by Ann Cleeves
Chapter Thirteen
Willow had a window seat in the small plane and looked down over the islands of Orkney, trying to distinguish them. That must be Sanday. Or could it be Shapinsay? That’s certainly North Ronaldsay, so close to Fair Isle. Leaving Orkney behind, they flew low over Fair Isle on the plane’s approach to Sumburgh and she was able to make out more details than she’d ever seen before: the scattering of white croft houses to the south, two lighthouses, one at each end of the island. This was where Jimmy Perez came from. Where Fran Hunter, his lover and Cassie’s mother, had been stabbed during the course of a murder investigation more than three years before. Willow hadn’t been involved in that case; she’d moved to Inverness soon after. But she’d read about it, had become a little obsessed about it during her first encounter with Jimmy Perez, and had come to understand something of his sense of guilt and to know him a little better.
Now they’d be working together again, and she wasn’t sure what she made of that. She’d pushed all thoughts of him to the back of her mind. It was too complicated and she was too independent. She’d not been feeling well recently, not as sharp as usual and with a lot less energy. She’d tried to persuade herself that she wasn’t really ill, but that hadn’t helped. It was a calm flight and she looked down to the south of Shetland mainland as the plane circled to land into the southerly breeze. And she realized that she was glad to be here; it felt a little like coming home. And no matter how awkward it might be, she was glad to be seeing Jimmy Perez again.
He was there waiting for her. She saw him through the terminal window as she walked down the plane steps – black-haired, dark-eyed, betraying his ancestors’ Spanish roots. His outline was blurred and always a little untidy. Just like her. She went to greet him before collecting her bag. He seemed uncertain, but gave her a real hug and kissed her on both cheeks. She grasped him back.
‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Skinny. Are you well?’
‘There’s a compliment to greet a girl!’ Because this wasn’t the time for a serious talk. That would have to wait. She saw her holdall on the belt and went to get it. He was there before her and held on to it. Once she might have made a fuss, but now she was glad for him to take it. ‘Where are we off to?’
‘Northmavine,’ he said. ‘North Mainland. The settlement of Deltaness. James Grieve came overnight on the ferry and should be there already. Sandy’s with him.’
‘So, a bit of a road trip, Jimmy.’ She thought that was good, because it would take a little while for her to tell him her news. ‘I read your email before I left, but you can fill me in with the details on the way.’
‘Vicki’s not with you?’
‘She had stuff to finish off this morning and will be in on the next flight. She’s arranged to pick up a hire car.’ Willow waited, expecting more questions, but Jimmy accepted the explanation. He opened the boot of his car and lifted in her bag. Cassie’s booster-seat was fixed in the back. Willow thought for a moment that the child was like her mother’s ghost. Always there, in one way or another.
‘That’s good then,’ Perez said. ‘So, I’ll have you to myself.’
I’m not quite sure, she thought, that we’re ever really alone.
They drove north along the road that was familiar to her now. Perez was talking about the victim and the two other families involved in the case so far: the Flemings and the Moncrieffs, one old-school Shetland and the other incomer. It seemed that this was all about families. Willow tried to concentrate and to ask the right questions. ‘It sounds as if the victim was more like a childminder than a nanny, if all the kids are at school now.’
‘Yeah, but she lived in, helped out with the shopping, driving the kids to sports clubs and music lessons. You know the sort of thing. Belle Moncrieff sees herself as a supermum, but since the youngest two were small, she’s depended on Emma. Belle’s working again too now, as a freelance publicist. She and Robert are having some sort of domestic meltdown because they’re not sure how they’ll cope without Emma.’ He turned and grinned at her, showing that, as a single parent, with a job without regular hours, he knew about domestic chaos.
They’d come to Ravenswick and Willow looked up the bank to the house where Perez lived with Cassie, and then down towards the sea past the Hays’ farm with its polytunnels and neat fields. This was the place that still featured in the worst of her nightmares.
‘Apparently Magnus’s house has been sold,’ Perez said. Perhaps he guessed at her memories and was trying to pull her attention back inland to happier things. ‘I haven’t met my new neighbours yet, though.’ He paused. ‘The woman who lives in the place in Deltaness where the body was found came to see me on Saturday morning. I thought that was why she was there: because she was moving in.’
‘What did she want?’ Willow found herself engaged in the conversation again, grateful to be distracted.
‘To tell me that she’d been getting anonymous messages, strange little cartoons on graph paper of gallows and hanged men. We’ve collected them all, of course, and the paper’s been sent for fingerprinting.’
‘And the next day a woman is hanging in her barn. That must have freaked her out, big-style.’ They were driving through Cunningsburgh; Perez had slowed down as they passed the school. In the playground mothers were waiting with buggies and prams while their children played chase and kicked around a ball. A bell rang and the children ran towards the door, pulled like iron filings to a magnet.
‘Ah well, there’s an added complication in the fact that a man committed suicide there not long ago. He’d once owned the house where the Flemings stay.’ Perez paused for a moment before adding: ‘Besides, I’m not sure that Helena is the sort to get freaked out.’
‘Helena Fleming, the designer?’
‘You’ve heard of her?’ Perez seemed surprised.
‘What are you saying, Jimmy? That I’ve got no style?’ She couldn’t help teasing. Her style was frayed jeans and baggy sweaters. Wild hair. Boho without the chic. ‘She featured in one of the Sunday newspapers a couple of weeks ago and I noticed, because of the Shetland connection. Why did Helena come to you for help? Don’t they have a community bobby out there in the wilds?’
‘She knew Fran,’ Perez said. ‘I couldn’t turn her away.’
‘Oh, Jimmy . . .’ His kindness was a curse, and one of the sexiest things about him.
They sat for a moment in silence and he turned off the main road towards Scalloway, to avoid driving though Lerwick.
‘Why did you ask me to be on my own when I picked you up?’
She was surprised by the directness of the question. Often Perez was cautious around her, worried about hurting her feelings or being hurt himself. She took a deep breath. ‘There’s something we need to talk about.’
‘You’re not leaving the force?’ He kept his voice light, jokey. ‘Getting married and moving to the other side of the world?’
‘Not quite that dramatic.’
‘You’re ill. I knew you weren’t looking well.’ He spoke with absolute certainty. They’d turned onto the road that led east back towards the main road up the spine of the island. Willow had an idea of the geography of the islands now. They were close to the Ting Loch, where once the Viking parliament had met, and in the distance there was a bare hill, laden with massive wind turbines. He pulled into the lay-by where car-share drivers left their vehicles and switched off the engine. She wanted to reach out and touch him.
‘No, Jimmy, I’m not ill, though in the last few weeks it’s felt as if I am.’ She paused. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He stared at her. There was no response. He could have been chiselled from stone or very hard wood.
‘You’re the father. That’s what I’m telling you. There wasn’t anyone else. Not for ages. I told you I wasn’t the sort for a recreational shag with a stranger. Or even with a friend. Not now I’m grown-up.’ He still didn’t speak and she continued, turning away so that she wasn’t able to see him, hating the blankness of his fa
ce and the tension in his body. ‘I’ve decided to have it. Keep it. When I found out, I knew I wanted this more than anything in the world. I won’t make any demands, Jimmy. I promise. I can manage fine by myself. But I wanted you to know.’
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected or hoped for. Maybe in her wildest dreams, late at night, that he’d take her into his arms and tell her that it was the best news in the world. That he’d ask her to marry him and move to Shetland to be with him and Cassie. That they would be a real family. This was Jimmy Perez, after all: emotionally incontinent, spreading his compassion to everyone he came into contact with. But not, it seemed, to her. Not this time.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before? You must have known for a while. You were here at the beginning of February.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wanted to wait until I was ten weeks and miscarriage was less likely. No point making a fuss if nothing was going to come of it.’ Then she told herself that this was Jimmy she was talking to, and he deserved more than that. ‘Really? It was cowardice. Because I was still confused, after all that happened then. Because it was hardly something to do over the phone or put in a work email.’ A pause. ‘I thought you might be happy for me, Jimmy. I wanted a child. So much.’
‘I’m very glad I was a satisfactory means to an end.’
The words winded her like a punch in the belly. ‘No!’ She thought this was going as badly as it could possibly go. ‘It wasn’t planned, what happened between us. There was nothing calculated in it.’
A silence. She turned back so that she was facing him, was aware of tears streaming down her cheeks and at that moment hated her weakness and the hormones that were making her so woolly and confused. Cars and lorries streamed past towards Lerwick on the road ahead of them. ‘I don’t lie, Jimmy. If you know me at all, you know that about me.’
‘I’m not sure I know anything about you.’ He was as cold and closed as when she’d first met him, soon after Fran’s death. For a while no cars passed. An oystercatcher called overhead. One of Jimmy’s hands was still on the steering wheel and she was desperate to reach out and put hers on top of it. To have some physical connection with him. But she knew how hurt she’d be, if he pulled his away.
‘What are we going to do?’ Her voice seemed to be spoken by someone else. Someone old and serious and lonely.
Another silence. ‘We’re going to work,’ he said at last. ‘We’re going to find a killer. That’s what we do.’ He started the engine. Before he drove off, he looked at her and she had a brief moment of hope, which was dashed as soon as she heard the anger in his voice. ‘Does anyone else know about this?’
She shook her head. ‘Not even my family. A couple of the women in Inverness nick might have guessed. I’ve been kind of rubbish at work lately. All over the place. Always tired. But you had to be the first person to know.’
He nodded briefly, as if to say that at least on that score she’d done the right thing, and then pulled out into the road.
Chapter Fourteen
Sandy was early to the ferry terminal and was there to see the NorthLink make its way up Bressay Sound and tie up to the dock. The professor would have had a smooth crossing, but Sandy thought James Grieve wasn’t the sort to get seasick anyway. And if he did succumb, it would take more than a bit of nausea to trouble him. He cut up dead bodies for a living, and he’d let slip after a few drams that he’d been part of the investigative team in the Balkans after the war in the former Yugoslavia. ‘The body of an elderly man, arthritic bones and a bullet hole in the back of the head . . . I think we could say that was a war crime, not the result of legitimate combat.’
Grieve was the first person off the ship and, when Sandy saw him, he was walking down the stairs, not taking the lift.
‘So, you’re my taxi driver for the day?’ The man had started speaking as soon as he reached the bottom step. He had a voice that could have been honed on the parade ground, and most of the waiting passengers turned to stare.
‘Jimmy asked me to take you straight to Deltaness, where the body was found.’ In contrast Sandy waited until the pathologist was close enough for him to keep his voice low. News of the woman’s death would be all over the islands by now, but it seemed disrespectful to discuss it in front of the people streaming off the ferry.
‘But you don’t think that’s where the victim died?’ Grieve slung his bag onto the back seat and climbed into the car.
‘It’s possible, but unlikely; there must have been a lot of careful planning if she was killed there. It’s certainly not suicide, unless someone came along afterwards and took away whatever she was standing on while she tied herself to that beam. I wondered if she could have been killed in her own car.’ Sandy described the footprint, the scenario that he’d conjured in his head.
Grieve nodded. ‘It sounds possible. If it was manual strangulation, we should be able to tell from the marks on her neck whether the murderer stood behind or in front of her.’
When they got to the Fleming house it was still too early for the children to have left the house for school. Sandy parked in the courtyard as close as he could get to the barn. The constable from the night before was still there. Someone had taken him a chair and there was a flask of coffee on the floor beside him. He was eating a bacon sandwich, still hot, the grease seeping into the kitchen towel that was wrapped round it.
‘The family’s been looking after you then?’ Sandy thought it hadn’t been such a hard night for the man after all. Not wet and not cold.
‘They seem fine people.’ His mouth was still full of bacon and bread.
Sandy wondered what he’d say if one of the fine Flemings turned out to be their killer. He gave the man James Grieve’s name for the log. ‘You can get off now and grab some kip.’
The constable stuffed the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth, picked up his belongings and set off. Grieve climbed into his scene-suit, but even when he was ready, he stood for a moment at the barn door, looking inside.
‘Did you bring a stepladder?’ he said. ‘I need something so I can see her in situ, and obviously I can’t use anything belonging to the Flemings. We don’t want contamination, do we? And even though they’ve been feeding up the local constabulary, and my wife would pay a fortune for one of Helena’s creations, one of them could be the killer.’ He paused. ‘Can you get hold of Annie Goudie?’ Annie was the funeral director based in Lerwick. ‘Jimmy says there are children in the house. Let’s get her lads here this morning, so we can get our victim away and off to Aberdeen on the ferry tonight. This one would haunt my nightmares, I hate to think what she’d do to a sensitive eleven-year-old.’
Sandy left the barn and walked to the front of the house. Helena was just leaving with the two children. The boy was in shorts and a T-shirt, sandals on his feet, a small rucksack with a cartoon superhero on his back. His back was very straight. He showed no curiosity about Sandy. The girl was dark-haired too, younger and it seemed she was unable to keep still. Again Sandy wondered what it would be like to have kids. He supposed it was a kind of lottery, and you wouldn’t know whether you’d get a daft one or a calm one until they arrived. But surely parenting had something to do with how they turned out? Louisa was a teacher and she worked with children all day. She was kind and patient, so if anyone was going to be a good mother, it would be her. Helena Fleming was tying the lassie’s hair up in pigtails.
‘You two can go on,’ she said, when she’d finished. ‘I’ll catch you up. Wait for me at the road.’ She pulled a face at Sandy. ‘I’m not looking forward to the school playground this morning. The gossips will be there, full of questions and speculation. I was even wondering if the kids were old enough for me to send them on their own, but decided against it. Christopher would be OK, but Ellie’s a bit crazy and not a big fan of school. It wouldn’t surprise me if she spent all morning on the beach. Anyway I wouldn’t put it past the gossip vultures to start on them.’
‘I’m just going to contact t
he undertaker in Lerwick,’ he said. ‘Her boys will come later this morning to take down the body. Emma should be gone by the time the bairns are back from school.’
She breathed heavily. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘But this won’t be over, will it? The talk. The gossip. The investigation. This will go on until you’ve found out who killed her.’
‘We will find out,’ Sandy said. ‘Jimmy Perez is a brilliant detective.’
She looked at him, a little surprised. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he is.’ And she set off down the track, almost at a run, to catch the children up.
Sandy had put on his own scene-suit to carry the step-ladder into the barn. James Grieve had moved a little closer to Emma Shearer and was talking into his Dictaphone. He clicked it off and turned to the detective.
‘You’re quite right, Sandy, I don’t think she was killed here. No shoes, you see. If the killer had arranged to meet her here, she’d surely still be wearing her shoes. Unless the killer had a good reason to take them off her. But why would he do that?’
‘Surely she’d have been wearing shoes if she was in her car.’ Sandy wasn’t quite as scared of Grieve as he’d once been. He was happy now to express his own opinions.
‘Depends on the shoes.’ Grieve was still staring at the woman, almost talking to himself. ‘They could have been knocked off as she was bundled into a boot to bring her here. And I don’t see this as a woman who’d be out in walking boots or good strong brogues. Not with that outfit.’
‘Why do that? Why risk being caught bringing her up here? The family was only out for the morning, and no one could have guessed how long they’d be gone.’
Grieve set up the stepladder, positioning it carefully. He took a couple of photos and the unexpected flash made Sandy blink. ‘I suppose it could be someone who enjoys risk,’ Grieve said. ‘Someone who’s turned on by that. Or perhaps the killer is sending a message.’
‘A message to the Fleming family?’
‘Maybe! But it’s your job to consider that, Constable. It’s not mine to speculate.’ Sandy held onto the steps and watched Grieve climb up. ‘Can you take her weight for a moment?’