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The night before Jimmy has to go to the mainland, Duncan says, into comfortable quiet: “I’ve got a gig.”
He’s lying back on the sofa, taking up space because he can. Jimmy couldn’t say that, even if he were the world’s finest musician, with a string of concerts scheduled. So easy, so casual: a gig. “Aye?” he says.
“An old friend’s band, needs a session fiddler for a few dates. And the council’s doing a wee music festival to keep the cruise ships happy. You could come along.”
Jimmy thinks about that on his side of the sofa. Duncan picks up his guitar from where it’s lying by his feet and strums a bit. Which feels odd, in this quiet room, lit within and winter-dark without. A little flashy and performative. Duncan must think so, too, because he puts it down after a minute or two, hunts down his fiddle. A few more notes: deep and sweet, the first few of a Shetland reel.
“I like that,” Jimmy says. “When you play like that.”
“I’m glad,” Duncan says, smiles a little, like he’s making a mental note. A few more scrapes of the bow. “I’m out of practice.”
Which makes sense, but still strikes Jimmy as incongruous. Duncan, Jimmy’s dear old friend and ally, is charming and unreliable; that’s a fact, and so is how he plays two musical instruments and performs in front of paying audiences. He can’t be winging that. Of course, he must occasionally practise.
“I’m trying to,” Duncan says, apparently reading his mind. “It’s hard to, when you’re having some kind of slow motion nervous breakdown.”
It’s as close as he’s come in a long while to talking about the bodies on the beach. Jimmy doesn’t like that silence, worries about it. Maybe he hesitates a moment too long, because Duncan’s expression closes off. “Ah, well, you don’t have to.”
Jimmy shakes himself. He’s being asked because Cassie would be asked; because he’s Duncan’s family. “I’ll come,” he says.
Duncan smiles at him. He plays a few notes of Queen of Argyll, a tune about a man who adores a woman who’ll never have him, that reminds Jimmy of Fran. There’s so much memory attached to everything, he thinks, a little sadly. Nothing here without its ghosts.
*
In the morning, Duncan gives him a lift to the ferry terminal, though he could have walked, and Jimmy girds his loins to police resourcing. There’s so much police resourcing. Half a dozen meetings over the next couple of days, accompanied by dry sandwiches and sparkling water in an Aberdeen conference room. Jimmy considers asking if he can have a Police Scotland clinker-built yoal, decides from a crofter’s son it may not sound like a joke. When it’s over it’s too late to go home that night. The next day—maybe it’s because he hasn’t slept well, or is just so keen to be gone. Maybe it’s just a thing that happens, because as Duncan often says, even Jimmy Perez makes mistakes. It happens.
Jimmy steps off the kerb without looking. A second later it hits him: a Lime green creature with a Deliveroo pack on the back. It’s such a loud noise. Not your fault, Jimmy thinks, as the rider’s face crumples in horror, and then he hits the pavement. The e-bike clatters down beside him and there’s nothing, for a minute. Jimmy thinks it’s just for a minute, but then it can’t be, because a passer-by has made a call and a new green person is here. Not the horrible green of the Lime bike but a nice, deep emergency-services green.
“Hi, there,” she says, as Jimmy vaguely occupies his body. “Can you sit up? What’s your name?”
Jimmy can sit up. He’s still on the pavement and there’s dirt in his hair. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. “Not to worry,” the paramedic says, briskly, pickpockets him with the ease of long practice. “Happens to everyone.”
She shows him his wallet and phone, neatly extracted from his coat. “I think this”—she riffles through cards and receipts, flicks to the driving licence and startled-looking photo—“must be you. James? Jamie? Jimmy, okay, and this guy”—she holds up his phone—“must be the guy we call. Right?”
Jimmy peers at his own phone background, of himself, Cassie and Duncan at last year’s folk festival. He nods gratefully, unlocks the phone when prompted, and sits back as the paramedic dials.
“Jimmy!” Duncan, delighted through the speaker. “You’re never back already! Do you want to—“
“Excuse me, sir,” the paramedic interrupts, soft and formal. She looks down at the name. “Are you Duncan Hunter?”
A pause from the other end, full of words unspoken. Then Duncan says, flat: “What has he done”—almost angry, though Jimmy is getting confused, and doesn’t understand why.
All of that happens at eight in the morning. By two o’clock, Duncan is there, somehow, at the little A&E department at the infirmary, two hundred miles of open sea from Shetland. Jimmy doesn’t think it’s like him to have gone down to the airport and beaten up a cargo pilot, but he can’t think of any other way he could have done it. “A friend who does frozen food runs out of Sumburgh,” Duncan explains, when Jimmy asks him. He can speak again now, and think sort-of straight if he tries. “Owed me a favour so he put me in with the peas.”
They’re in a curtained bay, about to be released. Jimmy has submitted to the tide of NHS hurry-up-and-wait, had lights shone into his eyes and fingers snapped by his ears. Duncan speaks to the doctor when he finally turns up, gets a sheaf of papers on what to do for someone post-concussion. When the everything’s done he takes Jimmy by the arm and gets him to standing. “Do you want to stay till morning?” he asks. “We can try and go home tonight but I don’t much fancy it. We won’t get a berth.”
“Home,” Jimmy says. It means the full overnight journey, fourteen hours on hard plastic seats, but his whole soul wants his own bed and shore. In the end it turns out Duncan has a friend on the ferry, too, a guy on Hjaltland who puts them into a crew-only bunk room far from the public areas. Jimmy dozes among drying socks and the scent of liquid fuel and mildew. There’s a porthole on either side of him and in between the deep rock of the sea.
“You came,” he says, drowsily, the words slipping out without him necessarily wanting them to. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Would I let you down?” Duncan asks lightly, rummaging in a bag for some water.
“Yes!” Jimmy looks up. He doesn’t mean to say this, but here it is. “You’ve let me down, let Cassie down, dozens and dozens of times!”
A truly awful thing for him to say, after what must have been a horrible day for Duncan, too; dropping everything, probably calling round madly to get someone to take over behind the bar, getting himself off the island at no notice, and then now back again, all night, across a brutal winter sea.
Duncan glances over at him. If he’s hurt, he’s not showing it. “I was younger then,” he says, voice clear and pure. “I’m older now. I know you want me to tell you something else, something more complicated, some other reason. But that’s it.”
“I know,” Jimmy says, struck. “I’m sorry. You came for me. I just—was surprised.”
“Jimmy, a stranger called me off your fucking phone.” Duncan almost never swears, and it startles Jimmy into silence. He lies there on his front, his head propped up on his hands. Through the porthole, he thinks he sees something out in the blackness; another ship perhaps, with a silver prow and dragon, cutting through the waves. But there shouldn’t be anything to be seen out there, not until the red transmitter light on Fair Isle. He blinks and it’s gone, and there’s no time to mention it; Duncan’s friend has returned with another kindness in the form of two packets of sandwiches. For some reason the guy is stupidly attractive, with the sea-glass eyes that were once all of Jimmy’s taste. He’s glad Cassie didn’t inherit that tendency, to go for men just because they seemed like home.
Looking at Duncan again, rummaging in the bag, he knows there’s something he could reach for, if he only tried. “I don’t want to eat,” he says, knowing he sounds childish and sullen, not knowing how to pull it back.
“That’s fine, but drink this for me,” Duncan says gently, their earlier words forgotten. He holds out the plastic water bottle for Jimmy to take. He’s humming a slow tune as he moves around the cabin, like this is twenty years ago and it’s Cassie who’s having a fractious night. He’s perhaps not aware he’s doing it. The sound, and the rock of the sea, lull Jimmy to sleep.
*
In the morning, Jimmy decides that he’ll go into work but take it easy; get ahead of his paperwork and filing. Duncan rings up and explains this to Tosh, who explains in turn that Shetland was, historically, a deprived region of Scotland; even until the pipelines came ashore, certain things in their community were lacking, but they’ve caught up nowadays, they even have computers and screens, and if Jimmy comes into the office to catch up on his paperwork and filing they will be on computers and screens, he will be a man with a concussion looking at computers and screens.
It’s possible that’s what’s happened. It may be Jimmy has known them both so long and well that they conducted this argument entirely in his head. He dozes on the sofa most of the morning, while Duncan makes lunch and reads the leaflets on Your Loved One’s Head Injury. “It says here that someone should stay with you, for the first few days,” he reports, holding the piece of paper in one hand and a spatula in the other. “You’re liable to get dizzy and forgetful.”
Jimmy opens his eyes and swings his legs round. “I’ll be fine.”
“Be fine lying down.” Duncan wanders over and touches Jimmy’s hair absently.
“No, listen.” Jimmy sits up properly, lets his feet touch the ground. “You can’t just stay with me, Duncan. You have a business to run. And you’ve got those gigs, you were excited about them, you told me. And we can’t drag Cassie home from Glasgow because her dad hit his head.”
“Likelihood of irritability and other strong emotions,” Duncan reads from the leaflet. “Jimmy, we’ll work it out.”
He finds his phone and works it out. Tosh says she can be around for some of tomorrow, doing her paperwork at the dining table; the band can get a replacement fiddler for Duncan just for tonight. The remaining gigs and the winter music festival, that the council are running, aren’t for a few days. If Jimmy can stand the noise—that is, if he doesn’t develop any sensitivity to loud sounds—then friends of Duncan’s can put him at the front and keep an eye on him.
“Duncan!” Jimmy says. “I don’t need babysitting. I don’t need—play dates.” He was never the parent of a toddler, but this is still sounding painfully familiar. “I’m fine.”
“If we leave you alone it might be dangerous,” Duncan says. “And someone’s got to keep you from reading and off your phone.”
Jimmy wants to argue some more, but loses traction when he tries. After Duncan has given him lunch he dozes again, too dizzy and unhappy for tea or an open window or a soothing podcast or anything that Duncan suggests and Jimmy threatens to throw at his head. He doesn’t actually want to work or read: it’s just this feeling of being trapped here, in this small space of a living room. It was the same yesterday; close cabins and hospitals, places where he’s always felt trapped.
Duncan sits beside him when he’s halfway through explaining this and also pummelling a cushion. “I know you hate it,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Being quiet and resting, following medical advice. The thing is, Jimmy, it’s going to happen regardless. I’ve got to be able to tell Cassie I took good care of you. And Fran, too.”
Jimmy immediately wants to yell at him for such transparent emotional manipulation, but Duncan’s expression is implacable. He means what he says. He reaches out, strokes Jimmy’s cheek with two fingers, and it undoes Jimmy a little bit. He leans back on the sofa and closes his eyes.
“I’ll read to you in a while,” Duncan says, gently. “Go back to sleep if you want. I’ll be here.”
Jimmy acquiesces, because there’s nothing else to do. When he wakes up a while later, he feels well enough to go out for walk, to catch the last of the daylight. Duncan calls to him to take a hat and gloves; Jimmy ignores him about the hat and has to go back upstairs for the gloves. He opens the front door and feels bright warmth and sunlight, hears the close clash of metal, and catches a glimpse of a helmet. He slams the door and backs off. “There’s Vikings on the doorstep.”
Duncan hurries out from the kitchen. “What?”
Jimmy realises, with exhausted horror, that he probably does need babysitting. “Nothing.”
“Really, Vikings?” Duncan asks, a reasonable question in the Shetland of this century. “Not someone dressing up for the museum? Or Erling Haaland?”
Jimmy shakes his head. When he opens the front door again there’s no one there and Duncan is looking at him in a way he doesn’t like. “Let me come out with you,” he says. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway.”
Jimmy doesn’t believe him, but can’t resist. Duncan ducks back in the house for his own coat and woollens, and comes with Jimmy up the steps to the road and along the waterfront. In this murky January, the darkness coming over the sea is inky and absolute. At the the far end of the commercial harbour, Duncan takes two letters out of his pocket and puts them in the box for the next day’s collection, and they turn back around. The ferry is heading back and they both pause to watch it, in the rhythm of their shared childhood. Jimmy has a sudden memory: a month from Fran’s death, him and Cassie stunned and laden, off the boat like refugees. Jimmy’s parents came to meet them; Duncan came after Cassie was in bed, got Jimmy drunk, made him cry. Grief shatters the mind’s clocks, makes it so things happen cross-wise from other things, but he remembers that.
“Jimmy,” Duncan says, as they start walking again. “Did you mean to tell me what you told me last night?”
“What?” Jimmy says.
“About my friend, Anders. That’ll have been him, actually, heading back on Hjaltland. You said you liked him. I mean, of course you did, he helped us, but from what you said, you… liked him.”
He’s amused, as well a little uncertain. Jimmy takes a moment to understand what he’s saying, and feels a wave of embarrassment that rises and then stalls, as though the concussion is stopping it from breaking. “I’ve never told you that.”
“That you’re bisexual, no, you haven’t.”
Duncan’s not uncertain on that word, Jimmy notes, and is besieged by another memory. Telling Fran, though it felt like the hardest thing he’d done in a life containing murders. He doesn’t remember telling Duncan last night, but it seems something in him wanted to.
“I can forget it, if you didnae mean to tell me,” Duncan says. Easily, kindly, his hand finding Jimmy’s. Jimmy squeezes back.
“No,” he says. “Don’t forget.”
“I, ah.” Duncan looks at him, embarrassed. “Might have, uh. Already known it to forget. You may recall, your beautiful wife, she had many good qualities—“
“She couldn’t keep a secret,” Jimmy says, and laughs for the first time since the accident. They walk back to the house in silence, more comfortable than they’ve been. There are no Vikings on the way. Inside, Duncan turns on the lights and puts something in a casserole dish while Jimmy and his ever-present headache retreat to the sofa.
“I told you I’d read to you,” he says, once the oven timer is on. “But all you read is horrible treatises on forensics. And Dubliners. Christ, Jimmy, you are beyond human assistance.”
“Play for me,” Jimmy says, as Duncan pushes James Joyce off the end of the sofa. The words land like the thud of the book. Soft but definite. Duncan looks at him for a long moment, then nods. He’s supposed to be in a nice convivial bar tonight, playing music he loves in front of an audience.
Instead, he’s here with Jimmy. Duncan lays a fire and lights it, and gets out his fiddle. And perhaps for someone else, somewhere else, it wouldn’t soothe; it would pierce an aching head. But it gives Jimmy a pure, unearthly pleasure that Duncan can play like this, not with virtuoso skill but with the heartbeat of the islands, of all that is old and precious in them. In the firelight Jimmy listens, and watches the way Duncan watches him, eyes shadowed, full of endless care.
*
It turns out the pamphlets and websites are right, and it’s the first forty-eight hours after a head injury that are the worst. On the third morning, Jimmy sits on the sea wall with his coffee in the late sunrise, and finds he can bear it better. For Duncan’s sake, he wants to; the man’s only sin is worrying about him.
He’s even found Jimmy something real to do, in between yelling that the bistro gives him time to look after his dependants the way it does all its other employees. Apparently Jimmy is allowed to knit, as long as he does it without looking, so Duncan has got one of the neighbours to cast on for him. Cassie’s abandoned projects gain some quixotic rows, and no one asks why Jimmy, a grown man, unmarried, would be anyone’s dependant. In the meantime, Tosh seems completely unperturbed at the idea of answering her work emails at the dining table while babysitting her boss. Amid the comfortable quiet and clack of needles, she catches Jimmy up on how a ship got into trouble off Northmavine late last night, and it didn’t founder, but it did lose a couple of cargo containers.
“And that’s why we have these things all over our western beaches,” she says brightly, and overturns a plastic evidence bag onto the table next to her laptop. “Don’t worry about handling it,” she adds. “After we’d found the first twenty of them we thought we’d got enough evidence for basically everything ever.”
Jimmy sits beside her and lifts up piles of plasticky, silicone-y things, puts them back down. Sand pours into his hands from the cracks. “Ah,” he says.
“Cock rings,” Tosh says, tragically. “I mean, I think. I had an old boyfriend who—you know. You do know?”
“I know.” Jimmy laughs and moves to makes more tea. He likes having her here. Duncan has left food in the fridge for them both and he digs around for some plates.
“See, I’m great at this,” Tosh says, ironic over the sound of the kettle boiling. “My boss got hit by an e-bike and a ship almost went down offshore, plus there was a minor arson, two indictable thefts, the world’s most northerly jaguar without an exotic animal licence probably unless the oligarchs have them in Russia they probably do don’t they and all that’s fine, but that old boyfriend who, you know, was very bad in bed, is married now with kids, and that’s hard.”
She’s laughing, but there’s a shadow of real unhappiness there. Jimmy wonders what about him invites these kinds of confidences from his immediate subordinates. “You allow too much importance to the men in your life,” he says.
“Oh.” Tosh looks over her shoulder at Jimmy, back on the sofa with his knitting needles. There’s a small, sad smile on her face. “Not you, I think.”
Jimmy smiles back, moved by that vivid affection. After lunch she suggests a walk, and they go out to Clickimin, along the sea’s margin through the broch’s dead. Jimmy sees the grey figures by the edge of the lochan, enacting their thousand-year-old rites, but doesn’t like to mention it. The bright air is bracing after all this time inside. They come back across to the Lodberries for more tea, and then Tosh has to go, to attend to real police business elsewhere. She pauses to fuss over him having enough cushions and something to drink, and Jimmy finds he doesn’t mind it, not from her. “Thank you for staying,” he says.
“Ach, shut up,” Tosh says, comfortably. “Duncan will be here in a bit, he says. See you later.”
She departs, and the cold air and exercise do their work: Jimmy falls asleep again, feeling the headache smooth out. He feels strangely like there’s nothing to worry about.
When he wakes up, someone has rearranged him. Duncan is sitting on the sofa, his knees under Jimmy’s thighs. “Setlist change,” he says, looking grumpily at his phone. “Apparently nothing else will do for the cruise ships but bloody Flower of Scotland. Jimmy, my love,”—wry on the endearment—“I’m gonnae keep you awake a bit, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mind,” Jimmy says. He doesn’t; doesn’t even mind the old tune, remembered from winter nights at Ibrox. Duncan gets up, because apparently even his degree of devil-may-care doesn’t stretch to playing a guitar with half of another human being draped over him. He fetches down his laptop for the sheet music and picks his way through it. It’s jangly, stop-and-start, clearly something he knows but has long forgotten. Duncan is right that Jimmy can’t sleep through it, but he finds his way to a halfway place, floating on a grey sea of sound. It holds him up, alongside Duncan’s occasional muttering about Americans and other aliens, only wanting the ones they’ve seen on TV.
Eventually the music stops, though whether Duncan is satisfied with his own performance is unclear. “Something for you to end with, I think,” he says, affectionately. “Now I’ve kept you awake the entire afternoon. What’ll it be?”
Jimmy turns over on the sofa. “Ae fond kiss, and then we sever,” he says.
“Oh, it’s bad luck,” Duncan says, fretful, but he switches instruments and plays it, muttering this time about crabbit old men and their sad old songs. The last notes of it have drifted high in the air, ever-distant and lovely, before he sets down the bow and asks about the cock rings.
*
Jimmy drops in and out, and goes to bed early. When he’s safely out of the way, Duncan sits up in the living room with his phone and the discharge paperwork Jimmy was given in Aberdeen. He dials 111 and when the nice person from the NHS answers, says it’s not for himself, but someone else. “Over eighteen, aye,” he says. “His name is Jimmy Perez. I’ve got his NHS number.”
He reads it out. The person on the other end asks their relationship is, and Duncan makes loose circles in the air with his free hand, tries to grasp at nothingness, throws nothingness at the ceiling in despair. “He’s mine somehow,” he says, at last. “They gave him into my care.”
So what can we do for you, the NHS asks. Is it about the concussion?
“Aye,” Duncan says. He pauses, stands up, goes to the base of the stairs to make sure Jimmy hasn’t woken up and come down to listen. “I think he’s doing better. He’s nae good at being looked after, mind.”
Lots of middle-aged men are bad at that, says the person, without urgency. Surely it can’t be a quiet night for the NHS, Duncan thinks. The call centre will be on the mainland somewhere. Traffic accidents and epidemics and fear. He found those bodies even here. It’s not quiet anywhere.
“He’s started to say things that are true,” Duncan says. “He told me something that’s true, that I don’t think he’s said out loud in years. A colleague, a friend, was looking after him today, and she said he—uh.” A pause for precise quotation. “Just dropped a truth bomb on her with her tea. And he hasn’t told me, but I think he’s seeing things.”
Hallucinations?
“I want to say yes,” Duncan says, frankly. “That’s why I called. He’s had a concussion and now he’s hallucinating. But they’re true things.”
A breath on the other end, someone quietly listening.
“Long-ago ships. Vikings. The dead in the brochs. He’s always been the sort that the dead speak to.”
The person pauses another moment. Wait a minute, they say, I need to consult. A burst of hold music, a plinky plonky version of what Meat Loaf wouldn’t do for love. Then the call handler again. Where are you exactly?
Surely they have the address on file, Duncan thinks. He gets up again, walks unhurried to the shutters, throws them open to the night. Darkness and a whirl of music: the crash of waves on the beach, the yells of whaaps and fulmars. A bright night session spilling from a pub above the sea. This little house could be the world’s heart. This place, Duncan thinks, with awful wryness, is his heart.
He reads the address out again, to oblige them. Lodberries, Lerwick, Shetland.
Shetland, the person repeats, thoughtfully. All right. That’s all right.
“Is it?” Duncan asks. “What about Jimmy?”
It’ll wear off.
“Really?” Duncan says.
Yes. Stay with him, look after him.
“I always have,” Duncan says. Without quite knowing why, he’s smiling. “Thank you. Goodnight.”
He closes the shutters, and turns out the lights.
*
By the night of the first gig, Jimmy is feeling a little better. He’s been spending his time tidying up the house, giving stuff to the charity shop and sorting through their collective strongbox of papers, but it’s too much like living in the past, and he’s ready to go out.
“You’ll come?” Duncan says, still with the question mark, and Jimmy nods. They walk out through the fading daylight, around the curve of the bay. While they go Duncan tells Jimmy some yarn about the bistro staff, how one of them got presented with various novelty items at his stag do and now they’re finding them in random places in the kitchen. “Oh,” he says, pleased, “I could try it with one of your cock rings.”
“They’re not my cock rings,” Jimmy says, indignantly. “They’re just… in my life, for some reason.”
“Aye, well, that was me with you and look where we are,” Duncan says, leaving Jimmy to think about what he’s just been compared to. He has to pause here and there when his head jabs him, but there are benches along the path on the headland, and Duncan gives him a hand to get up when he needs it. The gig is in a pub called the Hanged Man. One of the band wonders why you’d call it that, if it’s a made-up name; Jimmy, with a glance at the hook and apparition above the bar, knows it’s not made up. Duncan follows his gaze as they go in and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Things that aren’t there but are there, really,” he says, a reminder from when he’s already told Jimmy this. Things you’d see, if you only could see them.
That’s fine. It’s fine. Duncan directs Jimmy to some pals of his, who have taken over a a table to the left of the stage. And after a while, the music starts.
It’s—nice. Nice both is and isn’t the word. The pub isn’t full of ship tourists just yet, though some guy is hanging around with two cameras and a P&O lanyard, presumably for the sake of the cruise line advertising. It’s mostly locals, a few ordinary tourists; Duncan’s pals are here both to support him and keep an eye on Jimmy, which Jimmy finds embarrassing but not exactly bad. A fire in a big open grate bathes the whole place in low-orange light. And the music is what Jimmy knows, was raised with from childhood on an island that had almost as many instruments as people. Reels for dancing, and sad airs, and intense covers of the Eurythmics, because as the frontwoman of the band—Jimmy is almost sure her name must be Erica, because she goes by “Red”—points out, it’s a living tradition. If it’s nice, it’s because the outskirts of Lerwick on a Wednesday evening demands no other, fancier word, no perfect or wonderful or transcendent. Jimmy is right where his life needs him to be, and it’s nice.
He leans back in his chair, taps his foot. One of the pals puts a non-alcoholic cider by his hand. And eventually, the band announce their regret: there’s only time for a couple more numbers. Flower of Scotland first, as their crowd-pleaser. As he has all evening, Duncan seems happy and in his element, sitting at the back of the stage with the firelight flickering over his face. When the applause for that one dies away, they stop, confer. Red the frontwoman and Duncan exchange a few words that even Jimmy, sitting right by the stage, can’t hear. Then they both stand up and swap instruments, guitar for fiddle and vice versa, to an interested murmur from the audience.
Duncan meets Jimmy’s eyes as he picks up the bow, and smiles. No one else notices. Then they start up with oh, the summer time is coming, which is a tune Jimmy loves, has always loved, and that’s the last of it, the music finally fades out. Duncan says hi to his friends and has another drink and is clapped on the back by his bandmates; the cruise line photographer seems delighted by how picturesque it all is, and eventually Jimmy and Duncan are heading back into the night, through darkness close and familiar. Duncan is still humming to himself about wild mountain thyme, and Jimmy’s sense that everything is quite right with the world hasn’t dissipated, has got stronger, even. That Duncan should be here, with him, here, now, that they should be here together.
“You played that for me,” he says, as they walk down the steps to the house.
“Of course,” Duncan says, warm and easy. He opens the door with his own keys. When the lights go on they show up all the dust, lingering in the air from all the tidying up. Jimmy hadn’t quite finished with the strongbox. Birth, death, marriage and adoption certificates, by chance the last pages Fran ever signed, are all spread there on the table.
“I see you cleaned up the entire house except the penis enhancers,” Duncan says, laughing, goes to make tea with whisky in it. When he sets the cups on the table he sees what else is there, and sobers. Jimmy watches, as he reaches out to touch Fran’s handwriting, and wishes they were still where they were five minutes ago, laughing and talking through the dark.
“I didn’t want to have to rush to a hospital on the mainland,” Duncan says, suddenly, looking down. “When I did that, the last time—you know why that was.”
Jimmy understands. “But you did it again anyway.”
“For you, yeah.”
It’s so quiet and simple as he says it; a note played at the right place in the rhythm. Jimmy sees the truth of things as they are, and kisses him.
Duncan pulls back. “No,” he says, soft and sweet, passes a hand over Jimmy’s hair. “Not this. Not you.”
Jimmy holds still, not sure what this is.
“You’re fine how you are,” Duncan says, delicately sad. “Grumpy. Don’t want to do things outside your comfort zone. Bi but you’d hardly say it. That’s all right. I live with you and I’ll always be with you.”
Jimmy doesn’t move.
“But here’s sweet, concussed Jimmy, who’s a trowie sprite.” Duncan laughs at himself, not bitter. “Sees strange things, and the truth of the whole world, all the way down to how it is. I sort of think the real one does that, too, he just doesn’t talk about it. This version of you wants me. He’s a little dizzy and weird and he wants me. But it’s going to wear off. And when it does—“ He shrugs. “I don’t want to be a regret.”
He does kiss Jimmy—a ghost of his lips, the bare warmth of his mouth—before pulling back again. “Years ago I’d have gone for it anyway,” he says. “That’s you, too. Fuck.”
He takes his tea and goes upstairs, his boots hard on the boards. Jimmy holds still. It feels like the music’s stopped.
*
It wears off. What happened that night makes things awkward and strange between them but it doesn’t change how Duncan watches over Jimmy. There are more hot drinks, quiet exhortations to be patient, that it will get better.
It does, somewhat; at least, the very worst of it wears off. Two weeks later, the winter music festival is in full swing and the cruise ship visitors ought to be very happy. It was meant to be small but has grown exponentially, so it’s now a dozen local musicians and acts, and Jimmy has the whole list to hand because the police have been asked to provide a night-time presence. He’s off duty but Tosh is somewhere in the crowd, cosplaying a beat cop—so she says; Jimmy doesn’t know what that means—and when her shift is over she turns up with ciders. Duncan and the band, who tonight have a guitar, a fiddle, a harp and a set of drums between them, play on a small raised stage in front of an appreciative audience.
“Hey, they’re not bad,” Tosh says, to Jimmy’s left, as they stand there breathing steam in their scarves and hats. “Like… I kind of always thought it was a prop.”
“What?” Jimmy says. He feels like he ought to have having a nice time. Nice and mellow, amid traditional Shetland-Greenlandic folk music and the lantern light and the cold.
“Duncan and his guitar.” Tosh waves a hand. “I thought he just carried it around to look cool.”
Jimmy laughs a little, the hot cider burning on its way down. “He can play it,” he says. “He can play the fiddle, too, but he…”
He doesn’t quite finish that sentence, and Tosh glances over at him. “You okay there?” she asks. “Your head not bothering you?”
“I’m fine.” Even the leaflets admit it: you get better eventually. The last symptom he can look forward to enjoying is a vague, non-specific depression, and Jimmy wonders if that’s just his personality, anyway. He looks up, sees the band have nearly finished their set. Duncan and the fiddle player swapping their instruments is a thing, now; something people now expect, and want, so they can then speculate on Instagram about what it’s about, who the girl is in the crowd who the last song is for. It’s not always Wild Mountain Thyme. It’s always something Jimmy knows.
Even Tosh, brilliant practical hard-headed Tosh, seems pleased by this little piece of theatre. “Wow,” she says. “I should’ve dated a musician. No, wait, I’m off men. Forget I said the other part.”
Jimmy laughs again, because he will admit to a degree of depressed but it’s very hard not to love her. “Listen, I’m going to head home,” he says. “Duncan will be out with his pals, after their show. But I’d rather not stick around.”
He’d rather not be around Duncan at all; not when Duncan thinks he’s forgetting some of what happened when he was concussed, when he isn’t, not at all. He’s happy Duncan is happy, that music has soothed something that was so deeply hurt in him. He’d still rather not.
“You want me to walk down with you?” Tosh asks. Like he’s a teenage girl worrying about being followed, but she’s unembarrassed when she asks.
“No,” Jimmy says. “But thank you.”
They listen to the last song, and applaud. Even through his lack of affect, Jimmy can feel how the sound passes from the speakers into the earth, becomes part of this place and season. He buys Tosh another drink before he goes, walking with his hands in his pockets in the direction of the harbour. Before he leaves the bright-lit space of the festival ground, someone skids to a halt beside him. “DI Perez,” the guy says, out of breath. “You’re a difficult man to find. I need your help.”
Jimmy stops, and after a moment, recognises him: he’s the cruise ship photographer who was there at the Hanged Man gig and has been hanging around most of the week. “I’m off-duty,” he says, feeling rather guilty for saying it—an old sergeant or three might well ask, why did you join the police if you didn’t want to help people—but he’s so tired and increasingly detached from all this. “My colleague, Detective Sergeant McIntosh, is by the small stage.”
“Not like that,” the man says, insistent. “Just—take a look at this.”
He moves away from the crowd, leans against a wall and beckons Jimmy to him. Curiosity wins out; Jimmy steps forwards. “I was just shooting some local colour, the other day,” the guy says. “I didn’t know what I’d got until I’d got it.”
Jimmy peers down at the screen on the back of the camera. It’s a professional quality image, taken one of the days Jimmy wasn’t working. It seems to have been caught from a middle distance, while Duncan was hauling Jimmy upright off a harbour bench, their hands still joined. Jimmy’s coat hood is thrown back and his pale eyes are all sea and sky. Duncan, the one in the picture, is looking down at him with—amusement. Affection. A visible, open, uncomplicated love. It could be on a gallery wall. Jimmy looks back up at the photographer, not sure what he can say.
“I’d like you to sign a release for it,” the photographer says. “My employer will make it worth your while.”
Jimmy says, “You want to use this to advertise a cruise line?”
“It’s dramatic, romantic.” The photographer shrugs. “Like the fjords. And between you and me, the company wouldn’t say no to a different demographic. Can’t all be Linda on her sixtieth and Mo on her golden wedding. Even the younger couples, they’re all— you know. Mortgage and kids and Center Parcs. Anyway. ” He shrugs again. “Your partner, what’s his name?”
“Duncan,” Jimmy says weakly, not explaining.
“Well, you and him give it a think, and let me know.” He puts his card directly into Jimmy’s hand. “Listen, if you don’t want to, let me know anyway and I’ll make sure you get a copy. Somebody ought to.”
He seems to be about to wander off, then changes his mind. “Listen, you two are from here, right? Not incomers?”
“No.” Unwillingly, Jimmy adds, “I left for a while. But I’m home now.”
“Sure. Nice to meet you.”
The guy slopes off. Jimmy shoves the card in his pocket and goes home. He’s not expecting Duncan to be there when he lets himself in, and he isn’t. Jimmy pours three fingers of peaty malt into a glass and takes it out onto the sea wall. It’s bitterly cold and wild out there, which matches his mood. Depression, and stupid rage though he’s not even sure at what. What exactly the photographer did to annoy him, he’s not sure either, but something. Talked about local colour, maybe. The queer customs of the native Shetlander. Ghosts and brochs and trowie sprites. That’s what Duncan called him and Jimmy does remember that; remembers kissing him, or trying to. But he’s embarrassed, now, and Duncan didn’t want it, and... that’s where they are. It’s where they live.
He doesn’t know if it has to be. He doesn’t know what it means, that Duncan was here all the time he was lost to himself, and that a stranger saw wild light in it. He fetches more whisky and thinks it through. When Duncan gets back he’s a little drunk, but still not as much as he wants to be. “Someone I met,” Jimmy says, as he steps damply through the front door, “wants to use us for tourism on the islands. A picture of me and you.”
“They could do worse,” Duncan says, setting down his guitar case. He’s tipsy, too, his cheeks flushed. He looks like he had a good night, doing what he loves. “Christ, Jimmy, aren’t you freezing?”
“A bit.” Jimmy sits down on the sofa and reaches for a cushion, remembers all the times he’s been sent to find teenage runaways armed with chemical handwarmers and thermos mugs of hot chocolate. “Duncan…”
“What?” Half-distracted, affectionate, going through to put the kettle on.
Jimmy thinks about it; says it, finally. “You are home to me.”
It’s that Duncan came in the house and straight away asked if he was freezing. It’s the tea and all the tea. It’s the last song of every gig, and the islands. But the alcohol isn’t enough for him to say the whole of it, which is: you are my home and my heart and hearth, and I had to be hit on the head to see it.
“Jimmy?” Duncan says. Gentle, as always; he comes to sit next to Jimmy on the sofa and puts a careful arm around him. “What are you saying to me?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy says, and kisses him again, because it turns out the truth of things is only love. “Don’t tell me I don’t mean it,” he adds, miserably. “I really do.”
Duncan draws back. “No,” he says. “I was waiting for you.”
Jimmy smiles at him, doesn’t ask how long for.
“Are we alone here?” Duncan asks, looking around him.
There’s no ghosts any more that Jimmy can see. “Yes,” he says. “Come to bed with me.”
Come fuck me and kiss me, he thinks. Come upon my sheets and be undone. Duncan looks at him, tentative but open to wonder, and Jimmy remembers why he wanted to play again, to beat down his own ghosts.
“Aye, all right,” Duncan says. He takes Jimmy’s hand, still tentatively. “Jimmy—why don’t you see Fran, when you see things?”
“I loved her,” Jimmy says. “Buried her, grieved her, think of her. Nothing to haunt.”
”All right,” Duncan says, stronger now. Jimmy has a feeling he can take care of Duncan, too. That they can be what they need to be to each other. One of the cock rings tips off the table in a cheerful breeze, and the wind’s howl is a song.