Thin Air: (Shetland book 6)

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘I might go out for a walk,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t settle to anything.’ She hoped to provoke the same reaction as she had when she’d gone out alone before. Don’t be stupid, there’s a killer out there. Wait until I’ve finished this and I’ll come out with you.

  But he just looked up briefly from the screen. ‘OK. Take care.’ It was as if he was so wrapped up in his work that he’d forgotten about Eleanor’s death altogether and seemed to have no sense of danger.

  It was the first time Marcus had made her angry. Previously he’d always been so solicitous and she couldn’t see what could be so important on the screen. There was a brief flash of jealousy as she even wondered if there was an email from another woman that was holding his attention; perhaps that was why he seemed so engrossed, the reason for the self-satisfied smile. She picked up her jacket and went outside. There was a chill that she hadn’t been expecting and she was tempted to return immediately into the warm. But she could be stubborn too and instead she walked back down the track towards the old croft house. The garden was overgrown, but the grass on the way to the front door had been trampled. There was no other sign of life. No smoke from the chimney this time. No face at the window. She knocked. The paint on the door was peeling and came off in blue specks on her fist. No answer. The door wasn’t locked – there might have been a bolt inside, but there wasn’t a hole for the key. She pushed it and was surprised at how easily it opened.

  ‘Hello!’ But she knew nobody could be living here. From the faint light coming from the open door she saw that the place wasn’t habitable. Ahead of her was what had once been a tiny scullery. A bench with an enamel bowl standing on it. To the right the room where she’d imagined having seen the girl dancing in the candlelight. A beaten-earth floor. In one corner a small stove. She opened it and saw that there were blocks of peat inside, but the stove was cold and she couldn’t decide if any of it had been burned. She walked to the window and thought that perhaps the dust had been disturbed on the sill and there was a drop of candle wax.

  Looking in at her was a face. Pale and blurred by the dirt on the glass and the gloom of the fog. She screamed. The face disappeared, there were footsteps on the scullery floor and a man appeared in the doorway.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He was middle-aged and his grey hair was too long and stuck up at the front, giving him a faintly clownish appearance. Something about the silhouette he presented, the angular body and that ridiculous hair were familiar.

  ‘I was just looking,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought the house was derelict.’ Apology and politeness had always been her default positions.

  ‘Oh, nobody lives here.’ She realized now that he was English. He stepped further into the room and she backed away from him. ‘Who are you?’ he said. It was hard to tell whether he was angry or amused. The voice was flat.

  ‘My name’s Polly Gilmour. I’m staying at Sletts. My partner will be looking for me, if I don’t go back soon.’ She hoped that was true, but remembered Marcus as she’d last seen him, determined to be normal, to communicate with the outside world, and she wasn’t sure if he would be bothered to come after her. She found that she was shaking.

  ‘So you’re one of Eleanor Longstaff’s friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked her up and down as if she were a sort of biological specimen, then gave a sly smile. ‘I think I’ve seen you around.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Charles Hillier. I run Springfield House. The detectives are staying there.’ He seemed about to say more, but suddenly headlights lit up the room.

  ‘That’ll be Ian,’ she said. ‘Eleanor’s husband. I should go. It’s my turn to make supper.’ The inanity struck her as crazy. She’d imagined seeing a ghost in this house and now some strange man had her penned inside it and she was talking about cooking a meal. She judged the distance between them and darted past him into the scullery. But he shut the front door with his foot and stood with his back to it, blocking her way again. She was trembling and found it impossible to think clearly at all. It felt like the worst sort of nightmare. With the front door shut, the small room was almost dark.

  Suddenly someone was banging on the living-room window with the flat of his hand. ‘Polly, is that you?’ It was Ian. He must have caught sight of her in his headlights and stopped his car.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’ She was surprised at how strongly the words came out: now she sounded defiant rather than scared. Hillier moved away from the door as Ian Longstaff came in. The three of them stood very close together in the tiny room. There was the smell of damp, but something else. Alcohol. Polly thought Ian must have taken off to a bar somewhere and had been sitting nursing pints and brooding. She wondered if Lowrie had been with him and, if so, how the man could have been so stupid as to let him drive back.

  ‘Who are you?’ Ian glared at the older man. Polly thought he looked like a gorilla picking a fight with another male for supremacy of the troop. Eleanor had always called him, with amused affection, her alpha male.

  Hillier barked back his name. ‘I own Springfield House hotel. Your friend here was trespassing.’

  ‘So you own this place too, do you?’ Polly could tell that Ian longed for a fight and realized he’d wanted to hit someone ever since he’d been told that Eleanor was dead.

  ‘I know the owner.’

  ‘And that gives you the right to throw your weight about, does it? To intimidate women?’ Ian was bristling with aggression, so now she was almost more frightened of him than of Hillier.

  ‘I’m not intimidated,’ she said. ‘It was a misunderstanding. Let’s go.’ She squeezed past the older man and out of the front door, pulling Ian after her by the sleeve of his jacket. He resisted for a moment, then the fight seemed to leave him altogether and he followed her.

  Hillier stood in the doorway watching them. He was still smiling and called after them. ‘Do you know who lived in this place?’

  Curiosity got the better of her. Ian was walking back to his car, but she paused for a moment. ‘Who?’

  ‘Sarah Malcolmson,’ Hillier said. ‘The girl who was blamed for Peerie Lizzie’s death. This was her family’s house.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Time stretched and had become unimportant. The long-case clock in the corner had just struck eleven, but it was light and the team was still working, sitting in the yellow morning room in Springfield House. Occasionally they heard the drinkers in the public bar coming out to the courtyard to make their way home. Willow was uneasy. Just being here made them compromised – they were enjoying the hospitality of potential suspects after all. The remains left on the sideboard were of the supper provided by Charles and David. And earlier Perez had wandered off on his own to talk to George Malcolmson and that was unforgivable. Any information that the man provided would be uncorroborated, but it wasn’t the breach in protocol that made her so angry, it was the attitude of Jimmy Perez. His driving away on his own had felt like a personal affront. Why hadn’t he discussed his ideas with her first?

  Sandy sat between them and seemed to have been infected by her anxiety. He looked at them like a child sensing tension between parents and wondering if he was to blame.

  ‘I went to the school this morning,’ he said. ‘Just on the off-chance. I thought I might find the lassie Eleanor saw on the beach. If her mother was with her that day, she might have seen what was going on at Sletts. We know that Vaila Arthur turned up to see Eleanor the afternoon before the party; a witness might have noticed someone else.’

  ‘Any luck?’ Willow was glad to be distracted.

  ‘No one in the school meets that description, but the teacher thought she saw the child with a woman coming off the ferry on Friday afternoon.’

  ‘Just holidaymakers then,’ Willow said. ‘Probably not relevant.’

  Perez looked up and she thought he was about to contradict her, but he said nothing. He had Eleanor’s notes spread on the table between them and was o
ccasionally writing in a book of his own.

  ‘So what did you get from the Malcolmson house, Jimmy?’ Willow finally found the silence unbearable. ‘Did you speak to Lowrie again? We still don’t know if Eleanor contacted him for more details of Peerie Lizzie before heading north.’

  Perez looked up. ‘No. Lowrie and Caroline were down at Vidlin, looking at the house they’re planning to buy. I spoke to George, though.’

  ‘Anything?’ Don’t go all brooding and mysterious on me again, Jimmy Perez. I can’t stand it.

  ‘The young maid who was looking after the Geldard child was a relative of his,’ Perez said. ‘Her family had lived in Utra, that derelict croft on the way to Sletts. After the tragedy she was sent south. She married a man from Inverness and there was a child apparently, who turned up for Sarah’s funeral, surprising them all.’

  ‘It should be possible to trace her. We should be able to track down Sarah’s married name. Sandy, will you get on to that tomorrow?’

  Sandy nodded. ‘You think it might be important?’

  ‘We won’t know until you speak to her!’ Immediately Willow felt guilty, because it wasn’t Sandy who had provoked her anger. ‘And, Jimmy, perhaps you can talk to Lowrie. It’s become more important now to know what contact he had with Eleanor before the party. If she spoke to Charles Hillier before she came here, she’ll have known that the nursemaid in the Peerie Lizzie story was Lowrie’s relative. She would surely have wanted to talk to Lowrie about that, either in London or here.’

  Perez nodded and returned to the notebook.

  A silence. Now the light was fading. Willow wondered how Perez could possibly see to read. She reached out to switch on a lamp and his face was transformed into a series of planes and shadows. She felt an irrational urge to touch his forehead, because in the artificial light it looked hard and smooth like metal. He looked up and caught her eye and she turned away. She’d been caught staring like an awkward teenager.

  ‘I wonder if Eleanor had already found Sarah Malcolmson’s daughter,’ he said. ‘There’s a name here on the page after she’d contacted David and Charles. Monica. No surname even. I can’t see how she might feature here, other than as a part of the Unst ghost story.’

  ‘Any contact details?’ Willow leaned forward, but found Eleanor’s handwriting impossible to read. Perez must have spent hours working through the book, becoming accustomed to its eccentricities.

  ‘No, perhaps she’d only got as far as tracing the name.’

  ‘Something else for us to work on tomorrow.’ She stretched, suddenly exhausted. ‘I’m away to my bed. I wake up so early here and I need some sleep.’

  Perez didn’t move. She saw that the notebooks had become an obsession. ‘Jimmy,’ she said, ‘you need to rest. It’ll wait until tomorrow.’

  Then he did look at her and, like an obedient child, he got to his feet.

  She woke early, as the sunlight filtered through the crack in the heavy curtains onto her face. So at least the fog had cleared. She made tea and showered. Yoga, a ritual from her childhood in the commune, and then she felt ready for the day, suddenly full of energy and optimism. Today there would be a break in the case. The kitchen was unusually quiet. No David. No smell of coffee. Willow had a sudden panic that the men had run away, packed a few things into their car and taken the first ferry out; even that they had left the night before. Perhaps their questions about Eleanor had frightened them off. She hadn’t seen them since dinner; later in the evening she’d collected a supper tray from the kitchen herself. They could be south to the mainland by now on the first plane to Aberdeen. Though she couldn’t conceive what reason either of them might have for killing Eleanor Longstaff.

  It was still too early for the real guests to appear for breakfast, and downstairs the house was empty. She walked through the grand entrance hall and tried to imagine what the place had been like in Gilbert and Roberta Geldard’s day. There’d have been more servants. Someone would already be up sweeping the floors, lighting a range in the kitchen, and the big front door would be thrown open to let in the air. Perhaps Elizabeth had been unable to sleep because of the bright sunshine, even so early in the day. And she’d run out through the open door down to the shore to play. Then a mist had rolled in from the sea without her noticing and the tide had come in and surrounded her. She’d been stranded on a sandbank and drowned.

  Willow followed in Peerie Lizzie’s path, through the wide front door and out into the garden. No mist today. Bright sunshine and a gusty wind blowing the shadows of the clouds across the water. There was, though, a figure on the shore. A silhouette against the light, not identifiable at this distance. She thought it was probably Jimmy Perez, that he hadn’t slept either and was standing looking into the middle distance and brooding about his lost love. She supposed she shouldn’t disturb him, but decided she’d made allowance enough for his grief.

  She walked down the grass track and through the big stone pillars. Wide flagstone steps led to the shore. The man was crying. His back was turned to her and he was quite silent, but she could tell from the movement of his shoulders. An oystercatcher called from the sandy grass as she disturbed it by walking to the beach. She’d known as soon as she’d left the garden that this wasn’t Perez. This man was older and his hair was shorter, lighter. She hesitated for a moment, reluctant to intrude on his private grief. He must have sensed her watching him, because he turned suddenly and stood quite still until she reached him. It was David Gordon, tears and mucus streaming down his face. He’d always been so private and dignified that the sight was shocking. She supposed that Charles had left him. Nothing else would account for such disorder, the filthy face and dishevelled clothes.

  ‘Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Mr Gordon, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize at first that it was you. Would you rather that I left you alone?’ She was tempted to mention the possibility of breakfast – yoga always left her feeling hungry – but decided that might be insensitive.

  ‘No! Come with me!’ He sounded completely distraught and she wondered if he was having some sort of breakdown, thought this was the very last complication that she needed.

  She saw a line of his footprints in the sand. He was wearing rubber clogs and the prints were quite distinctive. He’d obviously come from further along the shore and now he set off back in that direction quickly, like a dog following a scent. She followed, stopping briefly when the sand was very wet, to take off her own shoes.

  Charles Hillier was lying on his back, staring up at the sky, close to the tideline. It was not long after high water. His hair and his clothes were dripping. He was fully dressed in the trousers and shirt he’d been wearing the evening before. There was no immediate sign of injury, but he was clearly dead.

  ‘You see!’ David cried. ‘I was coming to tell you, and then suddenly it hit me that I’d be alone for the rest of my life and I broke down. So selfish. So dreadfully selfish. Not to be crying for Charles, but for myself.’

  Willow took in the scene. There was no chance they’d get Vicki Hewitt or James Grieve to Unst before the next high water, so they would need to move the body – Vicki was fastidious about maintaining the integrity of the crime scene, but even she would accept the need for action if the alternative was the corpse being sucked away into the North Sea by a particularly big tide. She pulled out her phone. Miraculously there was a signal. She phoned first Perez and then Sandy. She told Sandy to ask the remaining two guests to find alternative accommodation and to suggest that they leave Springfield House as soon as possible. They were an elderly couple from Bedfordshire; she already had their contact details and they were too frail to walk as far as the beach. Certainly they’d have been incapable of killing Charles Hillier, if this turned out to be murder. She asked Perez to join her on the shore. Sandy was full of questions, which she ignored. Perez asked none.

  So she and David Hillier stood on the sand waiting. She didn’t want to send him back to the house alone, and she couldn’t leave Char
les’s body to the mercy of gulls, rats or dogs. He stood staring out at the water. ‘I should never have forced Charles to come here,’ he said.

  ‘He seemed perfectly content, happy even.’ She supposed this was what the man wanted to hear, but she thought it was true too.

  ‘He was an actor,’ David said. ‘That was why he made such a good stage magician. He could make people believe whatever he wanted them to. He wanted me to believe that he was pleased with the move. But I knew he was bored. He needed more drama in his life than Shetland could give him.’

  ‘Perhaps it was enough for him to know that you loved it here.’

  There was a silence. David didn’t respond to that. ‘How did he die?’

  She thought he must realize that she could have no more idea than him. ‘Was he ill?’

  ‘No. Horribly fit. I was the one who did all the exercise and was careful about what I ate, but he’d never had a day’s illness.’

  ‘Then we’ll need to wait for the post-mortem.’ In the far distance Willow saw Perez appear from the front door of the house and lope down the stone steps. She felt like the sheriff in an old cowboy movie, waiting for the cavalry to appear on the horizon. ‘When did you last see Charles?’

  ‘Last night. I went to bed early. There was live music in the bar, but our manager deals with that. He’s local and he’s very good at running the Thursday events. I assumed that perhaps Charles had popped in to see how things were going. I’d been working in the garden all day and I was exhausted. I went straight to sleep. When I woke early this morning I realized Charles hadn’t come to bed and I came looking for him. I searched the house first. Then I came out into the garden and saw something on the shore. It was that blue shirt. I recognized the colour, but I couldn’t believe it was him until I got here.’