Thin Air: (Shetland book 6)

by Ann Cleeves

  Again Polly’s eyes were drawn back to the painting on the wall. The background was of woodland and quite unlike Shetland. She knew she was being quite ridiculous. ‘I thought I saw her another time,’ she said. ‘In the old house that’s derelict. Utra. It was the night we’d all been to supper at your house. A girl dressed in white twirling round on her toes.’ She snapped her mouth shut before she could say any more, but felt relieved that she’d told them about the visions. It felt good to have the words out in the open. She’d been wrong to bottle up her worries in her head. That way madness lay.

  ‘You think you saw Eleanor’s ghost-child in Utra?’ Caroline looked at her strangely as if she was crazy already.

  ‘Well, it obviously wasn’t a ghost.’ Polly gave little self-deprecating smile, but really she wasn’t sure. Perhaps that was what she had seen. The idea had been creeping up on her over the last few days, tugging at her reason, so she felt her rational thoughts unwinding like a hank of yarn. What other explanation could there be for the dancing child? A child whom nobody in Meoness recognized. She looked up at the other women. ‘But somebody was inside.’

  ‘That could have been anyone.’ Caroline was dismissive. ‘It must have been almost dark when you walked past. And we were all pretty spooked after Eleanor’s murder.’

  Not you! You’ve never been scared in your life. And I’ve been scared for most of mine. Not of being haunted, but of saying the wrong thing, causing embarrassment. Showing myself up. That’s why I’m pretending now. Suddenly she longed for Eleanor, who would have listened to her without preaching or looking disapproving, whose solution to the ills of the world was laughter and another bottle of wine. ‘I expect you’re right. My imagination playing tricks in the weird light.’

  Grusche gave her a strange look, but Caroline hardly seemed to hear. She’d wandered away to the gallery. Grusche followed, and Polly could hear them talking about curtains and colours, and whether an abstract painting inspired by Muckle Flugga would look well in a room with a polished wooden floor. ‘I think that’s the one Lowrie would prefer,’ Grusche was saying. ‘That’s the one you should get.’

  Polly heard the words, but they seemed to come from a long way off. She stood in front of the painting of the girl. There was an artist’s signature in one corner. Monica Leaze. The name meant nothing to her, but she didn’t need to make a note of it. She knew she wouldn’t forget.

  In the ferry on the way back to Unst they stood on deck once more and Polly felt a sense of foreboding as the island drew closer. She told herself that she just had to survive for one more night. When the vessel turned to inch its way to the pier she had a view south to Yell and saw a grey bank of fog on the horizon. It was as if the route of her escape had been closed behind her. By the time they’d driven back to Meoness the light had gone again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Willow and Sandy put together a scratch lunch in the kitchen at Springfield House. Willow was feeling restless. If she were on the Scottish mainland she’d be at the post-mortem by now. She’d know how Charles Hillier had died. Here, there seemed little to do but wait and she’d never been very good at that.

  David had retreated to the walled vegetable garden. Earlier Willow had watched him from her bedroom window, digging and digging the uncultivated patch close to the shattered greenhouse, as if the activity would wear out his mind as well as his body and he’d stop thinking. She went outside to call him in for lunch, but even when she was right behind him he continued to plunge the spade into the sandy soil, then push it with his foot, his whole body straining to get the blade into the peaty soil, oblivious to everything else. She tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Come in and get some lunch. You need to eat.’

  He stopped. His face was red, and sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes.

  ‘Where is he?’

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant. ‘Annie Goudie, the funeral director, has just arrived with a couple of men. Charles will be on his way to Lerwick soon. He’ll be on the boat for Aberdeen tonight.’ She paused. ‘Do you want to see him? To say goodbye?’

  ‘No!’ He turned away angrily as if he intended to continue digging, then stopped, the spade dropped to the ground at his feet, and faced her again. ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t bear it. To see him so unlike himself. When he was alive he was never still.’

  She nodded. A wheatear flicked along the wall that separated the garden from the open hillside. ‘Is there anything I can get you? Tea? Water?’

  He nodded towards a bottle of water standing on the path that ran around the garden. ‘I’m fine. Really, it’s very kind, but I’m better out here.’

  Inside, Sandy and Perez had started to eat. Perez was making notes, methodical, just as when he’d transcribed Eleanor’s scribbling. He reached out for a piece of bread with his left hand while he was still focused on writing with his right. Willow poured herself a glass of water from the tap and wondered how long they could continue to run the operation from Springfield House. This felt like an investigation from a different age, the three of them left to run the inquiry without outside interference. A Special Operations team during the war, perhaps a resistance group in a strange land. Soon she’d be under pressure to move back to the police station in Lerwick, where they’d have the technical support to investigate in a more orthodox way. And where her boss would insist on regular conference-call updates from Inverness. He was already worrying about the budget. ‘Don’t think you can claim overtime because you’re staying out there. That’s your choice.’ When the three English people moved south they’d have no real excuse for being in Unst, so the following morning she’d hand Springfield House back to David and his memories.

  She wondered what he’d do then. He had no real friends in the islands. Charles had been the sociable one, dropping into the bar occasionally in the evenings to chat to the locals. David had been happy to make things run smoothly behind the scenes. She suspected that he would sell up and move back to an anonymous flat in some small university town. He’d spend his days walking the hills and remembering with regret the only time he ever took a risk.

  Perez looked up from his notes. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Angry,’ she said. ‘Trying to exhaust himself with digging. As if he could bring the man back by turning over the whole plot.’ There was a clock on the wall and in the silence she heard it ticking, marking down the seconds until they would have to leave. The pressure felt tight around her head and she forced herself to breathe slowly. ‘What have you got for me? Sandy, any news on the mysterious Monica mentioned in Eleanor’s notes? We wondered if she might be Sarah Malcolmson’s daughter.’

  Sandy had his mouth full of smoked mackerel and bread and she had to wait for him to speak, and then he was full of apologies. Perez looked up from his writing again. ‘Just get on with it, man!’

  ‘Once Mary Lomax turned up to wait with the body, I went down to Voxter.’ He looked anxious. ‘You weren’t here, but I thought that would be the best thing to do. I know you’ve talked to George already, Jimmy, but I thought he might know more about Sarah’s daughter than he said. He would have met her at the funeral, so he’d have known her name at least.’

  ‘Well? Was she our mysterious Monica?’

  Sandy shook his head. ‘Elizabeth. Her name was Elizabeth.’

  ‘Sarah Malcolmson named her daughter after the child whose death she was accused of causing?’ Willow couldn’t make sense of that. It seemed like a strange kind of masochism. And hardly fair to the girl who’d remind her mother every day of why she’d been forced to leave the islands.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Perhaps Sarah had been really fond of Lizzie Geldard.’ Perez set aside his notes. ‘In those days wealthy parents didn’t do much of the real childcare, did they? Sarah would have been more like a mother to the girl. Perhaps the name was a way of honouring her memory.’

  Willow wasn’t sure about all that. It seemed a macabre thing to do. ‘So we�
�re still looking for the Monica who featured in Eleanor’s notes. I don’t suppose you’ve come across anything useful, like a phone number, Jimmy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So perhaps she hadn’t tracked it down yet.’ Willow took a ripe tomato from the bowl on the table and bit into it. The juice dribbled down her chin and she tore a piece of kitchen towel from the roll on the bench to wipe it away.

  ‘Or maybe she knew it already. There’s no surname, so perhaps Eleanor was friends with the mysterious Monica. Or had met her previously at least.’

  Willow thought again that they didn’t have time for this kind of speculation. She needed something concrete to give to her boss in Inverness. ‘I want to track Charles’s movements yesterday evening after he met Polly and Ian in the old house in Meoness. Did he go into the Springfield bar when the men were there, for instance?’

  ‘Lowrie says not,’ Perez said.

  ‘Well, Lowrie’s hardly an unbiased witness, is he?’ Willow could hear the frustration spill out into her voice. ‘He’s an ex-lover of Eleanor Longstaff and a potential suspect.’

  ‘Shall we look in Hillier’s office?’ Perez said. ‘It might be a good time, while David’s still outside. I’d be interested in any communication between Eleanor and Charles. Even if she just made one phone call asking about the history of the house and the Geldard family, why didn’t he tell David? David was the historian, the expert.’

  ‘And then I’d like to go to the derelict house where he met Ian and Polly.’ Willow was already on her feet. Any action was better than sitting in this sad house waiting for inspiration to strike. ‘Why would he go there? I don’t buy the notion that he just drove around in the fog.’

  ‘To meet someone?’ Sandy had been following the conversation and was trying to help.

  ‘Polly Gilmour, you mean? That could work. They’d arranged to meet and then Ian came along and surprised them.’ But Willow couldn’t see what possible connection there could be between a librarian from London and an ex-magician who ran a classy B&B in Shetland. It still seemed as if only Eleanor Longstaff linked all the people involved in the case. With her death they’d turned into a group of disparate individuals. And the encounter in the croft had obviously left Polly shaken. Would she have been so scared if the meeting had been planned?

  The hotel office was a small room on the ground floor. Any money had been spent refurbishing the guest rooms and this work space was shabby. Flatpack shelves had been put up in the alcoves and the desk looked as if it might have come from a charity shop in Lerwick. Willow sat at it and started the computer. Hillier hadn’t logged off and she didn’t need a password to get into the system or his emails.

  ‘Nothing from Eleanor,’ she said. ‘Either they communicated by phone or he deleted the messages as soon as he’d read them.’

  ‘Anything from the mysterious Monica?’ Perez was working through the shelves, pulling out guide books and files. There was a box file full of receipts for the work done on Springfield House. He set it on the desk next to Willow.

  ‘Nothing saved. But he seems to have been very diligent about deleting his emails. Mine go back for years.’

  ‘More secrecy,’ Perez said.

  ‘But who would have access to this computer? Only David.’ She was aware of Perez standing very close to her and looking over her shoulder. She imagined that she could feel his breath on her neck.

  ‘That was the point, surely,’ Perez said. ‘Charles was involved in something to do with Eleanor’s project and he knew that David would disapprove.’

  ‘We’ll take the computer with us when we go south tomorrow.’ Again Willow sensed the movement of time as something tangible, like the tide or the wind. ‘The geeks in Inverness should be able to track the email history. We might have some mention of your Monica yet.’ She began to lift the receipts from the box file.

  ‘Look at this! Hundreds of pounds for a set of bedroom curtains. You can see why the couple were running out of cash.’ She wondered if David had sanctioned the expenditure or if he’d closed his eyes to it because he knew the excitement of renovating and decorating Springfield was all that kept Charles in Shetland.

  Perez had finished emptying shelves and turned his attention to a painted cupboard that formed a window seat, the only original piece of furniture in the room. It contained memorabilia of Charles’s stage career, flyers and posters, a signed programme for the Royal Variety Show, photos of Charles next to men with wide lapels and women with big hair. He piled the contents onto the floor. Then he stopped. He was on his knees and was so still for a moment that it looked to Willow as if he was praying. Then he pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket. She got down beside him and was again aware of her body close to his. He reached inside the cupboard and pulled out a small digital recorder, held it carefully in his fingers for her to see.

  ‘It could be a coincidence.’ Willow stood up. ‘No reason at all why it should be Eleanor’s.’ But she didn’t believe in coincidence and she could hear the excitement in her own voice. Here they could have found a definite link between the two victims.

  ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ Perez stood it on the desk and switched it on. They heard an eager young woman talking about walking along the path from Voxter after an evening with her relatives and seeing the apparition of Peerie Lizzie.

  ‘That’s Vaila Arthur, telling Eleanor the story of her encounter with Peerie Lizzie,’ Willow said. ‘Can we go right back to the beginning and play it from the start?’

  Perez pressed a couple of buttons. There was silence. Willow expected to hear Vaila’s words again. Instead there was a child’s voice. She was singing a simple melody; it was piping and a little flat on the high notes, but still moving somehow.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ She looked across the desk at Perez, whose face was white and quite still.

  He waited a moment before answering. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is Peerie Lizzie’s song.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Perez recognized the song after the first few bars. Cassie had learned it at school and had come home singing it, over and over, to rehearse for the end-of-term show, until he and Fran had wanted to scream. And although Fran was still alive then, still a real presence in her own house, warm and strong and argumentative, he’d thought it wrong to teach Peerie Lizzie’s song to the children. He’d understood the need for the bairns to be aware of their cultural heritage, the folk traditions, but this song had only been written twenty years ago, by Marty Thomson up in Northmavine, and it celebrated the death of a real child who had died. But when he’d voiced his concerns to Fran she’d laughed at him and told him he was being daft and he’d spent too long as a cop. ‘Kids love spooky stories. And most of them don’t even listen to the words.’

  His sense of her was so real that for a moment he imagined it was Fran sitting on the other side of the desk in the big house in Unst, and not Willow Reeves.

  On hearing Willow’s voice he was jolted back to the present, and felt the loss of his woman all over again. He felt he had to explain his reaction to the song, and as he did so his memory of Fran’s laughter at his anxiety – at his notion that Cassie might be frightened – melted away. He’d wanted to focus on the memory, the sound that Fran’s voice had made and the shape of her body with her head thrown back.

  ‘A well-known local musician wrote it. It’s a kind of ballad, using the story of Elizabeth Geldard’s death. The children learn it in school – it’s seen as part of their heritage, but the teachers also use it as a warning that the shore can be dangerous and the children have to be aware of the incoming tides.’ As he spoke he was thinking there was something different about the song on the tape. It wasn’t quite as Cassie had sung it. He considered asking Willow to play it once more, but was worried about the way he might respond. Perhaps he’d get emotional again, break down even, and he’d promised Willow that he was well now and perfectly fit for work.

  ‘So why is it on Eleanor’s recorder? Did Vail
a Arthur sing it? More background to her story of seeing the ghost?’

  ‘That wasn’t a woman’s voice,’ Perez said. ‘It was a child.’ It was the one thing of which he was certain.

  ‘So if we find out who the singer was we might know who else Eleanor met on the day of the party. Vaila only has a baby. It couldn’t have been her.’

  Perez didn’t answer.

  ‘We should ask Vaila,’ Willow said. ‘Come on, Jimmy. No time like the present.’

  Perez felt her looking at him strangely and tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but he was thinking of the song and what was different about the recording from the version he knew. At last he got to his feet and followed her out of the house. They walked into the yard to pick up their car and found David sitting outside the walled garden, smoking.

  ‘I gave up years ago.’ He nodded towards the cigarettes on the bench beside him. ‘These were Charlie’s. He thought I didn’t know that he’d started smoking again. I pretended not to, because I didn’t want to nag. All these pretences and small lies. It seems ridiculous now. Why couldn’t we just be honest with each other?’ He sucked in the nicotine as if he hoped it would kill him immediately.

  Vaila let them in to her smart new bungalow. She had the baby over one shoulder and was patting her back. ‘She’s been crying all morning,’ she said. ‘Wind or colic. I’m not sure I’d know the difference, though.’ And she looked at them hopefully as if they might be expert in the ways of small children.

  Willow ignored her. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a few more questions.’

  Vaila put the kettle on, still holding the child. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ she said. ‘My man’s working away again and we all need adult company, don’t we?’ But her voice was cheerful; there was no evidence here of post-natal depression.

  ‘I’ll do this.’ Perez nodded towards the cups and the teapot. ‘You go and sit down.’ He wondered what it might be like to hold a very small baby against your skin, how it might smell, and then thought again that he needed to pull himself together. With Fran gone, that was never going to happen.