In which a Nazi bomber is imitated, waste bird life is reprocessed as salmon feed, and secrets are revealed about Detective Constable McKinstry.

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….