Murder at Up Helly A
Tonight should be the Lerwick Up Helly A … this is a rather irreverent look at it, but I did promise a murder short story for January…
‘It’s also known as Transvestite Tuesday,’ I murmured in Gavin’s ear.
It was the last Tuesday in January, and the evening of Shetland’s most spectacular fire festival, the Lerwick Up Helly A. A sailing friend had managed to wangle us tickets for the dance at the Anderson High School, one of eleven venues in the town where the celebrations went on all night. We were sitting at one side of the assembly hall, with the band up on stage at our left. In front of us, twenty men in shiny black mackintoshes with blonde wigs were doing an approximation of a pole dance.
‘Ewan – my sergeant in Inverness – would be trying to remember the Public Order laws, to see what he could arrest them for.’
‘There’s worse to come,’ I assured him.
Gavin had mentioned last year that he’d never seen Up Helly A. Now, like most soothmoothers confronted with the awful reality of blue-movie cross-dressing that so many of the squads go for, he was finding it hard to take in. ‘Breach of the Peace covers most things. And there are no women at all?’
‘Against the rules for the Lerwick one,’ I said. ‘But they let women in the squads in the country.’
We’d watched the Viking procession in the morning, thirty-five men winding through the narrow streets of old Lerwick in a fine display of shining breastplates, swirling cloaks and upraised axes. It ended at the pier, where the squad clustered around their dragon-headed galley for photographs. The biting northerly wind had that tin smell that means snow. I’d huddled into my best ocean-going jacket while Gavin had taken photographs, then drawn him into the Peerie Shop Café for a drinking chocolate with cream on top, to warm up and gather strength for the long day and night to come.
The afternoon was spent in the Museum, which, naturally, had an Up Helly A themed exhibition, with an old Jarl suit of gleaming mail, costumes from the non-Viking squads, shields and a film from the 1930s of the burning galley. We’d eaten scallops in a creamy sauce at the Queen’s Hotel, on the waterfront, then headed up to the Hillhead, where the guizers assembled for the procession. I’d seen policeman crowd-control and safety thoughts going through his head as the torches were lit, and diverted him by pointing out the raven banner flying from the Town Hall. For today, the Vikings were in charge – although, given the ‘welcome’ they’d probably received on their round of schools, hospitals and businesses, it might be just as well if no major crime occurred.
By this time it was snowing, drifting Christmas-card flakes lit blood-red from underneath by a thousand flaming torches. The band up on the scaffolding was belting out the march, and the air smelled of paraffin. The Vikings led the procession, torchlight gleaming on their dragon shields and pointed helmets. They were followed by the lines of guizers: a squad of cowboys with white chaps and scarlet neckerchiefs, a reeling of teletubbies, a set of fair-isle jumpers with photographed councillor faces for masks, a menagerie of animals, including a kangaroo and a zebra, a shipload of sailors with a blonde mermaid in their midst … they passed and repassed, then went up and around to the park gates to form the circle of flickering light around the galley. The band struck up, and the wind whirled the singing voices to us: From grand old Viking centuries Up Helly A has come, So light the torch and sound the march and sound the rolling drum -
‘They do give him time to get out?’ Gavin asked, looking across at the dark figure of the Jarl in the centre of the flames.
The Jarl brandished his axe. ‘Three cheers for the galley makers … three cheers for Up Helly A!’ The answering yells rose to the sky. The Jarl climbed out of the galley, and the bugle sounded, then the guizers began to throw their torches. Soon the galley was blazing, the orange flames licking up the carved head, the writhing tail. The crowd began to disperse; Gavin moved closer to the park wall. ‘It was a bonny boat.’
‘It wouldn’t have sailed anyway,’ I consoled him. ‘It doesn’t have a bottom, where it sat on the galley. Right, now we change into party clothes and head for the hall.’ I glanced down at his kilt. ‘I can’t believe your knees aren’t blue with cold.’
‘A good plaid is warmer than a thin pair of trousers.’
We had a warm-up dram in the Lerwick hotel, and changed in the toilets. We were both looking our best when we met again in the lobby: he’d put on his scarlet dress tartan in honour of the night, with a black jacket with silver buttons, and a goat-beard sporran in place of the plain leather one. His russet hair was smoothed down with water, though I’d have taken a bet that it would be curling again as soon as it dried.
My sailing friends would hardly have recognised me. I’d done my best to hide the scar across my cheek with make-up. I’d undone my plait and brushed my dark hair into a curling cloud around my face, and the dark-sprigged dress Maman had bought me swirled around my ankles. I’d take the strappy sandals off for dancing; I didn’t want to spend February with a broken ankle.
We were early, so there was plenty of parking outside the Anderson, even with the coned-off area for turning buses. Gavin held his arm out formally as he opened the car door for me. I was glad of it, as already there was a good inch of snow spreading between us and the doorway, and I wasn’t used to walking in heels. We greeted our hosts and hostesses, and deposited our coats and drink in the cloakroom.
‘Do we just leave it here?’ Gavin said, looking at the carrier bag with his Laphroig, my bottles of Guiness and a glass each, left forlornly on the floor beneath his navy jacket and my scarlet one.
‘And come up for a drink when we want,’ I replied. ‘No drink’s allowed in the halls.’
‘I spotted a bottle being passed round in the procession.’
‘It’s a dry festival,’ I said, austerely, ‘but it just so happens that every suit has a half-bottle shaped pocket sewn in – or used to have, when all the costumes were made by a local seamstress. I don’t know what happens now they’re ordered by the dozen from e-bay.’
‘Now what?’ Gavin asked.
I motioned him back down the corridor to the assembly room. ‘We sit back and be entertained,’ I said. ‘All the guizers in the procession, well, they’re in groups, ‘squads’. They go round each hall and perform an act. It’s like a military exercise. There’s a list at the door of the order they go on in, and they have a list of what hall they should be at, at what time. They come in, do their act and a dance, then go to their next venue. There are – ‘ I consulted the programme I’d bought earlier - ’forty-seven squads, and it’ll last till eight tomorrow morning – eleven hours, that’s a squad every fifteen minutes.’
‘Good arithmetic,’ Gavin said gravely, ‘and almost correct.’ He leant over my shoulder. ‘Some of these squad names … ‘Springtime for Hitler and the Pope’ …’Headhunters’ – corporate I presume – ‘
‘I wouldn’t presume anything,’ I said, remembering the blacked-up squad I’d seen somewhere in the procession, with curly wigs, boned noses, fur bikinis and a jangling of seed necklaces. ‘Political correctness hasn’t made it to Up Helly A.’
‘Ladyboys of Lerwick?’ Gavin shook his head. ‘Ewan – my sergeant – is a member of the Free Kirk, and he had to phone in sick the day he was assigned to do duty for the Bangkok ones doing a concert in Inverness. He didn’t feel he could countenance such a thing.’
‘Good thing he’s not on duty here tonight,’ I said.
The Jarl Squad was first on, and they reprised the Up Helly A songs and marched about a bit, brandishing their axes. They were followed by a group dressed as the Olympic mascot, and there was running, jumping and a medals ceremony. After that, we got up to dance a Boston two-step. ‘You do it slightly differently up here,’ Gavin commented. He was a good dancer, holding me firmly enough to keep in step, without being encroaching.
Then the men in black macs came on. After them, an eightsome.
‘Can you dance this?’ Gavin asked, standing up.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but only if you let me lead. Trust me, we do it a lot differently.’
After that was something that I presumed was based on the Fifty Shades book, with a lot of brandishing of whips; then a dance routine by the menagerie; then a ‘Strip the Willow’. We were just getting up when the kangaroo appeared in front of me.
‘May I have the pleasure?’ it said, in one of those English public-school voices designed for pitching commands at the lower orders. It added, to Gavin, ‘Guizers have first pick tonight, old boy. Sorry about that – but I’ll bring her back in one piece.’
He turned out to be one of these people who grab you awkwardly, and can’t quite keep time with your feet. I got thumped twice by the half-bottle in his pouch. Furthermore, he kept bounding across the dance to talk to me. His name was Justin, he said, dodging the couple going down, he’d started off in tourism but now he was pretty important in the planning department, he stayed in a flat in King Harald Street, he’d only just completed his five-year residence qualification to be in a squad, and he was having an amazing night – then he started asking about me. I didn’t want him turning up on my Khalida, the 8m yacht I lived aboard, so I called myself Chantelle Leask, from Walls, working to Northlink Ferries. I was running out of lies by the third repetition of the dance.
‘In Inverness we only dance it once,’ Gavin said, when I finally got back to him.
‘Wimps.’
‘We do it faster though. Would you like a dram, or shall we investigate supper?’
The supper was magnificent. I had a plate o soup with two saat flesh bannocks, and was eyeing up the spread of fancies when another of the menagerie came up to us. His bear head was hanging down his back, and his movements unsteady, as if he’d had a dram too many already. He spoke straight to Gavin. ‘Du’s a policeman, is dat right? Wan o wir squad’s joost collapsed. We tink - weel, we tink he’s mebbe deed.’
* * * * *
‘Simple,’ Gavin said, the next evening. ‘He was poisoned by a bottle nobody could have carried, which then vanished into this air.’
We were back in ordinary clothes; he was in his green kilt and jacket, I was in jeans and jumper over several layers of sailing thermals, because even with the gas ring on and the washboards firmly closed, my Khalida was pretty cold. The steam from our mugs of coffee misted her long windows.
‘By someone in his squad,’ he added. ‘Everything’s closed, of course, so the lab’s not got back to us yet, but all the signs are for something he’d drunk in the last ten minutes – which means it had to be one of his squad, because they’d been standing in the entrance waiting for their bus, and passing half bottles around. The poison was in one of them.’
The lunchtime Radio Shetland news had announced that a man had been taken into custody, so I knew he was just having fun mystifying me.
‘Give me the suspects first,’ I said.
‘The dead man – Kevin, he was called – ‘could be difficult when he’d had a dram,’ one of them said. It seemed there’d been some sort of flare-up between him and one of the other men earlier in the evening, an older quarrel about a car Kevin had sold to the other man, Gibbie, which had broken down a few weeks later. Gibbie reckoned Kevin had known it was about to go.’
‘It doesn’t seem a great motive for murder.’
‘You’d be astonished,’ Gavin said seriously, ‘what someone unbalanced enough to commit murder would consider a reasonable motive. Gibbie – the zebra in the squad - had a reputation for being good with cars, and he felt Kevin had made a fool of him. The other one – well, the rest of the squad was keen to talk about this one. Justin the kangaroo, your dance partner for the Strip the Willow. He worked with Kevin, and it seemed that Kevin was given to making a bit of a fool of him, imitating him every time he mispronounced a Shetland name, which was pretty often. Word was, Kevin had the boss’s ear, and was going to try and get him ‘transferred’.’
‘The first thing he said, after his name,’ I recalled, ‘was how important he was in the planning office.’
‘A word against him could blight his career for the future. That’s a motive I like better, especially for someone bred to be the ruling class.’
‘You’re as bad as I am,’ I said, ‘taking against the poor bloke just because of his accent.’
‘I’m a Highlander,’ Gavin said. ‘Do you know what percentage of Scotland belongs to people from elsewhere?’
‘No Scot Nat stuff right now,’ I retorted. ‘Explain this bottle that nobody could have carried. Do you think the person poisoned his own bottle, then passed it to him to drink from?’
Gavin shook his head. ‘No. The first thing we did was take their bottles, for analysis. We had to check, but each had only one, and they’d been drinking from them while they waited, so I was sure the poison wasn’t in any of them. No, the killer brought a separate, prepared bottle – but each suit had only one, half-bottle sized pocket, so where did he carry it?’
‘He could have had the poisoned one in his pocket and his own in his hand,’ I suggested.
‘Could, but didn’t – they were all agreed that nobody had a bottle in hand while they did their act. And how did he dispose of it? The group are sure that none of them moved away from where they were waiting, and even if they were mistaken, the snow backs them up. Plenty of prints on the doorstep, bus tracks curving round, but no lone footsteps crossing the car park.’
I remembered the expanse of white, with the curve of bus tyres round to where the dead man lay. ‘I don’t suppose someone could have walked in the bus tracks?’
‘They didn’t,’ Gavin stated, ‘nor did they leave it in the bins in the doorway. And a squad of men searched all the car-park, within throwing distance. Nothing.’
He left a pause while I tried to work that one out.
‘Then,’ he finished, ‘I remembered the playing fields of Eton.’
‘Ah,’ I said, light dawning. ‘Did public schoolboy Justin’s suit have a bottle pocket as well?’
‘They all did. According to the seamstress, it’s standard for an Up Helly A suit.’
‘Then he’s your murderer,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the bruises where his other bottle hit me – it was in his kangaroo pouch. As for getting rid of it … go on, then, tell me how far out of the Anderson car park a good cricket player managed to throw a half-bottle.’