The Midhowe Letter
(2026)(The eighth book in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series)
A Story by Phillip Strang
Eighty-eight years after Tormod Craigie walked into the sea, his great-niece flew from Manitoba to ask why the family had never spoken his name.
A Canadian woman is found at the foot of the cliffs below the Midhowe broch on a Friday afternoon in late spring. The post-mortem finds a single blow to the back of the skull before she went over. A spanner, the pathologist thinks. Something close to it.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch knows the cliffs and the broch and the slope above. She does not know the woman.
What Margaret Craigie carried back to Rousay was a sympathy letter from her grandfather's papers, written in 1928 by a neighbour who had seen Tormod walking the western shore on the sixteenth of November. The constable's record gave the disappearance as the thirteenth. One of those dates is wrong, and the difference matters: it places a man in the right field at the right time to have moved a boundary stone the Land Settlement Act had just walked across his neighbour's land.
The letter is missing from Margaret's cottage. Janet Inkster, retired schoolteacher, has been writing to her for nearly a year. She poured the tea on the Wednesday afternoon. She has lived in one place her whole life, and on Rousay an Inkster has farmed the croft above the broch for four generations.
Freya has known the Inkster family all her life. That is the problem.
The Midhowe Letteris the eighth Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery — patient, quiet, and steeped in the weight of a small island family carrying a hundred years of silence across two continents.
Genre: Mystery
A Canadian woman is found at the foot of the cliffs below the Midhowe broch on a Friday afternoon in late spring. The post-mortem finds a single blow to the back of the skull before she went over. A spanner, the pathologist thinks. Something close to it.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch knows the cliffs and the broch and the slope above. She does not know the woman.
What Margaret Craigie carried back to Rousay was a sympathy letter from her grandfather's papers, written in 1928 by a neighbour who had seen Tormod walking the western shore on the sixteenth of November. The constable's record gave the disappearance as the thirteenth. One of those dates is wrong, and the difference matters: it places a man in the right field at the right time to have moved a boundary stone the Land Settlement Act had just walked across his neighbour's land.
The letter is missing from Margaret's cottage. Janet Inkster, retired schoolteacher, has been writing to her for nearly a year. She poured the tea on the Wednesday afternoon. She has lived in one place her whole life, and on Rousay an Inkster has farmed the croft above the broch for four generations.
Freya has known the Inkster family all her life. That is the problem.
The Midhowe Letteris the eighth Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery — patient, quiet, and steeped in the weight of a small island family carrying a hundred years of silence across two continents.
Genre: Mystery