Thin Air: (Shetland book 6)

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Does this mean she was killed elsewhere and carried here? That the blood dried into the fabric before she was placed in the loch?’ If so, why? Because the place had a special significance? To make Eleanor look perfect?

  ‘Dragged rather than carried.’ Vicki’s words were muffled by her mask. She pointed to where the heather had been flattened in places, the stalks snapped. ‘Not conclusive of course, because the vegetation damage could have been caused by walkers in heavy boots any time in the last couple of weeks, but it’s possible, don’t you think? Dragging would explain the grass stains on the back of the dress. And I don’t think she was murdered very far away. I didn’t see any damage to the vegetation near the stile.’ She began moving in slow sweeps, bent almost double, parting the bog grasses and heather with her gloved hands. She stopped where the grass was shorter, cropped by sheep, then bent again and picked up an object so small that Willow couldn’t make it out, and slipped it into an evidence bag.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Not sure yet. Wait a minute.’ Vicki continued her fingertip search and crouched again to slide a scrap into a different bag.

  Willow was wearing overshoes, but she waited where she was until Vicki called to her. Here they were close to the edge of the cliff and the noise of breaking waves and the onshore breeze were suddenly exhilarating. There was sea pink and blue squill. Vicki laid the bags on the palm of her hand so that Willow could look inside.

  ‘Torn scraps of paper.’ Willow was disappointed. ‘Could be anything.’

  ‘Not ordinary litter,’ Vicki said. ‘Not sweet paper or crisp packet. And anyway, why tear them into pieces?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘It’s stiff, shiny. My guess is it was a photo.’

  Willow thought about that. Who printed out photos these days? People took digital pictures and then posted them on Facebook or Twitter. ‘So somebody up here tore up a photo. A fit of rage perhaps? It would be good if we could find the rest of it.’

  Vicki laughed. ‘With this breeze the rest will be halfway to Norway by now. These pieces were caught in the longer grass.’

  Close to the cliff edge, stones – round and smoothed by the water – had been thrown up by violent storms. Some were as big as a small child, too heavy almost for a man to lift, yet during gales the tide had tossed them like marbles from the shore below. ‘One of those could be your murder weapon.’ Vicki stretched her hands above her head and then rubbed her aching back. ‘Though if I was the killer I’d have thrown it back over the cliff, once I was done.’

  ‘Not premeditated then.’ Willow was talking almost to herself. ‘The killer didn’t bring a weapon with them.’

  ‘Unless they knew these rocks were here and arranged the meeting. And the victim would have been walking away. Or turned away. This wasn’t self-defence or a scrap that got out of hand.’

  Willow couldn’t imagine the immaculate Eleanor in a catfight. ‘Would there have been blood on the killer’s clothing? We’ve bagged what her friends were wearing that night and sent it south. No results yet.’

  ‘Not from the original blow perhaps, but it’d be hard to avoid it if you were dragging the body and then arranging it.’ Vicki frowned. ‘I’ll collect some samples of heather. I’d hope to find small traces of blood on the grass too, especially if the killer dragged Eleanor by her feet, in the hope of keeping themselves clean. And you’d expect the shoes and socks to be wet. You couldn’t place the body so accurately without getting into the loch.’

  ‘Unless the killer went barefoot too.’ Willow paused. ‘Sandy did a quick search of the area yesterday.’

  Vicki snorted. ‘Have you ever known a man search properly for anything? My husband’s hopeless. A quick look then it’s “Vicki, what have you done with my football kit?” and, like a mug, I find it for him because it’s easier than getting him to do it for himself.’

  ‘You think they’ll be somewhere here then?’ Willow hadn’t known that Vicki Hewitt had a husband and was distracted for a moment, wondering if there were children too.

  ‘It’s possible.’ Vicki was already bent double again, feeling among the boulders with gloved hands. Then she was lying flat on her stomach reaching into the holes in the sandy soil close to the cliff edge. But she found nothing and stood up and stretched again.

  Willow wondered what her husband did for a living, if he didn’t mind these strange call-outs to crime scenes. She herself had never found a man prepared to put up with the frequent and sudden disappearances.

  ‘I’d get a search team in to look properly,’ Vicki said, ‘but if the killer had any sense the shoes would be at the bottom of the cliff and swept away by the tide by now.’ She walked to the edge of the cordon and began to take off her paper suit, pushing her mask from her face so that she could talk properly.

  ‘So the killer didn’t panic,’ Willow said. Out at sea a trawler was pitching and tipping over the waves. She felt slightly nauseous watching it. ‘They didn’t hit Eleanor over the head in a blind rage and run away. They threw the murder weapon, the cloak that she was last seen wearing and the sandals into the sea. And perhaps they tore up a photograph and scattered the pieces in the wind. Then they walked back to the road as if nothing had happened. It would have been early in the morning and already light.’

  ‘How did the phone get to the hill by the hall?’ Vicki was packing up now and had started walking down the hill with the big silver box in which she kept her equipment.

  ‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t left there to throw us off track. The murderer wanted the body found. Otherwise why not tip Eleanor over the cliff with everything else? If the body had been discovered on the boulder beach at the bottom of the headland we’d probably have put it down to an accident. She’d been drinking, after all. There were lots of witnesses to that. One head wound wouldn’t show up among the others, and nobody would survive that fall.’ Willow thought it would have been no further to drag the body to the cliff edge than to the loch. And it would have been easier because the grass there was so much shorter.

  ‘Perhaps Eleanor had dropped the phone earlier in the evening?’ Vicki turned to wait for Willow at the stile.

  ‘But someone sent that email at two o’clock in the morning. What was Eleanor doing wandering around in the early hours? And why go from the stone enclosure near the hall and then walk in the opposite direction to the loch? Too many questions and nothing that makes sense.’ Again Willow thought that there’d been a meeting here. It had been planned. She tried to imagine the scene. The strange half-light of early morning, Eleanor waiting, shivering perhaps, wrapping her cloak around her party clothes to keep warm. Had she dozed? Been surprised in the end by the visitor for whom she’d been waiting? Or had the murderer moved silently over the grass like one of Eleanor’s ghosts and killed the woman without warning?

  Later, on her way into the grand entrance hall of Springfield House, Willow bumped into Perez. ‘How did you get on with the Malcolmsons?’

  ‘It was interesting . . .’ He paused, shot a glance behind him and only then did she see Ian Longstaff waiting for them in the shadows of the hall. ‘But I’ll explain later.’

  They sat in the yellow room with its flashes of sunshine. Willow asked Perez to lead the interview; he’d already formed a relationship with the man and she could tell that Longstaff viewed her with distrust. Most of the women he knew worked in the media and were fashionable, well groomed and neurotic. They didn’t have unmanageable hair or charity-shop clothes. She settled carefully on a low spindly chair out of his line of view.

  ‘I understand that this must be difficult for you,’ Perez said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You understand nothing!’ Longstaff leaned forward. ‘I loved Eleanor from the moment I saw her. I might as well be dead myself.’

  There was a silence. Willow became aware of sounds outside the room. Curlews on the hill. The inevitable sheep. Inside, the tension became so uncomfortable that she wondered if she should intervene. Perez
was an intensely private man and wouldn’t explain that the love of his life had been murdered too. She couldn’t do that, but she might ask a harmless question while Perez recovered his composure. In the end she waited. It wasn’t her place to interfere.

  ‘Of course,’ Perez said at last, ‘it’s the guilt that’s the hardest thing. The idea that you might have done something different. The rerunning of various scenarios in your head.’

  Another silence before Longstaff nodded. ‘I should have gone outside to fetch her in, that night after the party. I should have protected her.’

  ‘Did she need protecting? Were you aware that she might be in danger? She worked in the media, and high-profile people can attract unwanted notice.’ Perez’s voice was so low that Willow had to listen carefully to make out the words. ‘You’re a sound engineer and you work in the same business. You’ll understand that.’

  ‘You think she had a stalker?’ Longstaff looked up at him sharply. ‘No, there was nothing of that sort. She never appeared on television herself. And she would have told me if she was getting any hassle.’

  ‘This project she was working on – the project that seemed to trigger the . . .’ Perez hesitated and seemed to be searching for the right word, ‘disagreement between you, when you were drinking with your friends after the wedding party. Can you tell me a little about that? Were you working on it too, on the sound?’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been a role for me yet,’ Longstaff said. ‘The show was still in pre-production. Eleanor had decided on a scriptwriter, but she wasn’t sure exactly what form the broadcast should take yet. She was researching stories. Intelligent, rational people who were convinced they’d seen a ghost. She said she didn’t want an hour full of weirdos and loonies.’

  ‘And she’d heard the story of Peerie Lizzie.’ Perez was looking down at the water from the small window by his side, as if he expected to see the ghost of the child rising up from the sea. ‘A girl who grew up in this house in the 1920s, who was drowned in a high tide and who comes back to haunt the childless.’ And drunk young men.

  Longstaff waited a beat before replying. ‘Is that the story? That only the childless see her? Eleanor didn’t tell me that.’ Another beat. ‘Or perhaps she did, but I wasn’t listening. I’d begun to lose patience with her. That seems cruel now – cruel and wasteful. I’d give anything to have her back and prattling about her favourite projects.’

  ‘There are lots of stories.’ Perez gave a smile and turned slightly to include Willow. ‘That’s the way of ghosts.’

  ‘I’ve never believed in the supernatural,’ Longstaff said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I can see why people might want to believe. We’re grateful for anything that might maintain that contact.’

  ‘Had Eleanor been in touch with anyone here in Unst about Peerie Lizzie? Had she arranged to meet someone who claimed to have seen the ghost?’

  Longstaff shrugged. ‘She probably talked to Lowrie about it. They’re old friends from her uni days. He’d be a good local contact.’

  ‘Had she met Lowrie to discuss it? In London perhaps, when the project was still in its initial phase?’

  Willow wondered where Perez was going with this. Perhaps he thought Lowrie was the man with whom Eleanor had been seen in the restaurant. But surely Caroline would have recognized her lover, even from the back in a crowded bar?

  ‘I don’t know.’ Longstaff’s original impatience had returned. ‘And I don’t know how these questions will help us find out who killed Eleanor.’ He had his legs crossed and one foot was twitching, tapping the polished wooden floor in a strange Morse code.

  Perez seemed unbothered by the noise, which had set Willow’s nerves jangling, or by the man’s words. ‘Because I understand that Eleanor and Lowrie were very close when they were at university. They had a relationship, didn’t they? So perhaps it would be natural for her to go to him with her questions.’

  Longstaff gave a harsh little laugh. ‘Nell had lots of relationships when she was at university. The way she tells it, she worked her way through the whole dramatic society. Lowrie might have thought they had a special thing going, but from her point of view he was just another recreational shag.’ He paused. ‘I still don’t understand how this will help us find her killer.’

  The foot began tapping again.

  ‘I’m sorry to press the point,’ Perez said, ‘but it’s important to find out if Eleanor had made any local contacts – someone she might have arranged to meet, perhaps on the night of her death.’

  ‘She wasn’t crazy enough to go wandering around in the early hours of the morning to meet a total stranger!’

  ‘Really?’ Perez gave that smile again. ‘Most of us think of Shetland as a safe place. We leave our doors open and we feel happy to go out alone at night.’

  ‘One of you killed her!’

  ‘Really?’ The question repeated itself like the chorus of a song. ‘Most homicides in the UK are committed by people we know. Much more likely, I’d think, that she was murdered by one of her friends.’

  Longstaff looked up sharply, but didn’t answer. They sat for a moment staring at each other in silence.

  The interview over, the three of them stood outside Springfield House. The breeze tugged at Willow’s hair, until she pulled it out of her eyes and her mouth and tied it in a knot at the back of her head.

  ‘I don’t believe any of her friends killed her.’ It was clear that Ian Longstaff had been thinking about Perez’s last comment, and the words came out without warning. ‘They adored her.’

  Neither of the detectives answered him. They watched him climb into his large car and drive away.

  They ate that night in the kitchen, while the B&B guests sat in the dining room. Charles’s partner David had arrived back from Lerwick with fish from the Blydoit shop and he cooked scallops, quickly seared while they waited at the table, and followed it with a rich lamb stew. He was an intense man, very quiet and dignified. He’d taught classics in a provincial university and Willow wondered what had brought the pair together; the scholar and the stage magician seemed to have little in common. He left the casserole on the middle of the table so that they could help themselves. There was a home-made loaf and Shetland butter to complete the meal.

  ‘The bread’s Grusche Malcolmson’s,’ he said, on his way out of the room, unwilling to claim credit for another person’s work. ‘She does all our baking.’ He paused. ‘If anyone asks, you’re our family. We’re not supposed to have guests in the kitchen. Health regulations.’ He gave another tight smile.

  Willow gave an absent-minded nod, but she was preoccupied. Grusche was the mother of the bridegroom at the hamefarin’. Another witness. Another possible suspect. In these islands there were too many connections. It would be just the same at home in the Western Isles.

  ‘So, Sandy.’ She looked at the young man over the table. ‘You got Eleanor’s body onto the ferry for James Grieve. Do you have any other news for us?’

  He looked like a schoolboy asked to stand up in front of the class to show what he’d learned, uncertain and flushed. ‘Just confirmation of what Eleanor’s friends told us. I checked with the ferry terminal and they were booked on the boat on Friday night. Two executive cabins and two cars. None of them has a criminal record. I’ve got details of her next of kin and her work colleagues. Her mother, Cilla, was informed of Eleanor’s death yesterday. She’s expecting Jimmy to visit. She’ll be at home, not at work.’ He paused for breath and looked up from the stew.

  Willow wondered if it would be patronizing to tell him that he’d done very well and resisted the impulse. ‘And you, Jimmy? Did you get anything new from Lowrie’s mother and father?’

  There was a moment’s pause. ‘Lowrie was in love with our victim when he was a student. A grand passion, apparently. He came home one holiday threatening to leave university, and his parents even worried that he might kill himself.’

  ‘A young man being melodramatic, do you t
hink? Or is it still significant after all this time?’ Willow thought she must have been a cold and heartless girl herself, for she couldn’t remember having lost sleep over a man. There were men she’d fancied and had enjoyed being with, but after a few months she’d grown impatient with them all, had made an excuse and moved on.

  Perez shrugged. ‘Maybe it says more about Eleanor. Perhaps she enjoyed provoking that sort of reaction.’

  ‘So if she was having an affair,’ Willow said, ‘it had less to do with needing comfort after the miscarriage than with putting some excitement and danger into her life.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He considered the idea. ‘Or needing to be loved. When I’ve spoken to her family and her friends in London I might have more idea what was going on.’ He paused. ‘Do you think it might be worth trying to trace this child that Eleanor saw on the beach the afternoon she died, and that Polly saw at the party?’

  ‘Are you believing in ghosts now too, Jimmy?’ Willow kept her voice light. She hoped he wasn’t going all flaky on her.

  ‘I wondered if she might be a possible witness,’ he replied. ‘If Eleanor wandered out to look for her.’

  ‘Good point.’ She nodded towards Sandy. ‘Will you look into that while Jimmy’s on his jaunt to the south? See if you can track down Peerie Lizzie for us.’

  She’d meant it as a joke, but she noticed that Jimmy didn’t laugh.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Polly had never dealt well with stress. Sometimes she felt fragile, like one of her mother’s favourite porcelain vases, as if it would only take a loud noise or an unintentional jolt for her to crack, or to topple and smash into pieces. She’d never been to see a doctor about her anxiety and had rather admired Eleanor for having submitted to treatment, even for a short while. There seemed such a stigma to a psychiatric hospital, even the private places full of celebrities struggling with addiction.