Martinmas

Martinmas is the fourth instalment of 1588: A Calendar of Crime, a collection of short stories published in step with the sixteenth century calendar. In St Salvator's college at the start of the academic year a young student claims that he has seen the ghost of a Spanish soldier. Giles and Hew dismiss this as the fevered product of a wild imagination; the students are unsettled by a spate of violent storms, and fears of the apocalypse readily resurge. In the close confines of college, they can be contained. But when a merchant dies, on the feast of St Martin known as 'killing time', with the words 'dead Spaniard' the last upon his lips, the terror of the students spills out to the streets, and Hew is called upon to rid the town of ghosts.

Shirley McKay was born in Tynemouth but now lives with her family in Fife. At the age of fifteen she won the Young Observer playwriting competition, her play being performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. She went on to study English and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews before attending Durham University for postgraduate study in Romantic and Seventeenth-Century prose. She was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. Shirley works as a freelance proofreader.