“To hell with that,” said Mary, striding forward into the maze-like main museum exhibition floor, all stone age origins, vikings and interactive displays about whelks. There was a (full-size, if small to start with) lighthouse and models of bodies found in peat bogs. Her trainers squeaked on the polished floor. She stopped for a moment and pulled from a pocket a pair of disposable paper slippers. Now she didn’t squeak. But walking the highly-polished floor was like skating. After getting lost, slitheringly, amid the deliberately corkscrewing arrangement of unreadable ‘interpretive facilities’, as she usually did, she pushed past the barrier marked ‘danger: insecure vessels’ and into the soaring boat hall, where various types of Shetland Model, the double-ended local design of coastal open boat, all virtually identical, dangled at different heights. It was, as ever, impressive, if you liked boats with sharp bits at both ends. It was a pity the Health and Safety authorities had deemed it, in the official parlance “too dangly for punter safety” after the archivist incident. Bollocks to that. Tarquin the archivist had allegedly been swinging on a skiff late at night while listening to Daniel O’Donnel records at ear-melting volume over the museum tannoy, when a cable broke. The full details of that incident had yet to emerge.

McKinstry, by some magical form of Shetlandic navigation, possible involving the stars, or magnetism, or reestit mutton, was already there, his desert-booted feet now wrapped in polythene sandwich bags. He looked like he was walking on cellophaned bakery products. If in doubt, improvise, that was McKinstry’s motto. Probably. Also present was was Chief Inspector Fotheringham-Hyphen-Smith. There was a vacant post in the Shetland Branch of Police Scotland for a Detective Inspector, for which Mary was qualified, but had not as yet advanced to. Partly because she hadn’t applied. It had the whiff of permanence about it, and she still missed the fleshpots of Glasgow. Or indeed, any fleshpot, anywhere on mainland UK. In fact, forget the pots. Plain old flesh would do fine. Inappropriate, she muttered to herself. Get a grip.

Hyphen, in her opinion, did nothing much in terms of police work other than attend charity functions, fly off to expensively drunken training days and conferences south, and mutter about resources. He was clad in full disposable forensic overalls, known as shite whites, with an elasticated sterile bonnet covering his braided police forage cap. The glint of gold could just be seen peeking through the muslin-like mesh. Hyphen was wearing the fashionable blue disposable gloves that had begun appearing in TV crime thrillers with titles set on islands like Mull, Orkney, the Hebrides, Arran, Cumbrae, Rockall, Rum and Eigg, though Eigg never sat well with Mary, who was mildly allergic to hens and every substance produced by them. All these programmes featured doomy, tragic male protagonists with peculiar names. At least two were suffering from terminal illnesses, and all were more or less alcoholics; the Arran cop was named Gonzalez and supposedly descended from a shipwrecked Spanish Armada sailor, though not recently. Thus the blue gloves were now called Gonzos throughout Police Scotland. Mary hated them because they made her hands sweat. She had no idea why no-one had made a crime series in Shetland. Perhaps because nobody would ever believe anything criminal happened here.

“Sergeant,” said Hyphen in his strangled, Merchants-school Edinburgh drawl, “I should have imagined you of all people would have known better. This is a crime scene. You are a detective, but first and foremost you are a policeman...person. As I was just reminding Constable McKinstry. You should know better than…”

“Thank you sir,” said Mary “I am quite aware of my status, as I am sure is Constable McKinstry. As you can see, our feet, the main imposers of outside material capable of sullying any forensic evidence, are carefully covered, mine with forensically-approved paper, the Constable’s with ah, medical plastic. Should we desire to touch anything, We will don Gonzos, or if you prefer to use their correct title, surgical gloves, in the requisite television blue. The very gloves I see producing sweat from your own hands, sir, sweat that is extremely acidic and capable of destroying the most hardy of fingerprints.” She paused. A scraping noise came from within the Industry, which lay like some kind of ancient, raddled beached creature from the underworld, or a beach.

“Sharon! Are you in there?”

A muffled reply came from the depths of the gigantic wooden hull which almost filled the bottom section of the boat hall.

“Aye. Hallo Mary Lou. Goodbye Heart!” Damn. Mary hated that ‘Lou’. Why couldn’t her family name have been something sensible, like Mitchell? Joni. what a nice name. Or Siouxsie. Though Sue was no second name to wish on anyone. “Nearly finished here. Catch!”

A round object wrapped in a tied green plastic bag marked ‘Tesco’, worryingly head-sized and making an unappetising squelching noise, came flying over the gunwale of the boat, which was bare, old wood, remnants of preserving Stockholm Tar adhering to its surface in places. With a sickening wet crunch, the bag fell at the feet of Inspector Fotheringham-Smith, who flinched back, a look of horror on his face. A fine spray of red appeared in his pristine overalls. It was a five-pence recyclable Tesco bag and thus prone to leaks.

Mary folded her arms. She was still wishing Sharon wouldn’t refer to her Everly Brothers inspired name. She hated sounding like some country and western hick.

“A hoax then, Sharon?”

A fully forensically-masked and be-hatted head appeared from the bowels of the boat. A gloved hand ripped both off in one movement, revealing the cropped black hair of local police doctor Dr Sharon Moorhead. She was a Geordie, around 35 and one of the few people in Shetland Mary socialised with on anything more than a cursory fashion. They shared a taste for home-cooked Indian food and the films of Jean Pierre Melville. Alain Delon in Le Samourai was why Mary wore her old Longines watch on her right wrist, face down. Sharon was a GP ‘with special interests’; and had trained in pathology, though she was not qualified, as she put it, to do ‘actual cold butchery’. That had to happen in Inverness or Aberdeen. She was fully qualified forensically, though, and in the absence of Shetland’s one and only SOCO, Scenes of Crime Officer (Glenda Skolosivinski, currently on indefinite sick leave after contracting trench mouth) here she was.

“Indeed, Mary L, a hoax it is. This is Shetland, after all. We don’t have actual murders. Take a look. Put your gloves on and see what Tesco has to offer. A 3D-printed latex mask. Stuffed with memory foam in chunks. Soaked in a some kind of red dye, bottom made to look especially convincing with some animal guts, probably belonging to a rabbit. Smells like rabbit. Bugs Bunny aroma. Dyed orange fake beard, probably made from rabbit fur. Waste not want not. You order them online. The masks not the rabbits, plenty of those about.”

Hyphen had been frozen in horror. Now he was moving, incrementally stretching and swaying, both infuriated but unsure how to react. He, after all, was the one dressed for a germ warfare attack, only with leaky blue gloves.

“Dr Moorhead,” said Fotheringham-Smith “Your behaviour is most unprofessional. I would…”

“Making me miss my flight south, and my connection to Paris, for the sake of a rubber head and some rabbit innards. That’s not just unprofessional, Chief Inspector. It’s bloody unforgivable. Do you know how little I get in the way of holidays?” Sharon’s voice was calm but carried considerable emotional depth. Standing in the prow of the Industry, she looked down on the little party of police officers like a viking warrior, only in white paper overalls.

“You get these masks in any likeness you like, and they’re full slip-on heads, you can actually put them right over your own bonce. You email two or three pictures of the person you presumably wish to take the piss out of. Very popular around Up Helly Aa time when they started being available, a couple of years ago. In this case, the unappetising Fearful Birkadale’s stupid wee goatee made it all too easy to have it adapted. A rubber beard wouldn’t work. The rabbit stuff would’ve been done locally. Air rifle and a pair of scissors would suffice. I believe the mask company is in Tonbridge and called Rubber Johnny’s. Good name, eh? May lead to some confusion, though. Something for the weekend, sir? Madam? Well kent in Kent!”

“Blood? Dye?” The voice was faint and seemed to be coming from Fotheringham-Smith.

“Dye. Theatrical capsules. There’s a note too. I’ve bagged it for you. ‘The Fucking Archies have has lost the head. Birkadale needs to get it screwed back on’. Printed, Times Roman, about 24 point, cheap paper.There’s your killer. One of the anti-windfarm mob, presumably, or someone who wants you to think that’s who’s responsible. Isn’t Louise, who reported this, a bit of blade-hater? Now you can get me to the airport and rearrange my flights to Paris. It’s midsummer, nearly, and a girl’s heart turns to shagging on the Eiffel Tower, or possibly a croissant.”

“Oh God, muttered Fotheringham-Smith, “it’s those SOW characters. Shit On Windfarms.”

“Yon Louise Finlayson,” said McKinstry. “Bit o’ a character, by all accounts.”

“And this is the kind of woman who has charge of our children!” Hyphen sounded as if women being in charge of anything was some kind of offence against the natural order of things. He turned to the hapless Alwyn. “Constable, it was you who instituted this...inquiry at murder status,” he said, his voice wobbling with barely-controlled frustration and rage. “And this is…is this really an inhuman…not a human head?”

“If it were Mr Birkadale’s, or indeed anyone’s, I doubt very much if Dr Moorhead would be throwing it about with such cavalier gusto,” said Mary.

“And I can assure it’s not,” said a quiet English, possibly Devon-tinged voice, lilting with an instantly infuriating sense of position and authority. Mary recognised it from all those radio interviews. It was Feargal Birkadale himself, alive, unmutilated, head still attached to body and as well as could be expected. He was taller than Mary remembered, and wearing a suit that was too tight for him, as was the fashion. Bulging bodies were cool. His hairy belly peeped out from beneath an improperly buttoned shirt). “Myself and Archipelagic Renewables have been attacked, traduced and insulted over the past months, but being dead and decapitated is a new experience for me. I thought I’d pop along to reassure everyone and see for myself which poor soul had been mistaken for…well. for myself. Though I now note that the skull in question is not, in point of fact, human. Is this the object in question?” He reached for the plastic bag, the leering eyes of the rubber moulding inside bulging, wide open - but then they were cast that way - through the red-smeared plastic..

“Best not, uh, sir” said Mary, who had noticed for the first time just how protuberant the real Birkadales eyes were.” We may wish to examine it further. At the very least this is a breach of the peace. And possibly involves cruelty to rabbits.May I asked how you heard about the ah, incident? Sergeant - Detective Sergeant Everly, by the way. Pleased to meet you in the, err….flesh.”

“An email, Sergeant. Some gleeful activist with what passes for a sense of humour hereabouts thought it would be entertaining to have me come and meet myself, face to, if you will, face.”

“What a waste of police time” said Fotheringham-Smith.” Jefferies, you called it in. See me in my office. You should contact Inverness as soon as, try and stop the Serious Crimes people from boarding their aircraft. I hardly think they’ll be too keen to investigate the moulding of a rubber mask and the possible murder of a rabbit.” He was already stripping off gloves and hat, though his white wellies and baggy protective onesie made him look like an albino penguin. For the Chief Inspector was, for a policeman, very short indeed. In height, as McKinstry was sometime heard to mutter, ‘and indeed of all the usual intellectual attributes’. Hyphen glared at Mary. “That teacher” he said , meaningfully. “Ha! Where is she?”

“Here, sir!” The voice was female, mockingly Shetlandic and gravelled by the consumption of rum and cigarettes, probably Trawler Rum and Capstan Full Strength or Samson roll-ups. “Arrest me for the non-murder of this ridiculous excuse for a man. Shame on the despoilers of our beloved rock!”

There was a sigh from McKinstry.

“Ach, Louise. Who’s looking after the bairns?”

“We’re on holiday, Peter, as you should know. It happens every simmer. Well, aren’t you going to handcuff me?”

Mary noticed that McKinstry had flushed beetroot red and was shaking his head at the redoubtable Louise Finlayson, a robust woman in her 30s with close-cropped platinum-dyed hair and a generally intimidating aura.

“That won’t be necessary, Ms Finlayson,” said Mary. “Just meet us at the police station. And you can explain yourself.”

“Ms Finlayson, we meet in the flesh at last,” said Birkadale, in honeyed tones.”

“Spare me your slime, Birkadale,” said Louise. “You haven’t won yet. You and the Archies still have a lot to lose.” She turned to watch as Alwyn Jeffries struggled to prevent a large man with a camera falling over as he slipped on the artificially blooded floor. “Ah, the media have arrived. Good. Trying to get ahead of the story, no doubt.” And she laughed a long smoker’s laugh. Suddenly, Mary was desperate for a fag.

To be continued…

In the windswept Shetland Islands, people are losing their heads.

A series of bizarre ritual murders sees eminent members of the community dismembered, their body parts left in embarrassing positions. While the energy company building the world’s biggest wind farm on the islands fights to stop the sabotage threatening its operations.

Detective-Sergeant Mary Lou Everly and Constable Peter McKinstry find themselves in their own battle - against terrible heavy metal music, militant knitters, bad reestit mutton soup and a sinister cat food magnate.

And the eternal, battering, killing wind…

“Head…head…first”, said Detective Constable Peter McKinstry, out of breath and gasping from his scramble up the Knab from Twageos Road. His usual Dickies denim jacket, bulging and ill-fitting at the best of times, flapped open over a Fair Isle gansie in lurid Whalsay blue. He exuded a pungent aroma of Fort-Chip-Shop-flavoured sweat.

Mary Lou Everly (though she avoided using the ‘Lou’, for cultural reasons, and had long ago removed the hyphen that separated her first two names) regarded him balefully. She too was sweating, but the sharpness of perspiration was tinged with Versace Eros Pour Femme and Dove antiperspirant, a combination she’d started using at university following a shoplifting spree in Boots. Now, morning by morning, it reminded her that she hadn’t always been the upstanding defender of law and justice she had since become. Detective Sergeant? Who’d have thought it? Once she had been a thief, albeit a very small-time and occasional one. If you discounted the twice weekly Woolworths Pick’n’Mix raids at stores throughout central Scotland. Anyway, the Dove and Versace niff relayed an important message for her and indeed all cops: you can get away with it.

“Headfirst? Thinking of taking a wee dive into the sea, Peter? Had enough of the pressure? Wild swimming, cavorting with orcas? Or are you fancying a wee watery ending? Too wet, man. Just keep eating those crabstick suppers from the Fort and you’ll be dead soon enough. They fry in lard there, you know. A suicide supper every lunchtime. And that’s not counting the inevitable heavy metal toxins from humanity’s besmirchment of the oceans.”

“I don’t think heavy metal works underwater,” said McKinstry, a wet rattle sounding from his ample chest. “Too burbly. Take Master of Puppets by Metallica…”

“Let’s not,” said Mary. She hated Metallica and all male metal guitar thrashing, while McKinstry’s tastes in music, which he often tried to insert into both conversation and any handy CD players, were for the kind of extreme rock that sounded to her like jet aircraft taking off and crashing, to complicated time signatures, very quickly. Her discarded, defiantly wired headphones had been playing some chilled early Beth Orton on an ancient iPod, loudly enough for her not to hear the muted buzz from the iPhone she was supposed to carry, always. But was sitting, disgracefully uncharged on top of the microwave at home.

Her breathing was even, despite having run the Knab loop once already. She’d been doing some muscle stretches on the bench at the old gun emplacement high on the peninsula that stuck out from Lerwick south towards the less important parts of the world. Like Britain, whatever that entity was composed of these days. She’d been about ready to set off for a second two-mile jog, down the steep path Peter McKinstry had just waddled up, then along Twageos Road to Commercial Street and back up here to her car, which was parked next to the world’s most spectacularly sited skatepark. Secretly, she longed to have a go there, flying high into the Shetland sky. She’d seen pictures that made the kids who skated there look as if they were skimming the Bressay Lighthouse on the other side of the Sound, scornfully, like sullen, supercool gods. Or bad angels.

”Head. Not headfirst. Found first. First thing you have to do, Sergeant,” said McKinstry, his respiration having returned to whatever unhealthy state he classed as normal. He was buttoning his jacket, that blinding flash of Symbister blue knitwear appearing now only in clumps, and his demeanour was returning to its everyday condition of supercilious boredom, or as near as he could get, given the obvious importance of his news. “Head. They found the head first. Dead, obviously. Head. First. Prior to anything else. Before other pieces. Of said individual. Which haven’t. Been found.”

“What, a dead head? Somebody being doing some gardening? Bit late for that Peter. It’s only June.” Eight days until the solstice, the longest day, the season of the ‘simmer dim’ in Shetland. The midnight sun, except it was usually a period of mist, cloud and gloom. Eternal half-daylight. Not sunshine. Mostly illuminated murk. But lots of it, and it made people act oddly. Mary felt a gnawing at her guts. Maybe she needed some carbs. There was a muesli bar in the car. She swigged some water from her super-expensive Nike canteen, tasting the aluminium hydroxide used to make the local H2O pristine, pure and peatless. She’d have preferred it brown and phenolic, like good whisky. There were claims that purifying Shetland’s naturally brown water caused dementia. In her experience, there could be something in that. Still, it was better than the lumps of landscape and miniature prawns you sometimes got from unfiltered Northmavine tapster.

A head? A bodily severance? A dismemberment deliberately caused by a human as opposed to, say, a stray rotary lawnmower? Surely not?

“A real head, as in decapitation? Do you mean an animal?” Sheep’s heads were used in occasional practical jokes in the outer reaches of the isles, balanced on car bonnets, left at doorways, secreted in freezer compartments. Often more than a jest, a piece of gory vengeance against gossip or bully; or a soothmoother, an incomer with a superior attitude. Once they’d been used in a style of soup. Not soothmoothers, Sheep’s heads. Sheeps’ heid soup, with the eyelids a particular delicacy. Eyelids first, then the brains. Until the laws against eating brain and spinal cord tissue had been brought in. She’d had some, illegally, once. It had tasted of burnt jumper. Apparently searing with a red hot poker was de rigueur in the traditional recipé.

“It’s no’ an animal heid, sergeant.” McKinstry swallowed. His Shetland accent was emerging, usually buried in his conversations with her beneath a layer of was called, locally, knappin’: an attempt to upgrade dialect speech for the sake of the soothmoothers. Often carried out with a sarcastic twang attached. “It’s a human een...one. In fact it’s a heid’s heid. The heid o’ social engagement at da wind farm, yon Feargal Birkadale. The bruks o’ him’s still...missing.”

Mary had an overwhelming desire to giggle, though the awful gut ache was getting worse. Apprehension. Nerves. This kind of thing didn’t happen in Shetland, and never had happened. Maybe she was dreaming. Perhaps she’d wake up. Find herself back in her normal life as a detective sergeant in this tiny northern outpost of the CID, where drunken assaults, stolen cars (while drunk) housebreaking (while inebriated), and hapless attempts at drug smuggling and dealing (while stoned) were the worst that came her way. Violence? There was some. But it rarely went further than absent teeth or gouged eye sockets. Disco and Domestic, Chief Inspector Fotheringham-Hyphen- Smith called it. Of course there was the hurting of the children, something which seemed endemic wherever you went. Mary hated that, but it was no worse here than anywhere else.

Lately, of course, there had been the anti-wind farm campaign. Graffiti (‘DOWN WITH WIND YA BAS’ and ‘BIRD MURDERERS’ on two turbines near Nesting, and a slightly more worrying attempt to hit a stationary blade using a home made rocket-launcher firing compacted peat briquettes; all had missed.

Feargal Birkadale was a smoothly gibbering ex-hack who’d been imported by the worried developer, Archipelagic Renewables PLC (commonly known as Archie, or sometimes Fucking Archie) to convince locals that letting Shetland become what amounted to a single gigantic wind farm was actually a good idea: Covering the place in huge white whirligig’s bigger than the Eiffel Tower, churning any passing flocks of birds into feathery mince. Or so Mary murmured darkly to herself. From her occasional encounters with Birkadale and his pontificating supercilious quotes in The Shetland Times, Shetland News and on the two local radio stations, he was a flack-catching arse. But alas, it was not his arse that had been discovered, it seemed, but a far less useful part of his body.

“Where?”

“He’s at the museum. Hay’s Dock. In the Industry, the sixareen, ken, the big wooden...”

“I know what a sixareen is, Peter. I’ve been to the museum.” The gigantic 40-foot long haaf fishing boat, still reeking of bare wood and tar after a century, was the pride and joy of the museum’s state-of-the-art boat hall, a celebration of Shetland’s fishing heritage. Craft of all sizes dangled at various heights from (presumably) stout cables, while the Industry, mounted on a clever wheeled base, took up nearly all the floor space. It could be moved, though, allowing fiddlers to play concerts in the hall, availing themselves of the fine acoustics. There were always fiddlers playing somewhere in Shetland, and always at public events. It was like bagpipes in the rest of Scotland, a signifier of local ceremonial. It had, like people whistling in supermarkets, caused Mary to feel a kind of despairing rage, ever since her first exposure to the interminable sessions at the folk festival. There were genius players, but there were also far too many drunks sawing away at the same five notes played in various orders. It sounded to her like the crazed whining you got in dental surgeries, and felt like a particularly vicious hygienist was scaling and polishing her inner ear. It was the one thing about Shetland she actively disliked. Well, the thing she disliked the most. It wasn’t as bad as the foul, mummified, allegedly edible sheep meat called reestit mutton.

“He...it was spotted by Louise Finlayson. She’s headmistress of Garthness Primary, up north there, a peerie bit along from Brae. One of the schools the council wants to shut. The bairns were on an outing, and Miss, or Mizz, Finlayson just happened to be first onto that wee viewing balcony thing where you can look down into the Industry. Ken, you’re not allowed in the boat hall itself at the moment after that terrible accident when one of the yoals fell on the archivist. He’s never been able to do the Papa Stour Sword Dance properly since. Thank God it was Louise saw the heid and no’ one of the bairns. Though she was upset, right enough. But quite robust actually, One of the North Roe Finlaysons. Comes from a long line of fishwives and sheep rustlers.”

” Another heid…head, then. Hopefully she’s still attached to her’s. If you, ahem, identify the person with the body and not the bonce, so to speak.” Mary coughed in embarrassment. Sometimes she got distracted by her own scattergun thought processes. “You feel for the bairns, though. After all, they might have thought they were watching one of their parent’s slasher DVDs or a documentary about vikings. I’m surprised the little darlings don’t practise doing the Blood Eagle on each other more often.” She pondered for a moment. If it had been Up Helly Aa season, if the head had been bearded… “Did he...did Birkadale have a beard? I can’t remember.”

Peter who, like many Shetlanders, was something of a beard connoisseur, shrugged. “Goatee, verging on a lip beard I think, depending on the fashion. No’ a real beard. Trendy, like. He was een o’ they trendy bohemianists, or thought he was. Parachuting in to tell us what’s what, turn the place into a wilderness o’ feckin’ windy lights and batteries, cabled up to the soothlands. Stop those wild lads and lasses from doing that damage.”

“Objectivity, Peter. He may have been a prick but he’s gone and lost his head.”

“Naw, that’s no right. It’s the rest of him that’s lost. We’ve got his bloody heid.”

Not necessarily a ritual viking dismemberment then, or an Up Helly Aa prank gone wrong, thought Mary. Though either could still be a possibility. Do not prejudge, she told herself, determinedly. Be a detective. Detect. The Shetland taste for practical jokes could sometimes get out of hand. Careful with that axe, Maggie! The number of councillors’ cars left unlocked and filled with rotting fish by angry purser crews! Dear God, she hated Pink Floyd. Herrings, though. Fresh and fried in oatmeal and butter. Food of the gods.

Cold. She was getting cold now. It was a fine midsummer’s day, bright but with a mild south-easterly breeze that seemed to carry with it some inner winter viciousness, jealously guarded. You could get sunburned here, badly, and think you were shivering throughout. It wasn’t weather. It was a meteorological judgement. God hated Shetland. And especially policewomen.

“Right Peter. My car’s here. I’ll put on some tracky bottoms and see you at the museum. I take it Hyphen’s there?

“Aye. Chief Inspector Fotheringham-Hyphen-Smith is there indeed. Fully superiored and outranked, we are. Hyphen’s already called in the Inverness boys. The Flying Teuchters. The Murder Polis.” McKinstry couldn’t keep the resigned sneer out of his voice. “Superintendent Bloody Arthur and his boys. Read one Ian Rankin book and thinks if he buys a couple of John Martin records he’s bloody Rebus.”

“Where’s Sexton Blake when you need him?” Asked Mary. Fotheringham-Smith was why she’d quietly excised the hyphen from her own double moniker. She narrowed her eyes and gazed out to sea, past Bressay, where the June light seemed to be fading and blurring. ”Arthur likes to pretend he doesn’t have a first name. Like Rebus, or a dog or something. Or maybe he’s Arthur Arthur. Sounds like a dog barking. I don’t know, Peter. Depends when they can get on the plane. That looks like fog coming in to me.”

Peter looked out to the south.

“Aye, you could be right, detective sergeant. You could well be right. The Flying Teuchters, eh? Those Scottie bastards could be grounded. and then it’ll be up to us.” He turned to Mary. “I’ll see you at Hay’s Dock.” Mary felt absurdly pleased not to be counted a Scottie bastard in McKinstry’s eyes. The fact that her grandfather Edwin had been an infamous bigamist from Unst before moving to Glasgow obviously counted in her favour.

(To be continued…)

Perhaps it wasn’t wise to come to Shetland fresh from binge-watching both The Day of the Jackal reboot (a pale shadow of the fantastic David Fincher/Michael Fassbender movie The Killer which it so obviously rips off) and the Netflix Santa’s-got-a-Kalashnikov series Black Doves (Tory ministerial wife as ruthless killer; that old chestnut). Both of these are knowing, daft and colossally high-end in terms of budget. They look like the millions of dollars they cost. Shetland, in comparison, looks like  a youth fellowship pantomime with overtones of The Revenger’s Tragedy via River City. 

By the way, I once saw a Citizen’s Theatre production of Hamlet where the entire front row of teenage schoolgirls on a bus outing  shouted insults at the cast throughout. Until the murder/suicide scene when Hamlet silenced them by casually spraying the whole bunch with fake blood. Give that man a cigar!

Anyway here we are with another lukewarm-to-chilly opening, this time flashing back to the late Annie and Noah picking up the late Anton outside the gene therapy/cosmetic dentistry/eyebrow sculpting/limpet farming Portacabins of Doom. While practising their prime numbers. Fun parenting! Then it’s off to the scene of the double murder to be, well. Doubly murdered. Except for Noah, of course, who will sleep in the bath and subsequently have bad dreams about a nasty giant alien lizard. As you do.

To the police station, where Kyle the Irish DJ/Manchester hitman/drug dealer (loads of those in Lerwick, especially at the Fishermen’s Mission) is being quizzed by Ruth’n’Tosh. It’s all about Lisa Eyebrows (“Lisa’s a bombscare” says Kyle...a what?... “she’s too much for me”. But they came up from Manchester together With A Gun. And Lisa took it off him. Lisa and Annie were seen arguing about something, possibly the correct order of the Fibonacci Sequence. So obviously Lisa did it. She screams at crosses in the Kirk, like in The Devils. Or Sister Act, I forget which. No, no, obviously Annie did it, because she took the gun off Lisa, transformed herself into a lizard using magic mathematical spells, shot Anton because of his accent and then, having shot herself, turned back into the not-very-loving mother she was, only dead. Makes perfect sense. Noah’s in the bath. He sees dead lizards.

Except no, It turns out that Lisa was raped by Michael, husband of Noreen, father of baby Finn, auntie of Noah, and Annie was going to report it on her behalf. This is what she was talking about with Lisa, while removing the gun for unsafe keeping. This is also what she was going to talk to Tosh about back at that dodgy kilted party in episode one.

So Michael is a lizard monster. Except he’s not. And having fed us so many red herrings over the last few episodes, the denouement is dafter than any of them. Far from being furiously homicidal towards husband Michael when she finds out about the rape, Noreen decides to convince Annie not to say a word. She follows her, Anton and Noah to the croft where Noah goes to sleep in the bath. Handily, Annie has brought the fully loaded gun and placed it on an accessible shelf. 

Noreen is wearing one of those long padded jacket things, which I believe are described as puffer coats, in a shade of olive green. Sales of which have now dropped to zero as from now on wee boys will shout at any woman wearing one “murdering lizard!” For lo and behold, Noreen grabs the gun, accidentally shoots Annie in a struggle then not only shoots Anton deliberately, but finishes him off with a coup de grace, just like Keira Knightley or Ben Whishaw in Black Doves. Or Tony Soprano. Television is AN EVIL INFLUENCE!

But Noreen is not a Black Dove, or a Soprano, she is a Green Alien Lizard Woman, and when Noah’s daft and deranged dad takes him back to the croft of the crime, she is revealed as the accidentally murdering murderer when she tries to protect Noah from dopy dad and her face LITERALLY TURNS GREEN. I’m not sure if this is make-up, a special effect or if we’re meant to believe that she REALLY IS TURNING INTO A LIZARD, or the Wicked Witch of the Western Isles, but this whole sequence defied belief. Because who telephones the cops? Noreen does.

Ruth sees the reptile in Noreen (never liked that coat: you wouldn’t see Metropolitan Ruth in any ripstop puffer padded nylon) and arrests are duly made. Who’s going to look after wee baby Finn, asks Lisa, as dad Michael, rapist housing officer, is carted off too. Not to worry, a sea eagle swoops down, carries the baby away and rears him as its own. Months later, thinking he’s fledged, the child jumps off its cliff ledge nest into the sea, is rescued by a passing  social worker, and, when grown up, writes a searing exposé of local care services.

The best bit of the entire series: Lisa and Camper Van Angus, the Dutch activist, head off to Unst to investigate the spaceport (which exists, though it recently suffered an ‘anomaly” when a rocket blew up). “We’ll find out what’s really going on up there,”says Angus (played by Jimmy Yuill, who was Inspector Doug Kersey in Wycliffe), “they say there’s a launch pad. I think it’s a landing site. They’re expecting visitors.” Good grief, is that where Noreen, Green Lizard Woman, came from? Beamed down to Unst from the Planet Stupidity?

Ruth steals her brother Alan's box of toy dinosaurs and gives them to wee Noah, who’s off to Edinburgh to get away from all the mayhem. He’s delighted. That stegasaurus looks like…a lizard! Happy memories!

Tosh and Ruth have a drink at the Fjara cafe next to Tesco in Lerwick (surely their glasses of  white wines are bigger than that? No wonder Ruth cursorily orders a magnum of Buckfast, or two) and together they gaze out over the Vast Northern Ocean. “You can see Norway from here,” mutters Ruth, possibly slurring her words somewhat.

“Aye,” says Tosh, “Let’s get rat-arsed. Then we’ll see if we can make any sense of this series.”

“I very much doubt that,” says Ruth.

• Season 10 of Shetland has already been filmed and will be broadcast sometime in the new Year. If you’ve enjoyed these summaries, from next week I’ll be introducing for subscribers my own take on crimebusting in Shetland, in the serialisation of my novel A Passing Of Wind: The Shetland Decapitations, starring Detective Sergeant Mary Lou Everley. She never goes out without a bunnet.

  

Anyway, to skate over that: yet another cold opening, this time cued up by the continuity announcer because believe me, this episode makes less sense than Gregg Wallace discussing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Or cooking. And then the title sequence, which is gloriously high-definition, super-saturated seascape drone porn, and would make anyone want to move here. If they didn’t know about all the dodgy Portacabin gene therapists, murderous mussel farmers, inept detectives and the cost of flights to the mainland. Also the 20 or so wild swimmers  eaten each year by killer whales. Some of these glorious titular scenes, by the way, were shot in and around Eshaness, a mile or so from our house. Including Burnside, the spooky cottage that housed Brian Cox in full-on dishevelled peasant mode, long, long ago in season one, two or maybe it was Bergerac.

London 2011, and there’s Annie Betts, alive and being recruited into Mi5 by Professor Squirrel, I mean Quirrel, sorry Rossi, clearly Much Younger as he is resplendent in an orange wig. See you, Jimmy! Apparently Mi5 huckle Gregg Wallace lookalikes in pubs all the time, and shout their secrets to each other in front of unimpressed drinkers of Doom Bar and Theakstons Old Peculiar.

As I say, here come those lovely titles, so much glossier than the rest of the show’s curiously flat visuals, especially the indoor scenes. Reminds me of the fuss at BBC Scotland 40-odd years ago when they were making John Byrne’s iconic Tutti Frutti and ran out of cash towards the end of production, partly because somebody had decided to shoot the titles on hideously expensive 35mm film, for full cinematic effect. The rest was shot on 16mm (or ‘super 16’ as the widescreen version was called) but I think some of it had to be done on video in the end.

Back to the present day, and Peerie Noah is bedwetting, which must have been hellishly embarrassing for the excellent Jacob Ferguson  to film. He’s having a bad dream about malevolent lizards. Then we have Professor Rossi exiting what looks like a hotel in Stockbridge (did I catch a glimpse of Edinburgh Castle in the background?) and then trying to steal a car in Lerwick but finding they’re all locked. Point of information: nobody ever deliberately locks their cars in Shetland, or they didn’t until automatic digital vehicular fascism arrived. Freedom!). He eventually drives off in a ‘Bixter Express’ courier van, leaving whole swathes of Shetland devoid of their Amazon deliveries.

Off he goes, while Ruth and Tosh head to Sumburgh Airport to pick up Ruth’s former squeeze Rob, Mi5 officer, who explains that Annie was shot back in 2011 when she went in all Die Hard to arrest a Nordic traitor codenamed Brutus. Oh ho! That’s ringing Swedish bells. The dodgy Jacobsens are back in the frame! Et tu, Stefan? Down with hygge, meatballs and Pong chairs!

Aaaand we’re back in 2011, Prof Rothesay is coked and pished out of his orange-clad skull, insisting that Annie has to go with him to arrest Brutus. Forward to Cora, who’s had her hair done and drops another red herring, anchovy, spoot or possibly whelk into the queasy plotline: the bullets what killed Anton’n’Annie (convoluted Italian filmmaker reference, possibly)  match a bullet used in a Manchester drive-by shooting. What? Wait a minute, this is episode five and we don’t need another….too late! Turns out the Mancunian suspect shooter, who’s Irish, is in Shetland, and is named Kyle Frost. He’s the murderous murderer because he already tried to murder a Mancunian! Except of course it can’t be him. Because…because.

Everything goes a bit Nokia as Prof Rossi, complete with undelivered parcels and a gun, heads for the Jacobsens, knocks out Stefan and kidnaps Karin, who is clearly Brutus, or Bruta, being the former Swedish defence attaché in London in 2011. It seems Annie saw her and as a former spook, was spooked, called Rossi and then got killed. (Of course, that’s not what happened. There’s a whole other episode to go.) Rossi is bent on revenge for Annie’s death and takes Karin/Bruta to the St Ninian’s Isle tombolo (Annie has already explained in flashback that this is a double-sided beach, and her favourite place in the whole South Mainland of Shetland, other than Spiggie) where he intends to wreak a dreadful revenge, or shoot her, or throw away all those Amazon deliveries or something. But she’s a former Swedish Army officer and spy so takes the gun off him just as Ruth’n’Tosh arrive and, using grenades and a Gatling gun, obliterate both of them.

Alas, not. Both ex-spooks are carted off to the cop shop for interrogation with bannocks and sassermaet, while Rev Alan Calder holds a remembrance service for Annie. Dodgy Lisa of the weird and now definitely Irish accent is in residence at the manse, causing consternation with her sinister eyebrows. Prof Rossi is being interviewed. Did he love Annie. “Not like that” he replies, just as John Harris did to the same question in the last episode. Poor Annie. It seems nobody loved her Like That. Except for that sinister husband of hers. Let them have builders!

So, it turns out Annie getting shot in 2011 was all a vomiting Rossi’s fault, but she took the blame and he’s felt guilty ever since. Thus determined to avenge her death, now he’s clean, sober and no longer wearing that orange wig.

Lisa has a theological conversation with Rev Calder, suggesting that a bit of Catholicism would cheer up his austere kirk a bit. “Does God make people bad?” she asks. “No it’s their choice,” he says. Wow, Arminianism! What happened to Calvinism and predestination? No wonder the Church of Scotland’s in trouble. Karin Jacobsen, Bruta or Brutus, is denying everything, but Ruth tells her she’s going to be thrown to the Mi5 dogs who will undoubtedly send her back to Sweden to the face the music for betraying IKEA and sabotaging flat pack kits with the wrong number of Allen keys and screws.

Donnie and Tosh are back on hand-holding terms at least (where’s the wean, Donnie? Who’s babysitting? Oh, there’s a new nursery in town! Perez Day Care. All is explained). Meanwhile the Noah/Ruth relationship is evolving, and the boy’s bad dream is revealed - he and his mum were chased around the crofthouse by a giant lizard. I’m thinking smelly, scaly oilskins. I’m thinking John Harris or Nasty Patrick. Or given the plotting so far, maybe a giant Komodo dragon is less unlikely. Fetlar is known to have a problem with them.

But hold! What something fishy or herringesque this way comes? It’s Kyle Frost the Mancunian thug, hiding out at…the Seamen’s Mission? Where he’s both dossing down and doing DJ sets until 3.00am. Friends, I am acquainted with Seamen’s/Fishermen’s Missions the length of this land and they are not the junkie/techno/hard house havens portrayed here. Not only that, the exterior used is the Bød of Gremista, birthplace of Arthur Anderson, founder of the P&O shipping line, and the building is now the Shetland Textile Museum. Believe me, it’s A LOT nicer inside than shown. 

Turns out Kyle may have brought the gun north that killed Antonioni but couldn’t have fired it. But guess who he’s best pals with? Lisa Eyebrows of Angus Van Camper-Motorhome and enviro-activism fame. And she’s staring at the cross in Alan’s kirk, presumably wishing for more stained glass and a few statues. Or maybe she’s wondering if she hid that lizard costume securely enough. At the red herring processing plant.

Here come the weepy Swedes! Oh yes, the Ingmar Bergman influence is writ large in this epic concerning the desperate search for dental care in an island community largely deprived thereof.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and it’s time for yet another flashback, this time to the childhood of dead Fergus, the Nice Son of Jealous John Harris, who whom he’s had a bit of a spat, involving smashing his skull in with a miniature anchor. But in the sledgehammer symbolism of this script, ‘spat’ is also the word for  baby mussels, which grow into big mussels, which John and sons harvest for sale to Top London Restaurants and Belgians. 

Someday , son, all this will be yours, says Jealous John, many years ago. Even AI hasn’t managed to un-age Vincent Friel the merest smidgin in this particular piece of retrovision. Except it won’t be. Ferg’s deid, baby. You can tell. His hands have turned bright blue. Those mussels’ll have to get to Brussels without him. Anyway, the remaining Harrises are in a state and this allows ruthless Ruth to provoke Bad and Stupid  Son into spilling the moules mariniere: yes he burgled the cottage where Annie and Anton were found shot. No he didn’t shoot them. He’s deep in dept to JJ of the Golden Dragon (Chinatown reference, Jake) where the dim son has spent far too much on dodgy dim sum, or poker, or both. 

Wait a minute, they’ve got Jealous John in at the cop shop to do some decorating. Anyway he’s dressed in a white boiler suit and looks as if he’d be handy with roller. He’s certainly  feeling a lot of emulsion. Get him a cup of tea, says Tosh to Billy, the Oldest Policeman in the Known World.

The sinister Swedes turnip, I mean turn up (sorry about that) and Astrid the sick daughter is missing. Quick, to Kilbirnie or somewhere in Inverclyde, with a drone. Stefan, full of anguish, Surströmming (not so much a red herring as a very stinky one) and Gamel Dansk, drives past her but doesn’t stop because she’s got her hood up and is unrecognisable. Don’t Look Now! Meanwhile Dutch enviro-pensioner Angus Van Motorhome has recovered the powers of speech and insists that he was assaulted by at least a team of ten in Dr Mohawk’s Mysterious Marine Lab. Turns out he and Lisa of the Wandering Accent were tipped off about nefarious Nesting from the infamous online gossip and dating  site Shetland Confidential. (typical advert: wanted, woman for croft. Must have good teeth, or at least own. Ferguson tractor and Toyota HiLux repair skills helpful).

So it’s grab a search warrant from Harry the all-powerful Procurator Fiscal (Sutherland’s Law clearly a big influence) and off go Ruthless Ruth and Storm-tossed Tosh in full Scooby Doo mode to the sinister Marine Lab. “There used to be a door there!” shouts Psychic Ruth. “And now…it’s a cupboard.”  Sure enough, a secret stairway emerges and at last the full horror of what’s been going on emerges. If it wasn't for you meddling detective inspectors!

“What do we think the big creepy chair is for”, says Tosh. “Get Cora, the oldest GP with special forensic science interests north of Southampton, she’ll know.” But it’s obvious. This is the only private dental practice in Shetland  accepting new patients And Astrid doesn’t have respiratory problems: she’s been getting root canal treatment using a new-fangled vaccine made from limpets. And questionable orthodontics, including unnecessary veneers. It’s abscess all areas!

Wait a minute, Professor Quirrell is visiting Wee Noah, who’s back at dodgy dad’s house. It’s going a bit all Eastenders-meets-Star Wars, isn’t it? He’s not your father! I’m your father. But Professor Quirrell, secret Squirrel, just mutters something about Annie, twists Ian’s arm and heads off into the bog, moodily. We haven’t seen the last of him.

Astrid turns up at the Infamous Golden Dragon, only to find that the butterfly prawns are well and truly off; but Nathan’s there, lover of her former carer Anton, and she has to get off the island, urgently, away from the weepy parental Swedes and  off to her maw in Estonia for proper subsidised dentistry. Implants! She effortlessly sends the entire Shetland police force and her dad on a wild bonxie chase to Sumburgh Airport where she’s booked on a flight to Edinburgh. It’s a ruse, dopes! Only two ways off Shetland, air or sea, so next minute Nathan’s smuggling her into a container that’s being loaded onto the Hjaltland or the Hrossey. Or with luck the freight boat, which isn’t stabilised but where even stowaways get a free three-course dinner.

“That’s at least 12 hours overnight to Aberdeen,” I shout at the screen, “take a couple of Stugeron or you’re not going to have a good time, though at least a container will be more comfortable  than a Northlink pod. Contain yourself!”  Astrid’s there for five minutes before realising she should at least have tried to book a cabin. Amazingly, though she falls asleep (must have taken 25mg of Phenergan ) before the ferry has even left the berth.

Which gives the increasingly agitated Tosh and Ruth time to bang on every blue container on the car deck, retrieve Astrid and send her to the Gilbert Bain Hospital for caffeine, cuddles and recriminations.

Did Astrid’s dad the very weepy Swede kill Anton and Annie? No, he was busy crying in his car, he says. Prove it, shouts Ruth. “Weeping in an  SUV? Not much of an alibi”. If only it had been a hybrid saloon. Wait a minute, I forgot to say - RUTH IS WEARING A HAT. A WOOLLY ONE. Very fetching and a belated nod to Shetland weather conditions at last. The bunnet done it.

The Weeping Swede’s alibi is confirmed by the car’s GPS system - thank you Mr Volvo - and there follows a weirdly complicated sequence with Tosh finding out that Tara was having a miscarriage and can therefore prove that Annie met Anton at the hospital one night when Astrid was there. Tosh then faces domestic strife from her bidey-in Dopey Donnie, who’s not happy that she’s a nose-poking polis. And keeps upsetting people. “People have secrets” says Tosh, darkly. Donnie? Yer tea is oot, pal. Hide the stash!

Finally Ruth is on the phone to her former main squeeze, who works for Mi5, obviously, and he warns her that Professor Quirrell is NOT ALL HE SEEMS. Nor is he a good spy, as he previously implied. It appears he is a bad man with evil mathematical intentions; he must be detained immediately  and forthwith.

And here he is at the Viking Bus Station picking up an automatic pistol. He is clearly a rogue mathematical dentist determined to preserve what few patients he has left, and is bent on a filling spree starting with Dr Mohawk. This is not a drill. That’s why he’s always looked so down in the mouth.

Well, after a slick, streamlined and genuinely exciting opening, series nine of Death In Shetland has plummeted into complex daftness over the following two episodes like a gormless sheep falling down Calder’s Geo due to over indulgence in magic mushrooms; or a camera drone damaged by too-close a Bonxie encounter.

First there’s the problem of eyebrows. Sculpted female eyebrows of the non-penciled variety are a comparatively new phenomenon, so the supposed archive footage of maths genius Annie in her 80s schooldays, sporting a set of carefully coiffed supercilia in a a very Noughties mode, rendered the background appearance of Amstrad PCW 256s and 512s somewhat redundant. Anyway, she went to Oxford, encountered dodgy Professor Quirell and  became a bullet-scarred spook, from that time MI5 were so strapped for agents they sent their analysts out to catch armed cigarette smugglers at the Barras in Glasgow.

Modernist eyebrow sculpture also appears on the head of problem child Lisa Friel, whose accent started out Scottish, veered towards Tunbridge Wells and eventually settled into a Dublin twang. She’s on the run in the Worst Motorhome in the Known World with its owner, the man known only as Camper Van Angus. He must have Dutch heritage. They’re in Nesting watching the Mysterious Marine Laboratory, where Dr Mohan is making pharmaceuticals from limpets. The most inept policeman ever recruited fails to catch Lisa when she goes shopping for Pot Noodles, leaving Angus to freeze in a deckchair - no shelter whatsoever - while scanning Dr Mohan’s lair with big binoculars, taking notes. In a notebook. He is, however, wearing a hat, though not a woolly one.

Later Lisa goes to sleep while Angus, still scanning, sees something suspicious, goes to investigate, breaks into the Marine Lab, hears female screaming and subsequently disappears, only to turn up on the steps of the Gilbert Bain Hospital in a catatonic state, doubtless injected with liquidised limpets. There is  a well known limpet addiction problem in Shetland, along with folk hopelessly hooked on spoots and whelks. But never fear, despite being out all night, Van Angus’s notebook, in which he has been taking notes has NOT BLOWN AWAY and soon Grumpy Ruth, the Cagney inspector, is inside the lab and asserting that two JCB excavators engaged in sexual congress are very much like the dinosaur peerie Noah thought he saw when his mother stopped to collect (now dead) Anton the Suspicious Frenchman, before becoming dead herself. Got all that? Phew!

A word about the junior acting in this. Jacob Ferguson, who plays Noah, is terrific in a Boys from Brazil cold-eyed psychotic way though the interplay between him and (apparently) child-averse Cagney is pushed to breaking point: we know she’s going to come over all maternal in the end. But that baby in the Gilbert Bain Hospital, the one belonging to…one of Tosh’s pals, probably… is the real star, bald as a coot and keeping its ( girl or boy, who knows?) eyes firmly on an out-of-shot mother, the set lighting or indeed anything except the actor supposed to be its parent. Best bit so far.

Meanwhile, let’s have some racial stereotyping of the clumsiest kind! It seems that Anton is an ace  card shark who plays in a regular high stakes poker night at JJ Wang’s Chinese Restaurant, where JJ’s assistant Nathan is or was having a gay fling with Anton the Frenchman. Also, the nasty one of John Harris’s two sons is heavily in debt because he thought he was at a 500 Night in the Hillswick Hall. Same poker night where Malcolm Dick, he of the shotgun face-off in episode one, lost cash and found out his brother was shagging Eleanor, his fiancée. And speaking of sexual cavortings, it turns out Ian, husband of the murdered Annie, couldn’t have killed her because he was having dirty dealings with her pal Joni, wife of Jamie, who knows that Annie was investigating freight shipments into Sumburgh. Because…just because.

We need more dead bodies, so first Jealous John Harris, who loved Annie (“but not like that”) decides to run down bad and faithless husband Ian, because he thinks he’s the murderer, even though he’s just been released due to the shagging-Joni alibi. As it turns out, John just gives Ian (played by an actor with an alarming resemblance to Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber) a very sore face, and then gets in an argument with the nasty one (Patrick) of his two sons, accidentally killing the nice son (Fergus) in the process. With an anchor.  These things happen at sea. It was a fluke (anchor joke, sorry).

What else? The follicular issues continue, many of which would be solved by the judicious application of headgear. Proper, woollen, Shetland-knitted headgear. The decorous use of scarves is insufficient. I mean, what is going on with Tosh-Lacey’s hair. There’s an ENORMOUS amount of it, and it comes, scene by scene, in a variety of Kirby-grip-stanchioned styles. Also, what’s with the gurning, Alison? That’s a camera, not the wee guy in the back row at the Citz. The Last Minister in Shetland - seen preaching to a quite large congregation of three at one point - is also having trouble with his massive and unruly barnet. GO TO JAMIESONS AND GET A BUNNET! Doesn’t anyone involved in this know you lose nine-tenths of your body heat through your head, and on this showing a large amount of brainpower.

Oh, wait minute, there are the Jacobsens, Karin and Stefan, Swedish global finance experts who’re on the MI5 list of nasties because, as Prof Quirrell says, “intelligence agencies are xenophobic by nature.” Which doesn’t strike me as particular intelligent, but then he’s a mathematician. And they know nothing (I can talk, having got 16 per cent in my arithmetic O-level prelim). Stefan and Karin have a sick daughter who’s come to Shetland for limpet therapy.

Actually, it’s not all bad. Ashley Jensen as Cagney looks and sounds royally pissed off to be where she is and not back in London listening to her Teenage Fanclub records. But her bad tempered charm and withering aggression are always fun to watch (“Never come to my house again!”) Sandy, though. If there’s one thing that annoys folk in Shetland about the show it’s that the only real  Shetlander in the cast, and a very good actor indeed in other settings, is portrayed as a hapless dogsbody. “Sandy, get me everything you can about the trade in reestit puffins! Sandy, check out the files on orca smuggling! Sandy, where the hell is Norway from here? Get me Sassermaet now! And what’s the difference between a yow and a yoal?

Meanwhile, I’m off for some cream of limpet soup and a pint of illegal soy sauce. There’s a poker game at Golden Dragon tonight! I know I can win. It’s just a case of doing the maths…

The new Passing Place podcast (or, if you will peatcast) with Drew Ratter is here, for those interested in the brown (black and blue) stuff, carbon credits, preserved bodies and crofting. The Spotify link is at the end and it’s also onYouTube and Apple Podcasts:

Pink moon in a steekit stumba…

Hairst: my favourite time of the year in Shetland, when the migrant birds flock and flutter and the twitchers arrive, lens-loaded and scuffling for rarities. Season of mists and mirk, and frankly I like it that way. I love the way sound changes when the haar flows in, like being in a deadened recording studio. Even the wren’s piercing sweetness is curtailed.

Here’s a piece I wrote for Promote Shetland a few years ago:

Mist. Haar. Stumba, in Shetland dialect. A steekit stumba is a mist so thick you can hardly see through it. And I write in the season for it; an autumn Thursday, as darkness begins to fall and the cooling atmosphere condenses droplets of water into opaque greyness. Hairst, as this time of year is called.

I love the misty mornings, the gathering billows of fog of an evening, the way light in its varied forms, from breaking dawn through blazing sun to the pink and orange of sunset, all produce a range of complex effects that leave you stunned by their loveliness.

Of course mist can and does have its drawbacks. Those of a superstitious or easily frightened nature will find it difficult to erase memories of John Carpenter’s film The Fog, and the zombie pirates massing to take a terrible revenge on the village that brought about their doom. But this happens all the time in Shetland and we’ve grown used to it. Besides, our vikings sorted out those pesky pirates a while ago.

And then there are the flight delays. Yes, I know. Horribly inconvenient, but if it provides you with an extra day or, ah, three in these gorgeous northern isles, can you really complain? Tonight we drove up to Eshaness, hoping to catch, as we have in the past, the dappling of the entire sky in flaming orange that happens when the sun dips below the horizon and catches the forming fog above. The sun shimmered, perfectly round and blood red, then vanished into a thick bank of haar. We went for a walk anyway, from the lighthouse west, in the nightfall breeze. And then, coming back in the car, saw the full moon catching the stumba-filtered pinkness of the sunset. Hairst moon.

And so back home, the lyrics to Nick Drake’s wondrous song running through our heads:

Saw it written and I saw it say

Pink Moon is on its way

And none of you stand so tall

Pink Moon gonna get you all...

Still ill

Not that anyone’s quoting the increasingly flaky Morrissey these days.

Anyway, back after a marvellous trip to Northern Ireland and Scotland, and for the second time in six weeks, bringing respiratory infection with me. It was Covid last time, and as a result my weakened system was unable to withstand the onslaught of last week’s Glasgow and Linlithgow grandbairns’ coughs and splutters.

So my built-in asthma was glued up with the kind of muck that stops you breathing, were it not for the speedy application of inhalers, steroid pills and in the end, big, dirty old antibiotics. Finally, after a week, I’m beginning to feel better.

There are certain Shetland islands where you would be expected to isolate yourself from decent company, should you return with a ‘sooth host’ (cough). My wife remembers in the 70s been hailed from the shore by Foula islanders and asked if anyone on the ferry was suffering from anything infectious. A complete lack of immunity in isolated communities meant even a bad cold could be devastating. As was proved during Covid. How quickly and easily that’s been shoved into the recesses of memory.

What next?

Some of you will have noticed that I’ve stopped doing the weekly Beatcrofting radio show for 60 North and Mixcloud. I’m currently reviewing my various activities, including whether or not to continue as on Shetland Islands Council. A major piece of commissioned writing will be taking up a lot of time over the next few months, there are two other book projects looming, and I want to develop speech podcasting and Substacking. Also, regular trips south are now an essential part of our lives since Susan stopped providing 24-hour on-call services and a new associate doctor has been appointed. Decisions necessary soon.

When I first moved to Shetland in 1986, there was one big experimental wind generator at Voe, towering above our house. I never saw its blades turn from the day I moved until its demolition. Now the hill it stood on is bare, but to the south, the skyline churns (as long as the wind is blowing, and it almost always is) with dozens of turbines, all vastly bigger than that solitary, stubbornly still edifice. This is the Viking Energy windfarm.

Scottish and Southern Energy have this week been celebrating the project’s completion. The great and the good have been entertained to dinner at the Lerwick Museum, speeches have been made, drinks served and journalists sobered up. Mostly.

But a tone-deaf media briefing from SSEN chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies has alienated many islanders with its bullish insistence that this was just the start of wind farm developments in Shetland, that the paltry two-million a year Shetland Community Benefit Fund was actually pretty generous; that really, Shetland was being done an enormous favour. It felt colonial and patronising. Contemptuous.

A petition was immediately started to ask councillors, all of whom were invited to the gala SSEN dinner, to boycott the event. Over 660 signatures were gathered in a couple of days. There was a small demonstration outside the venue. For some islanders, the wind farm is a desecration of their -our - treasured landscape, one that has involved enormous disruption over the past two years and the shifting of vast amounts of peat. There have been peat slides, pollution of lochs and burns and a general feeling that Shetland is not being compensated adequately.

And I have to say, as windfarms go, this one is both large and unignorable. The turbines are huge, reaching 155 metres in height. The substation at Kergord is an enormous industrial building and the cabling associated with the project is mounted on extremely ugly wooden pylons.

As for the money, well. It could all have been very different. the original idea was for a community wind farm owned and operated by the council, who sought out partnership with SSEN. It could all, as one senior official told me a decade ago, have solved Shetland’s financial problems for decades to come.

I spoke to my old pal Drew Ratter, who was involved in the project from the council and Shetland Charitable Trust side from day one. You can listen to our Passing Place podcast here.

Not everyone will agree with or approve of Drew’s opinions, or mine, but there is information there which I think clears ups some of the muddy issues surrounding the project.

These include:

• The fact that Shetland Charitable Trust still stands to make up to £3m a year for the next 25 years from Viking, despite having controversially given up the opportunity to invest in the project.

• Landowners and crofting tenants with turbines on their land will all make large amounts of cash over the lifetime of the windfarm. That includes the Council itself, which through Busta Estates owns a great deal of the land concerned.

• Money gained by Shetland Islands Council from the sale of its interest in the wind farm to Shetland Charitable Trust may have been used to help fund the new Anderson High School.

• …and much more!

Speaking personally, I’m not a fan of the turbines (Drew is). They’re too close to several main roads. I find them intimidating, like giant mechanical triffids, and the effect on parts of the Shetland landscape I have known and loved for 40 years is hard to accept. I wrote this last year, as the construction work neared completion. Nevertheless I accept that climate change is a crisis that must be addressed and that we in Shetland have to play our part. I’m just not sure that the price we have paid and will continue to pay is really worth it. The revelation last week that SSEN were being paid NOT to operate turbines while folk in Shetland suffered fuel poverty (fires and central heating already on this week in the isles) was infuriating.

Have a listen to the podcast and see what you think.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't go to the celebratory SSEN dinner. But I accept that maybe I should have, if only to have serious words with Alistair Phillips-Davies.

Four in the morning, and boat anxiety strikes. The wind has risen after a day calm enough for me to unpack and inflate my Ukrainian dinghy, henceforth known as The City of Dnipropetrovsk. Dnipro for short. She - let’s be traditionally distaff - was made in a factory there, presumably within the sound of Russian artillery.

A company called Bark. As in barque, not dog. Very good value, and they give a discount to cover import duties. Quick delivery, well packed. “German materials,” they say. As in “not Russian.” I’m happy to do a tiny amount for a beleaguered economy.

An inflatable dinghy being entirely composed of rubberized wind, the possibility of Dnipro being carried off to Oz or Uzbekistan by a gust is very real. So I’m out in the gale, dressing gown flapping, heaving bags of compost and old gas cylinders onto it-him-her. Sorry, that anthropomorphic feminisation seems awkward.

Then I go back to bed and lie awake, worrying.

I’d forgotten. It’s always like this with boats. Ear constantly cocked for the force 10 that will rip and sink or send your pride and joy skywards. A boat is like a bad conscience, nagging at you: should have secured her-it-him better. Should’ve spent more on better rope. Should’ve.

But didn’t. Anyway, as calm descends and dawn breaks my ship-called-Dnipro is still sitting on the grass next to the compost heap. Inflation maintained. Flotation remains on the cards. But not, I hope, levitation. Or submergence..

And so, for another year…it begins! Up Helly Aa season has erupted via the Scalloway Fire Festival and of course the gigantic Lerwick affair, but there is so much more to go. Sunday will see me queuing up for tickets to the Hillswick Hall danceathon which follows the Northmavine Up Helly Aa later this month, and there are nine other fiery festivals to enjoy in Shetland if you’re in the mood for a bit of Norse conflagration.

Anyway, Tuesday saw the Shetland Webcams team experiment with an all-day webcast, leading up to the astonishing and I think rather wonderful show in the evening. Which you can watch, if you have a spare 90 minutes, here (start eight minutes in for the commentary)

Watch the procession and burning on YouTube

Earlier in the day, for premium ‘Red Eye’ subscribers to Shetland Webcams only, I hosted a two-hour version of the Beatcroft Social live from Lerwick. Music is focused on Shetland artists and music enjoyed by Shetlanders, or linked to the fire festival in some way. You can listen to a mildly edited version here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/special-up-helly-aa-beatcroft-social-tuesday-30-january/

Here’s the playlist:

Catriona Macdonald — Shetland Reels

Kasabian — Fire

Arthur Nicholson — Sun Shine on Me

Sheila Henderson — Dancing in the Rain

Steve Earle — I Feel All right

North Country Fair — When the Circle Closes

Michael Marra — Hermless

Fiddler’s Bid — Zander the Sander

Crazy World of Arthur Brown — Fire

Bongshang — If and When

Adam Guest — Solitude and Grace

Pulp — Common People

Nic Jones — The Humpback Whale

Bruce Springsteen — Fire

Todd Rundgren — Song of the Viking

Chris Stout — Norwegian Hymn?Jeg Ser Deg Sote Lam

Pilot — Call Me Round

Paul Brady — Arthur McBride

Chris Stapleton — Fire Away

Kris Drever — I didn’t Try Hard Enough

Moving Hearts — Before the Deluge

Willie Hunter, Violet Tulloch — Leaving Lerwick Harbour

And, specially written for the occasion, Elvis Voe and His Fitful Head return to ruminate: Here come The Pacifist Vikings

The Norse have come to town today

Marching in warlike array

And with them is a silver band

Euphoniums  sounding grand

They negotiate they don’t demand

The lovely vikings

Men and women, children too

Laughing and smiling the whole day through 

They’re spreading, happiness and peace 

They’ve made arrangements with the local police

Their days of pillaging have long since ceased

Adorable Vikings 

Here come the lovely Vikings

Here come the adorable Vikings 

They’re so enthralling

Valhalla’s calling

Lovely Vikings

They’ve built a bonfire in the play park now

The swings are carefully  preserved somehow 

A dragon galley has been torched

And not a single person has been scorched 

No one is even slightly drunk or debauched

Completely sober Vikings 

Copyright Elvis Voe And His Fitful Head, 2024

And for your delectation and delight, in homage to the recent spate of “what I look like as a viking” social media postings…

As usual, we’re webcasting the whole thing live on the evening of 30 January, and I’m doing the commentary. But if you’re interested, I’ll be talking, interviewing and playing music live from Lerwick all day. We’ll have coverage of the Junior Up Helly Aa and it will be beyond exciting. Or really quite interesting. Here’s a wee taster, along with the link for watching on the day/night:

www.shetlandwebcams.com/uphellyaa

Oh, and this is a song originally written for The Holy Waters Songbook, a kind of one-person show performed to mark the launch of my book Holy Waters - Searching for the Sacred in a Glass

It’s called Vikings From a Scottish Point of View (Remember 1263!) . 1263 is the date of the Battle of Largs, during which would-be viking invaders were repelled, or at least retreated in disarray, from west central Scotland

Vikings were largely unattractive

They ate mushrooms that were psychoactive

They conquered towns and villages and nations

Their beards were full of nasty infestations

Vikings, sailed from Norway to Newfoundland

It said so in a book I bought in Poundland

They didn't really  have much use for money

Drank a kind of superlager made from honey

With their hatchets and their helmets, they think they are so tough

They’ve done their share of pillaging, but now, they’re looking rough

With our broken Buckfast bottles, I think we’ll call their bluff

So come and have a go boys if you think you’re hard enough

Vikings they were full of great ideas

gave us Danish bacon, Volvos and Ikea

Their gods had names like Odin, Thor and Frigg

And Baldr who had to wear a wig

And so led by Haakon Haakonson in 1263

The vikings came to Scotland to assert their sovereignty

On mead and magic mushrooms they were so, severely wasted

Between Millport and Largs  they got completely pasted

Despite it all in Shetland  they still celebrate the Norse

Maybe they were defeated but in the end of course

They retreated to the Northlands and developed and endured

Now they make us all assemble their flat pack furniture…

With their hatchets and their helmets, they think they are so tough

They’ve done their share of pillaging, but now, they’re looking rough

With our broken Buckfast bottles, I think we’ll call their bluff

So come and have a go boys if you think you’re hard enough

You can listen to this sonic newsletter, all the words and tunes in full, on Mixcloud by clicking the link here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/unpromoting-shetland-come-and-have-a-go-if-you-think-youre-hard-enough/

You know Shetland, the TV series? It’s been the biggest boost to tourism in these Northern Isles since…well. Ever. That and knitting. It used to be music and wildlife, especially birds, but now it’s busloads of Americans off cruise ships who want to see Jimmy Perez’s house. And, you know the cliffs at Eshaness that feature in every series. Wow, the scenery! Always shot in spring and summer, of course, because to make TV you need light.

At the moment, there’s a lack.

Mickey Finn—Night Comes Down

(Quick aside, stop press and all that: location scouting for the next series of Shetland has begun! Ashley Jensen is coming back, I hope, along with her assorted knitted bunnets.) 

Who can blame those keen summer visitors, whose money we crave? Or the constant stream of folk wanting to move here permanently, sometimes without ever even having visited? There are plenty of jobs - too many vacancies in what is an overheating economy - and oh, that light! The summer’s midnight sun or ‘simmer dim’, illuminating us with a constant glow of inner happiness! What a peaceful quality of life for us and the kids, especially if we flog our Home Counties house for nigh on a million and pick up a croft for a hundred grand. We can make candles! Write novels. Do art! We can escape bad relatives, that criminal record, those people who find us no matter how many times we change our names…

Richard and Linda Thompson — Night Comes In

Except this isn’t summer. This is just past midwinter and it’s dark. Nobody’s shooting TV programmes. As I write, it’s just getting light at 9.00am and darkening severely at 2.30pm. The weather is currently mild and dull but over Christmas and New Year, for some 14 days we had unremitting gales. It was uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous to go out. Keeping warm was work. Candles? We were raiding the local shop to maintain that Swedish model of constant flicker (in case of power cuts). 

Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the Edge of Town

David Bowie — Modern Love

The darkness is hard to cope with, even for born-and-bred Shetlanders. There are good-natured tales of one particular remote island where folk essentially hibernate - go to bed in December and don’t surface until March. I have to admit that at this time of year I find myself dozing off frequently, and not just during council meetings. But the lack of light (hit that vitamin D!) really can wear you down. When I first arrived in Shetland to live, almost 40 years ago, there was a fashion for ultra violet winter lamps to boost your serotonin. There was lots of talk of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), the winter blues. 

I had a SAD lamp. Maybe it worked. I’m still here.

Ryan Adams — Darkness

Seasick Steve — Dark

I’ve written in the past about my delight in the cosiness, the briefly trendy notion of ‘coorie’, or what the Dutch called ‘gezillig’ - cosiness in the midst of midwinter. And it’s true that in Shetland the darkness can encourage ‘in aboot da night’ neighbourly socialising. If you can afford to heat your house. A survey last year indicated that unless you were earning at least £40,000 a year in Shetland, you were likely to be in ‘fuel poverty’. 

Because nearly everything here is dearer. We may not consider ourselves remote. But we are far away from distribution hubs.

On a personal level, this winter has been a difficult one to cope with, all kinds of pressures and family issues crowding in with the loss of illumination. Books, music and eBay help. Though not selling on the Devil’s Marketplace. And that’s another aspect of Shetland life - postal and courier services can be erratic, in my experience not so much in terms of deliveries here as in things going astray or getting broken when sending them off island.

Lindisfarne — Winter Song

Bert Jansch — In the Bleak Midwinter

Then we have the question of travel. Transport. Hideously expensive at the best of times, impossible at others, as ferries stop running and aeroplanes ‘go technical’ or things get too bumpy aloft. As I’ve said in the past , sometimes on the flight to Shetland you think you’re going to die. On the ferry, you can wish you were dead. And when the sundried tomatoes supply dries up, the sooth bread vanishes…it can be hard without your Warburtons.

Family — My Friend the Sun

Anyway, I was hearing about the difficulties some newly-arrived families were having in adjusting to their first winter here, a particularly dark, windy and wet one as I’ve said. And I wondered aloud if Shetland’s sustained and expensive promotional programme aimed at encouraging folk to come to the isles to live and work was making it all look too appealing. Too easy. Too nice. Maybe what we need in Shetland are people with an adventurous spirit, the toughness of character to make it through the darkness. Maybe we should stop pretending that everything here is easy and friendly and lovely,  and that we glow in an eternal communal light. A fellow councillor commented that in the rural  West Highlands there was a kind of informal “two winter’ rule - only those who made it through two winters had the right stuff to stay.

Richard and Linda Thompson — Dimming of the Day/Dargai

As for me, I’m heading south this week to bairns and grandbairns, to partake of railways, cities and a different kind of seascape in Troon. By the time we get back at the end of January, we’ll be looking at Up Helly Aa, fire festival season, the ‘lightening of the year’ and the prospect of spring. I can’t wait.

Matt Deighton — Lay Down Your Weary Light

Full Playlist follows. Spotify link is at the end

Mickey Finn—Night Comes Down

Richard and Linda Thompson — Night Comes In

Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the Edge of Town

David Bowie — Modern Love

Ryan Adams — Darkness

Seasick Steve — Dark

Lindisfarne — Winter Song

Bert Jansch — In the Bleak Midwinter

Family — My Friend the Sun

Richard and Linda Thompson — Dimming of the Day/Dargai

Matt Deighton — Lay Down Your Weary Light