Thin Air: (Shetland book 6)

by Ann Cleeves

  Perez was just about to ask the woman about her work when Willow put the question for him, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘What do you do for a living, Ms Gilmour?’

  ‘I’m a librarian, with a special interest in British myths and customs. I work for the UK Folklore Society. They have a library in Hampstead that is open to the public and I run it for them.’ Her voice was suddenly enthusiastic. ‘I was assistant librarian in a busy public branch for a while, but that didn’t suit me nearly so well.’ She gave a little self-deprecating smile, so that Perez caught a glimpse of what Eleanor might have seen in her. She did have a sense of humour after all. ‘I’m much better at stories than I am with people. It’s my dream job.’

  ‘Perhaps Eleanor consulted you then. About her ghosts.’

  ‘Not really. I told her about Peerie Lizzie when we decided that we’d come up for the hamefarin’. That was when she explained that her company had been commissioned to produce a documentary about people who claimed to have experienced the supernatural. I offered to look out some material for her, but by then her staff had already made their contacts. It was clear she was more interested in contemporary sightings than in the origins of the stories.’ Polly looked up and smiled. ‘Eleanor never had the patience for detailed research.’

  The room fell silent. Outside there was the call of an oystercatcher in the distance. Willow looked at Perez to see if he had any questions.

  ‘Do you know if Eleanor had an affair recently?’ As soon as the words were spoken he thought that he should have been more tactful. Half his mind was on Cassie still, wondering if it would seem odd if he phoned the school to check that she’d arrived there safely. Polly blinked at him as if he’d slapped her.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t.’

  He wondered again at the uneven relationship between the women. Polly’s attitude felt more like hero-worship than a friendship between equals. But perhaps that was always the way in a relationship – one person was always more dependent than the other.

  ‘She had moral qualms about sex outside marriage?’

  She stared at him. ‘We never discussed it in those terms.’

  ‘You think such a thing would have been impossible for her?’

  ‘No,’ Polly said at last. ‘I don’t suppose it would. She didn’t have moral qualms about anything much. But she would have told me about it. We didn’t have secrets. Not about a big thing like that.’

  ‘When was the last time the two of you met alone?’ Perez wished he’d seen the two women together when Eleanor was alive. He remembered Fran with her friends in London and in the islands. She’d been easy and relaxed with them all. They’d laughed and drunk too much wine and gossiped, and he was struggling to imagine this woman behaving like that. But perhaps Polly was strained because she was grieving, and he thought again that he was being unfair to her.

  ‘Thursday evening. The day before we left London.’ Polly looked up at him. ‘It was to check last-minute details for the trip. Eleanor met me from the library and we walked back to my flat. I cooked her supper and we talked through the final arrangements.’

  ‘How was she then?’

  ‘Fine.’ The answer came too quickly and he waited for her to continue. ‘Really fine. Excited. About work – this documentary that she was making. It was a big deal for her company. A new departure. More popular than the stuff she’d made before, and if everything worked out it would be shown on BBC1. She was fizzing. More excited than I’d seen her for years. I thought that she’d finally moved on after losing the baby.’

  ‘But she didn’t talk about a new man in her life?’

  Polly shook her head. ‘I don’t know where that idea has come from. Have you been talking to Cilla? She never thought that Eleanor’s marriage would last. She’s an intellectual snob and Ian was never good enough.’

  ‘Cilla is Eleanor’s mother?’

  ‘Yes, she’s an art historian. She works for the British Museum. Very grand. A character.’ She paused and Perez wondered if Cilla had considered that Polly wasn’t quite good enough for her daughter too.

  Later they were eating lunch in the kitchen of Springfield House. James Grieve had been fretting all morning about missing his flight and had already left. Sandy had gone with him to collect Vicki Hewitt, the CSI, so again it was just Perez and Willow Reeves sitting across a table, sharing food. Perez felt comfortable working with her, but ambiguous about the effect she had on him. Another woman in his life, even if she were a colleague, felt like a kind of betrayal to Fran. And Willow was tall and big-boned with tangled hair and scruffy clothes. Her parents were hippies living in a commune in North Uist. He’d never met anyone quite like her before.

  ‘So what do we think?’ Willow leaned forward across the table. They were eating lentil soup and home-baked bannocks. ‘It must be one of the three friends, mustn’t it? None of the locals would have met Eleanor Longstaff except at the wedding party. They’d certainly have no reason to kill her.’ She dipped the corner of a bannock into the soup and reconsidered. ‘We need to check the alibis of the Malcolmsons, of course. They’ve known her for years too. So our murderer must be one of those five.’

  ‘Don’t we have to be sure that Eleanor hadn’t been in touch with anyone here?’ Perez spoke slowly. ‘I know it’s unlikely, but if she’d started work on that ghost programme, she might have contacted people who’d claimed to see Peerie Lizzie. It’s even possible that she set up a meeting with them.’

  ‘At two o’clock in the morning? And then pissed them off to the extent that they’d decided to kill her?’ Willow was scornful.

  ‘It’s unlikely, I know, but it would be interesting, don’t you think, if Eleanor had been talking to islanders and hadn’t told her husband or her friends.’

  There was a moment of silence. Charles Hillier wandered through and offered cheese and fruit. When he’d bought the big house with his partner there’d been rumours. Not just about a gay couple taking on the place, but something else. Perez struggled to remember the details. Something about a celebrity past?

  Charles lingered close to the table and then seemed to realize he was intruding: ‘Just help yourselves. I’ll make myself scarce. David’s in Lerwick all day, so he won’t disturb you, and I’ve told the guests that the morning room’s out of bounds. They know better than to come into the kitchen. Health-and-safety regs. A nightmare!’ He hesitated for a minute as if he was hoping they’d include him in the conversation, but when they only smiled at him he disappeared.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ Willow cut a large slice of cheese. ‘Sandy will be tied up for most of the day with Vicki, and I’d like to be at the scene when the body’s removed.’

  She was being thoughtful, Perez decided, keeping him away from the crime scene because he might be distressed by another sight of the body, but he made no comment. He was past the stage when he railed against people who were being kind. ‘Do you want me to talk to the Malcolmsons – Lowrie’s folk – this afternoon?’

  ‘Please.’ A pause. ‘And someone should go to London to see Eleanor’s mother and her colleagues. If Eleanor was having an affair with someone at work, I bet one of them will know. I’d ask you to go, but I understand that’s tricky because of Cassie.’

  ‘It’s not necessarily a problem.’ And immediately his head was full of plans. He found himself strangely excited about a trip south. ‘It might even work out well. Cass can come with me and stay with Fran’s parents. They’d love to see her. They miss her.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy Perez, I didn’t know you were so keen to run away from me.’ She smiled to show that it was a joke, but still he felt awkward, as if he might have offended her.

  It seemed that Lowrie and Caroline had taken the ferries into Lerwick, just as Hillier’s partner David had done, but Perez left a message with them to contact him when they returned. Then he tracked down Charles, who was mending a dripp
ing tap in one of the grand bathrooms upstairs.

  ‘Any chance I could use your PC?’

  Charles showed him into the office and switched on the computer so that Perez could book his flights to London online. The screensaver was a photo of Charles onstage dressed in Victorian costume, brandishing a big saw and heading towards a barrel with a beautiful blonde inside.

  ‘Of course, you were a famous magician!’ Vague memories of watching a television show with his parents came back to Perez. His father had loved it, but Perez had found the old-fashioned showmanship embarrassing. ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Not now. By the time I retired it was all about being disappointed. Driving miles to an audition, only to be told that the act was outdated. Days of being scared to leave the house in case my agent called. And there’s only so many ways of cutting a woman in half and making a rabbit disappear. It was time for me to give up, before all the money ran out, and let the young men take over with all that Houdini stuff. I’m too much of a coward to go in for that. Must admit that I’m enjoying this bit of melodrama, though. A bit of excitement in our dull and dreary lives, and it’s not as if I knew the poor woman.’

  ‘What brought you to Shetland?’

  Charles looked up. ‘David. He’s always been an outdoors nut and he’s been visiting this place since he was a kid. He supported me throughout my stage career. Now it was my turn. I love it. Buying this place and moving north was the best thing we ever did, though it’s certainly been more work than I’d imagined.’

  Charles went back to the dripping tap, and Perez phoned Fran’s parents from the office landline. Fran’s mother answered the phone.

  ‘How exciting! Of course Cassie can stay, Jimmy. And you too. It’d be great to catch up.’

  He said that the offer was very kind, but he’d be working and needed to stay closer to the centre of town. The couple had never said anything, but he suspected they blamed him at some level for Fran’s murder. If he hadn’t dragged their daughter to Fair Isle the previous autumn, then she’d still be alive. He liked them well enough, but felt awkward in their company. The guilt that he managed to keep at the back of his mind when he was working took over all his thoughts when he was with them. He booked himself a hotel close to Eleanor’s office in King’s Cross for the following night and went out onto the island.

  It was a breezy day with a gusty wind blowing little clouds across the sun and the water in the voe into white-topped waves. On his way to the Malcolmsons’ croft Perez ran through what he knew of Lowrie’s parents. George had been one of the last lightkeepers at Muckle Flugga before it was automated. Perez remembered that time in the mid-Nineties. There’d been a photo of George and his colleagues, all very smart in their uniforms, in The Shetland Times, accompanied by tales of his life on the rock. Perez had been still at school in Lerwick then and he’d been very taken with the stories. George had moved onto his father’s croft when he lost his work with the Northern Lighthouse Board. His wife Grusche was a German woman who’d come to cook in the work camps when the oil was first discovered. They’d met at a dance when George was on shore leave, and gossip had it that he married her because she didn’t mind being alone when he was away at the light. He’d had other girlfriends, but they’d all wanted him to give up his work.

  Perez knew Grusche better than her husband. She’d signed up to one of the art evening classes that Fran had run and the women had become friends. Occasionally Grusche had stopped overnight with them in Ravenswick, if she’d been in Lerwick for a film or a concert and had missed the ferries back to Unst. She’d just retired as cook at the island school, and she baked for Springfield House. Perez knew all these facts without having to check them. In the islands such domestic histories were known by everyone.

  When Perez arrived the Malcolmsons were in the kitchen. Grusche was making bread, kneading the dough on a board on the table. She was a tall woman, with strong features, striking rather than attractive. She saw him as he passed the window and waved him to come in.

  ‘Caroline said that you were here,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it’s you looking after this business, Jimmy.’ Her accent was German mixed with North Isles Shetland. She turned to her husband, who was in a low chair by the range, half-asleep. ‘This is Jimmy Perez, Fran’s man. I told you about him.’ She paused. ‘George didn’t get much rest last night. He and the bairns were up most of the night talking about what had happened.’

  Perez wondered what Lowrie and Caroline would make of being described as bairns. He held out a hand to George, who half-rose in his seat to take it. ‘I need to ask some questions. Intrusive questions. You understand.’

  ‘Of course, Jimmy. That’s the work that you do. Just give me a moment.’ She rolled the dough into a ball, lifted it into a cream china bowl and covered it with a clean tea towel, before setting it on the Rayburn. He wondered if she always answered for the two of them. ‘Do you want tea, or are you swimming in it?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He sat with her at the table.

  She smiled. ‘So, drowning in tea already, Jimmy. The Shetland way.’

  ‘How well did you both know Eleanor Longstaff?’

  ‘We’d met her a few times.’ Grusche still seemed to do the talking for them both. ‘In Durham, when Lowrie was there. And more recently when they were all living in London. They were good friends, I think. They were all at Lowrie’s wedding in Kent a few weeks ago and Eleanor was one of the bridesmaids. Such a bonny young woman. She almost stole the show.’

  ‘What made your son decide on an English university?’ For many Shetlanders Glasgow or Stirling seemed enough of an adventure.

  ‘Me!’ She grinned. ‘I’d always brought him up to believe that there was a big wide world out there for him to explore. And I’m ambitious for my son. You know these women with only children, Jimmy – how ferocious we are on their behalf! I’d planned for him to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but he thought he might be out of his depth there. Durham was a compromise.’

  And George? Perez wondered. What did he make of having his only son so far away?

  ‘What did you think of Eleanor Longstaff?’

  ‘I liked her! She was full of fun, a performer. One of those people who are always acting. Entertaining. I enjoyed talking to her about art and politics.’ She paused. ‘But I was glad when Lowrie went for Caroline.’ Another pause. ‘Some people are like a rich chocolate cake, don’t you think, Jimmy? You’d only enjoy them in small mouthfuls. I could never imagine Eleanor setting up home in Unst.’

  ‘But you think Lowrie and Caroline will come back?’

  ‘Maybe. We’d like that, wouldn’t we, George?’

  The man smiled from his chair. ‘Yes, it’d be good to see our grand-bairns growing up. And to have some help on the croft.’

  ‘We could make no assumptions about either of those things.’ Grusche’s voice was sharp. ‘Not about children, or what Lowrie and Caroline would do when they were here. But I missed him when he left home and it would be wonderful to see him back.’

  ‘Was there ever a possibility that Lowrie would settle with Eleanor then? Did he go out with her?’ Perez hadn’t been told about that. Did it mean the English people were keeping information from him? Or had it happened so long ago – a brief student fling – that they’d forgotten about it? Perhaps Shetlanders had longer memories than other folk.

  Grusche shrugged. ‘He went out with Eleanor a couple of times. She was an attractive woman.’

  George stood up and leaned his back against the range. ‘Yon woman broke his heart,’ he said. ‘We need to be honest with Jimmy. He’ll find out these things anyway. It’s impossible to keep a thing like that hidden.’

  ‘Lowrie was nineteen,’ Grusche said. ‘A boy. Away from home for the first time. It’s not surprising that he took rejection so seriously.’

  ‘But he came home threatening to leave the university,’ George said. ‘You even thought he might kill himself! You called her a witch.’

  ‘I was overreac
ting,’ Grusche said. ‘And so was he. He found Caroline, who is sensible and not given to games.’

  ‘But that was the sort of woman Eleanor was, Jimmy.’ It seemed to Perez that George thought carefully about every word before he spoke it, that he was trying to convey a special message hidden behind the words. ‘She was a generous person and warm and funny. But she wasn’t very kind. She wasn’t aware of anyone’s pleasure but her own, and she was always after excitement.’

  Perez looked at the man. He thought George had been brooding about all this since Eleanor Longstaff’s body had been discovered. ‘Is there anything else you think I should know?’

  The man hesitated and then he shook his head. ‘No. But when I heard that someone had killed her, I wasn’t surprised.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Willow Reeves watched the hearse from Lerwick drive away with the body, past Sletts, until it disappeared behind the Meoness community hall, where two days ago the victim had been dancing. From this distance the vehicle looked like a shiny beetle, and sunlight bounced from its black paint. Eleanor Longstaff would be in the boat south tonight and in Dr Grieve’s Aberdeen mortuary tomorrow.

  She turned to look at Vicki Hewitt at work. So far the crime-scene manager had found little to excite her close to where Eleanor’s body had been lying. The ground was too dry for footwear marks and the heather grew right to the edge of the loch. No mud or sand. When they’d lifted the woman from the water they’d seen the blow to the head, just as James Grieve had predicted. There’d been bloodstains on the back of the expensive silk dress; spatters that had remained even though the body had been underwater for some time and the material was soaking. And there were other marks that might have been grass or soil.