Chapter Twenty-Nine

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Mainland, Orkney

May 2024

CLEM

Clem and Quinn leave the cave to ask Ivan about the carving on the cave ceiling. On the jetty, she shows him the photographs on her phone.

“Probably just kids,” he says, glancing down warily, but the tone of his voice isn’t convincing, and he doesn’t move from the boat to see the symbol for himself.

“It’s carved into the rock,” she says, zooming in to show him the detail. “You think kids would go to all that trouble?”

He shrugs. “Yeah. Why not?”

Quinn throws her a look. “Would you mind coming and having a look?” he asks Ivan. Very polite for Quinn, but the soft approach doesn’t work. Ivan shakes his head.

Ivan shakes his head. “I’d better be getting back. Weather can change in a moment here in Orkney.”

They climb back on to the boat. Clem watches the island pull away from them, and she feels strangely bereft. As though a part of Erin remains in the cave. And Senna, too. All the answers out of reach.

“You go boating a lot?” Ivan asks her as she approaches the cockpit.

She shakes her head. “Never.”

“Have a try,” he says, nodding at the helm. He smiles, and she senses he’s apologetic for the trip to Gunn.

She takes the wheel in her hands, feeling the movement of the boat.

“Just keep it steady,” Ivan says with a smile. “I’ll make you some tea.”

“Why’s the island uninhabited?” Quinn asks Ivan when he passes them both their cups of tea. “Or not crawling with tourists?”

“There was a plague in the nineteenth century,” Ivan says, his eyes on the horizon. “Folk left and just didn’t come back. No cafés or hostels for tourists. Plenty of places to visit in Orkney that have infrastructure.”

“You have any idea why a group of teenagers might visit it?” she asks him.

“Who knows why folk do the things they do,” he says.

“Maybe that symbol has a history,” she says.

“It does,” he says, and she perks up.

“What history?” she asks.

“Well, it’s three spirals,” he says. “A trinity. It’s an ancient symbol. The Catholic church use it, don’t they?”

“I don’t think Catholics carved that symbol in the cave,” she says tersely, but just then Quinn holds up his phone, showing her something he has googled. It’s an image of three spirals, with the word Triskele .

···

Ivan drops them off at Kirkwall, where the old castle has long been razed by Orcadian rebels, the thick stone perimeter buried beneath concrete.

“So the spiral is a triskele,” she says, googling on her own phone now.

“That’s the word for it, yes,” Quinn says. “An ancient pagan symbol meaning life, death, and rebirth as interconnected states.”

Her stomach flips. Was the fire a suicide pact?

“You okay?” Quinn asks, seeing her face grow pale as they move through the streets.

“Yes,” she says. “Fine.” She’d rather keep such thoughts to herself for now, at least until they’ve figured out where the Triskele—the group—might be found.

Clem had imagined Orkney to feel remote and underdeveloped, but instead it is surprisingly established, with thriving towns and a diverse population. St. Magnus Cathedral sits proud in the center of the city, light pouring through its reconstructed rose window, the aisles filled with American tourists from a cruise ship.

They speak to shopkeepers and tourist clerks, asking about the tragedy on the Isle of Gunn. About Senna, and the Triskele. They find sympathy and tales of the island, its history of witches, plague, famine, but no information about Senna, or the Triskele, though they manage to exchange telephone numbers with over a dozen locals who promise to contact them if anything arises.

At two o’clock, they get the ferry to Gairsay, and find a small town close by with a convenience store and an empty café. The convenience store owner tells them he was interviewed by the police in relation to the fire on Fynhallow.

“I told them I had CCTV footage of the teenagers,” he says, pointing out the poster in his shop window featuring Senna’s face, the word Missing underneath in stark red letters. “The boy came in to buy a couple of Diet Cokes. Terribly sad. He was dead the next day. The ranger found him. I can give you her name.”

“Thanks,” Quinn says, but he sounds defeated. It’s nothing they don’t already know.

They stop for lunch at a café, the mood heavy. Visiting Fynhallow has taken its toll on both of them.

“I’m wondering if you might know anything about what happened on Fynhallow?” Quinn asks the woman running the café.

“No idea about that, I’m afraid,” she says with a tight smile. She turns her eyes to Clem. “We’ll be closing in fifteen minutes.”

Clem notices a man sitting at a table in the corner, gesturing at them. He’s young, midtwenties, wearing a rainbow-colored poncho with a guitar case in the seat next to him. She approaches him, and Quinn follows.

“I overheard you asking about the Triskele,” he says.

Clem nods. “You know about them?”

“The Triskele own a lot of the land around here,” he says in a low voice. “They control a lot of things. People won’t like you asking so openly about them.”

Quinn raises his eyebrows. “Okay. Well, do you know where we could find them?”

The man glances at the café owner, makes sure she’s not listening. “Can I ask why you’re looking for them?”

Clem takes the seat opposite him, and Quinn copies her, taking the seat beside her. “There was a fire on Fynhallow, and a boy got killed. Another girl is still missing. We have reason to think there’s a link between these events and the Triskele. We want to ask them a few questions, see if we can find out where the girl is.”

The man looks puzzled.

“Our daughter, Erin, was seriously injured in the fire on Fynhallow,” Clem tells the man. “We know she was researching the Triskele. I’m starting to wonder if she joined them.”

“No one just joins the Triskele,” he says. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, that’s what seems to have happened here,” Quinn says.

“Maybe different branches do different things?” suggests Clem.

He gives a small laugh, as though this notion is insane. Clem shares a look with Quinn. She’s not sure whether to trust this man. They don’t even know his name.

“Are you a member?” Clem asks, the penny dropping.

He eyes them with a small smile. “I am, yes.”

“Oh, wow,” she says. “Okay. So—”

“You’d be best talking to Edina,” the man interrupts. “She’s the leader, if you like. Tonight’s a hare moon.”

“A what moon?” Quinn asks.

“A hare moon. The elders will be meeting tonight in the old byre in Scarwell Woods.”

Clem scrambles to write that down on her phone.

“Scarwell Woods?” she checks, and the man nods.

“It’s about forty minutes from here. I can give you directions.”

“Yes,” Clem says, her heart lifting. “That would be amazing.”

His face darkens, and he looks them both over. “Fine,” he says then. “But I caution you both to take this extremely seriously. The Triskele doesn’t take kindly to strangers. You need to be prepared.”

···

They have dinner in Gairsay, in a diner opposite a set of church ruins, watching tourists pose for photographs on the steps outside. Strange, she thinks, how Erin never mentioned St. Magnus Cathedral, or Skara Brae, or the ancient standing stones at the Ring of Brodgar. Back in Kirkwall she could see they were exactly the kind of places Erin would like to visit, given their Viking connections, their importance to Orcadian history—but Erin didn’t say anything about these places.

They ask for the check, and Quinn glances at his watch. “Did Poncho Guy give us a time for the meeting?”

“He mentioned a hare moon.”

“Oh, hare moon, not hair?”

He spells out the one he means. Clem googles it. “It’s to do with fertility and new beginnings. Sounds like a pagan thing. Poncho Guy said they would be here tonight. I don’t recall a specific time.”

“Well, it’s six o’clock. Sunset is eighteen minutes after nine.”

“We’ll go and scope the place out first. See what Poncho Guy means by being prepared.”

They find Scarwell Woods about ten miles from the town, a small sign pointing toward it. No sign of any houses nearby. A field, and a metal gate. No signage to indicate if it’s private.

“Should we park here?” Quinn asks, pulling into the field.

She steps out and opens the gate. They park up, and when she steps out of the car it feels colder than in the town.

They head toward the woodland, finding an old stone building among the trees.

“The byre?” Quinn asks.

“I guess so,” she says, though the doors are closed. No sign of anyone around. Thick roots snaking through the understory, mossy boulders gathered between the tree trunks making it difficult to walk anywhere but a single path that leads from the byre to the mountains at the north of the island. And the trees are gnarled and ancient, the branches twisted over many years by strong winds.

About ten minutes later, she notices an etching on a tree trunk.

“Quinn!” she hisses, waving at him.

“What?”

He strides up to her and inspects the tree trunk in front of her.

Three spirals in the shape of a trinity.

“Well, that’s certainly a coincidence,” he says.

“It’s exactly like the one in the cave,” she says, bringing out her phone to compare the carving on the tree with the image on her phone.

“Looks like we’re in the right place.”

As she reaches up to touch the carving with her fingers, she sees something moving through the field just below the border of trees.

A hare.

She gasps at the distinctively long ears, the gleam of a gold eye.

“Look,” she whispers to Quinn.

“What?” he says, looking up.

But when she looks again, the hare has gone, out of sight.