Written in Bone -2 by Simon Beckett

Author:Simon Beckett [Beckett, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Murder, Mystery & Detective, Mystery Fiction, Suspense, Forensic Anthropologists, Suspense Fiction, Large Type Books, Scotland, Hebrides (Scotland), Murder - Investigation - Scotland - Hebrides, Forensics
ISBN: 9780440335962
Google: ELDK5amI7NIC
Amazon: 0440335965
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2007-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

WRITTEN IN BONE

161

‘It ’s al right, I can do it myself.’

‘I’m sure you can. But you’re not going to.’ She began to clean the cuts and grazes on my face. ‘Don’t worry. I used to be the unofficial nurse here before Bruce Cameron arrived.’

The wind moaned outside, but there was an easy silence between us as she worked. I wondered what a young woman like her, a single mother, was doing on a backwater like Runa.

Eking out a living somewhere like this couldn’t be easy. Brody had told me she ’d met Anna’s father on the mainland, so she ’d obviously left at some point. Yet she ’d come back out here. Was that because she actual y liked the island’s isolation, or was it a retreat from something that had happened out there? I thought again about the visitor who had been in the kitchen earlier, and who’d left her in tears. There couldn’t be many single men on an island this size, so it was hard not to draw conclusions about the reason for her secrecy.

Then again, what did I know? If I’d any sense I’d have been back home with Jenny now. I wished I could talk to her, and regretted not asking to use Fraser’s radio when I’d had the chance. I wondered what she was doing, if she was worrying about me. Probably. You should never have agreed to do this. What the hel was I doing on a bleak island miles from anywhere, nearly having died of exposure and then being burned to death, instead of getting on with my own life?

Except this was my life, I realized, in a moment of rare clarity. This was what I did. What I was. And if Jenny saw it as a problem, where did that leave us?

El en’s voice pul ed me back to the here and now. ‘Is it true what people are saying? About the body?’

‘What are they saying?’

She gently swabbed a cut with antiseptic. ‘That it was murder.’

Thanks to Fraser, there probably wasn’t any harm in confirming what everyone on Runa almost certainly already knew, but I stil felt reluctant to talk about it, even with El en.

162

Simon Beckett

‘It ’s al right, I know I shouldn’t ask,’ she said, quickly. ‘I just can’t believe anything like that could happen here. The bar was ful of talk about it earlier. No one can think who the victim can be, let alone imagine anyone from here being involved.’

I gave a non-committal murmur. This was exactly what we ’d hoped to avoid. Now gossip and rumour would fil the vacuum left by the absence of hard fact, muddying the water and stirring up a silt of mistrust. And the only person to benefit would be the kil er.

‘So wil you be coming back to Runa for your next holiday?’

El en asked, deliberately lightening the mood. I started to laugh. It hurt. ‘Don’t,’ I told her, wincing. She smiled. ‘Sorry. But are you always as accident prone as this?’

‘Not usual y.

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