by Ann Cleeves
‘I don’t believe it!’ Now she was shouting like a confused child responding to her fears with a tantrum. He could imagine her drumming her heels on the floor and lashing out at him. ‘You have to show me, Jimmy. I have to see him.’
He didn’t reply immediately, but gave her a few moments to collect herself. ‘I can’t take you to see him yet. Not on the beach. A little while and he’ll be in Annie Goudie’s funeral parlour in Lerwick. You and Mavis will see him then.’ A pause. Some of the children had already finished their meal and were running into the playground. ‘You have to trust me about this, Kathryn. Now, we’ll need to talk to your colleagues and ask them to cover your class for this afternoon and I’ll take you home.’
Perhaps it was talk of her work, but suddenly she seemed to grow up, to become herself again. Confused still and full of questions, but not an angry child any more. ‘They’ll be in the staffroom. We can talk to them there.’ At the door she stopped. ‘He wasn’t a perfect man. But he was such a good dad. Fun, you know. He could turn even the boring things into an adventure.’ Only then did she ask the question that he’d been expecting since he’d walked into the classroom. ‘How did he die?’
‘We can’t know for sure,’ Perez said. ‘But I don’t think it was an accident.’
Again she looked at him as if she didn’t understand the words, so he spoke again.
‘I think it was murder.’
Morag was waiting with Mavis Rogerson in the big, gloomy house in Lerwick. The sunshine was muted by the stained glass in the front door, so the hall seemed so dark after the police officer had let them in that it took some time for Perez’s eyes to get used to it. They sat in the kitchen and Morag made tea. Mavis hadn’t moved from the table and seemed hardly to notice their presence until Kathryn went up to her and put her arms around her.
‘Are you up to answering some questions?’ The kitchen was at the back of the house and in shadow. Perez wished they could go outside to talk, but there was no question of moving them.
The women looked up.
‘What do you need to know?’ It was Mavis. Her face was puffy and the colour of putty, but she wasn’t crying.
‘I need to understand why Tom didn’t get on that flight to Orkney. Was there a last-minute change of plan?’
‘I thought he was there,’ Mavis said. ‘It was all arranged. He gets on very well with my brother. He still lives in Kirkwall, and they were going to meet up on Sunday night.’
‘Did your brother contact you? To say that Tom hadn’t turned up?’
She shook her head.
‘Could we have his contact details? So we can check what happened. Or would you like to phone him?’
‘Oh no!’ The answer was immediate. ‘I can’t talk to anybody.’ A pause. ‘I don’t have the strength.’ It was an odd phrase, but Perez thought that was just how he’d felt after Fran’s death. He’d been too weak with grief to carry out even the simplest of tasks.
Mavis got her phone and found her brother’s number. Perez scribbled it into his notebook and passed it to Morag. The police officer slipped out of the room. While the three of them sipped tea, they could hear her muffled voice from the hall. At least she’d managed to get through first time. Morag came back into the room and they all stared at her. It was as if she was an actor appearing onstage and the attention seemed to make her a little flustered.
‘Tom phoned your brother on Sunday to cancel.’ Morag directed her words to Mavis. ‘Tom told him that something unexpected had turned up and that he’d be delayed. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to make the Orkney conference. He gave the impression that it was council business.’
‘Ah.’ Mavis sounded sad rather than angry. ‘That was always the excuse he used.’
‘Excuse me?’ Perez could guess what she meant, but he needed her to explain.
‘Tom had other women, Inspector. It was hardly a secret.’
Perez shot a look at Kathryn, but he couldn’t tell if this was news to her or whether she’d known about the affairs. She sat now, unmoving. Perhaps that was what she’d meant when she’d said her father wasn’t perfect. The room seemed very stuffy. It was as if everyone was in a slow-motion film, and Perez found that it was taking him a long time to put together his questions. He leaned across the table towards Mavis.
‘Did you have any suspicion that he wasn’t going to Orkney as planned this time?’
She lifted her head. ‘None at all. He liked visiting my family. He liked the conferences. He was a very sociable man. I always loved that about him.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We were happy, Jimmy. I knew what he was like when we married. Tom needed to be admired. It was a kind of addiction – the sex. It was clear very soon that I couldn’t meet all his needs. But I wanted to be with him. I could live with the fact that he strayed. I wish he’d been faithful, but he loved his family and the home we had here. I was his rock. He always said that. He wouldn’t have been the man he was, without me.’
The room was suddenly so quiet that Perez could hear the purring of the cat that was lying on the windowsill. He turned to Kathryn. ‘Did you know that your father had affairs?’
‘Of course. At first it all seemed just a bit of fun. My dad was a ladies’ man. He flirted at parties and weddings. He was a little bit mischievous, but everyone said there was no harm in him. As he got older and the women he chased got younger, it became embarrassing. He gained a reputation as a bit of a pest. I’m not sure there had been other women recently. Or only in his dreams. Single women would know they could do better – and that he would never leave his wife – and there aren’t that many women in Shetland willing to cheat on their partners. My father had become a bit of a laughing stock. You wouldn’t want to be seen out with him. It was all a bit sad.’
‘He was still an attractive man!’ Mavis cried. ‘You can’t talk about him like that.’
There was another silence. Perez thought it strange that the woman would prefer to think of her husband as a sexual predator than an embarrassment. It was an odd kind of loyalty.
‘Was Tom seeing anyone just now?’ He was thinking of the woman who’d been with Rogerson in the Scalloway Hotel. Sandy had thought that might be a business meeting, but he might not have been reading the situation accurately.
‘As I’ve just said, Jimmy, I don’t think he’d been seeing anyone for a while.’ Kathryn’s tea must have been cold by now, but she sipped from the mug.
‘There was some business deal that was taking up a lot of his time,’ Mavis said. ‘He was out some evenings, but he wasn’t with a woman. I could always tell when he’d been with a woman: he’d come back to me and he’d be kind of tender.’
‘Was it legal business?’ Perez asked. ‘Or something to do with the council?’
‘Maybe something to do with the oilies.’ Mavis was wearing a big hand-knitted cardigan, but despite the heat in the room she still seemed to feel cold. She pulled the garment around her. ‘Tom said he couldn’t tell me about it just yet, but it would make us money.’
‘Was money important to Tom?’
‘Not for its own sake,’ Kathryn said. ‘He couldn’t save. But he liked the things it could buy.’
Power? Perez thought. Influence. Women. But he wondered if the deals Tom bragged about were real or if they were fantasies, as were, according to his daughter, his relationships with young and beautiful women.
‘When did you last see Tom?’
‘Early Sunday,’ Mavis said. ‘Then he drove down to Sumburgh to get the morning plane.’
And he had done that. His car had been found in the airport car park. So what had happened between arriving in Sumburgh and checking in for his flight?
‘Who knew that he’d be going to Orkney?’
‘Everyone who reads The Shetland Times.’ Kathryn allowed herself a little smile. ‘There was a big article about the fisheries conference and about how Dad was going to fight for Shetland’s fishermen.’
‘But they wouldn’t know that he w
as leaving on Sunday morning.’
‘No. Just that he’d be in Orkney for the meeting on Monday morning.’
Perez thought Rogerson must have intended to go to the conference. Otherwise he wouldn’t have driven to Sumburgh and he wouldn’t have encouraged all that publicity. They’d need to question the check-in staff and other passengers. Perhaps there’d been a chance meeting in the airport that had made him change his mind. Or had someone been waiting for him there?
He turned his attention back to the women. ‘What were you up to over the weekend?’ He tried to keep his voice chatty and light.
Mavis stiffened and her voice was suddenly bitter. ‘Do you think I killed him, Jimmy? Because he’d been making a fool of me with other women? I’d have done that years ago, if I’d wanted him dead.’
‘I have to ask, Mavis. You must understand that.’
The women looked at each other. For a moment Perez suspected they were preparing to lie, but perhaps they just wanted to check the accuracy of the details they were about to give.
‘We had breakfast,’ Kathryn said, ‘and then we went to church.’
‘Here in Lerwick?’
‘No, in Ravenswick,’ Kathryn said. ‘We like the minister there.’
So they were in Ravenswick on the Sunday. Perez couldn’t work out the significance of that.
‘And after the service?’
‘We treated ourselves to Sunday lunch in the Ravenswick Hotel.’ Now Kathryn sounded almost defiant. She must understand the implication of Perez’s questions, even if Mavis didn’t. ‘Then later the weather cleared a little and we went for a walk in the hotel gardens. But we didn’t go anywhere near Tain, Jimmy, and we didn’t go to the beach.’
He nodded and waited for her to continue.
‘On Sunday night we were here. Together. I had marking to do, and my mother was watching television in the same room. I arrived at school at about eight this morning. It was icy and I’d allowed time in case there was a tailback from the traffic lights by the landslide. I didn’t see my father. Not over the weekend or this morning. As far as I knew, he was in Orkney.’
Perez stood up. They were back to where they’d started when he’d first met Kathryn in the school, and he didn’t want to be in this overheated room any longer. He left Morag with the women, shut the kitchen door behind him and stepped out into the sunshine.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Willow found the Hays’ farm easily. Perez had pointed it out when they’d driven from the airport and she’d remembered the polytunnels and the solid stone house that seemed a little grand. There was still the ghost of the croft house it had once been, but it had grown over the years and become a comfortable family home, with rooms in the roof and an extension at the front. The attached outbuildings, which had once contained animals or a dairy, were now part of the living space.
There were three people in the kitchen, along with a uniformed officer. It was early afternoon by now, but they looked as if they’d been sitting there since Perez had left. There was a smell of home-made soup, but the bowls must have been cleared away because there was no sign now that they’d eaten lunch. The officer must have recognized her, because he jumped to his feet when she tapped at the door and let herself in. The family turned and stared. Perhaps she didn’t look much like their idea of a police officer. She saw the young man who’d served her and Perez at Mareel and gave him a little smile. ‘Andy, isn’t it? We’ve met.’
He nodded. It looked as if the movement had taken a lot of effort. Willow reached out her hand to his parents. ‘Chief Inspector Willow Reeves. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you some more questions. But we’ll get it over with as soon as possible and let you get on with your lives.’ Because she found it hard to think of these respectable, ordinary individuals in their comfortable house as possible killers. They had too much to lose.
‘Is there a room I could use to chat to you? We’ll do it one at a time, so you’re not all inconvenienced at once.’ She could see that none of them were taken in by that, but she was here for more than a cosy chat around the kitchen table and it wasn’t a bad thing for them to know that this was serious.
‘There’s the office.’ Jane Hay got to her feet. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for a few nights. Willow wondered if the shock of finding a dead man on your land would do that to you or if something else was worrying her. ‘I’ll show you.’
It was a small room that might once have housed animals and led off from a long corridor that stretched the length of the building. Far enough away from the kitchen that no one would be able to eavesdrop. There was a desk with a computer, shelves with reports and gardening books, a chair to go with the desk and another in the corner.
‘Perfect.’
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Jane hovered in the doorway.
‘Fabulous.’ Coffee was Willow’s drug of choice. Her parents had lived caffeine-free lives and it still felt like a guilty pleasure. ‘Do you mind asking Andy to bring it through? I’d like to chat to him first.’
Jane nodded as if that was what she’d been expecting. She was about to say more, to give some excuse or explanation for her son’s behaviour, but seemed to think better of it and walked away.
The boy carried a tray and the smell of the coffee came before him. There was a mug and a little jug of milk and a sugar bowl. A plate of home-made biscuits. All very fancy, but Willow was used to witnesses trying to impress. And this would be the parents’ doing, not his.
‘Are you not having any?’ She reached out for a biscuit and pushed the plate towards him.
He shook his head. ‘We’ve been drinking coffee all morning.’
‘Jimmy Perez said you had something to tell me about Tom Rogerson.’
He looked up sharply. ‘My mother said I should say something, but really it wasn’t a big deal.’ A pause. ‘Nothing for her to make such a fuss about.’
‘All the same, your mother’s right. We hear about stuff anyway, so it’s best if it comes from you.’
Andy paused. ‘We had a row in the street. I’d had too much to drink. Rogerson was an arrogant bastard.’
‘According to Inspector Perez, your father said much the same thing. Was this a family problem, then? Is there some reason why you and your dad had taken against the man?’
There was no reply.
‘Only Rogerson had a reputation, I understand. If he’d been hassling your mother, I can see that you might both be angry . . .’ She let the implication drift into the air. The possible explanation for the tension within the family had only just come to her, but she thought now it made sense of Jane’s anxiety and Kevin’s resentment. It might also provide a motive for murder. Perhaps the respectable family was less comfortable than it seemed on the surface.
The boy looked up with a start. His surprise seemed genuine. Perhaps he was reflecting any young person’s horror that their parents might be sexual beings. Or perhaps he was a good actor.
‘No,’ he said at last, ‘there was nothing of that sort. Of course not.’ A pause. ‘Though it was just the sort of man Rogerson was. I mean I could see him doing that, being a nuisance with a woman. But my mother’s not like that. She wouldn’t be taken in by a man like him.’
‘Perhaps she wasn’t taken in. Perhaps he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
But Andy only shook his head. ‘I don’t even think they knew each other.’
‘How did you know him? Was he a regular in Mareel?’ Willow was feeling her way here. She thought it would take very little to make the boy clam up altogether.
‘He came in sometimes.’
‘But he was older than your dad. I’m trying to understand what you might have been fighting about. We don’t have arguments with people we scarcely know.’
‘It wasn’t important. I’d had too much to drink and Rogerson was in my way. He was rude and shoved me aside, and I lost it. There was nothing personal. I was just being stupid.’ He was getting impatient with the questions. Will
ow could see that he was struggling to hold on to his temper. So, all the more reason to push him.
‘Was anyone else there, to see what was going on?’
‘I wasn’t with anyone,’ Andy said. ‘There were people in the street, but not close enough to see exactly what was going on.’
‘Why did you leave uni?’
The sudden shift in questioning threw him. He looked even more twitchy. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t like the course much. I might go back. Try something a bit different.’
‘I grew up on an island,’ Willow said. ‘North Uist. Much smaller than Shetland mainland. No facilities. Nothing like you have here. I couldn’t wait to get out.’ She paused. ‘But I found it tricky to settle away from the place. No boundaries, you see. No limits to my territory. All that space stretching out around me. It made me kind of loopy for a while. And no boundaries in the emotional sense. I could do what I liked, and there was nobody I knew to stop me. Not like the island, full of gossiping busybodies. I’d guess that even though this is bigger, it’s hard to get away with stuff here too.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ The words hard and bitter.
She gave him a moment to explain, but she could tell that he was already regretting the outburst. ‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged and took a while to answer. ‘People think there are no secrets in Shetland, but they’re wrong. We all have secrets. It’s the only way we can keep sane.’
‘What secrets do you have, Andy?’ She kept her voice soft, a little ironic. She didn’t want to sound intense and frighten him off.
He looked up at her, with a sharp, jagged grin. ‘If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets.’
She could tell that she would get nothing more from him and she let him go.
Willow saw Kevin Hay next. She thought the woman had more to tell her and it wouldn’t do any harm to let her stew. The man was big and bluff. Not stupid by any means, but with a limited outlook. He would read The Shetland Times but news away from the islands would hold no interest for him.