by Ann Cleeves
Chapter Seventeen
Jimmy Perez left the row of concrete houses where Margaret Riddell and her sister lived and stood looking out at the sea for a moment. He tried to concentrate on the case and plan his next move, but thoughts of Willow intruded. Willow, pale and hurt. Willow, whose decision to have a child would force him to make uncomfortable choices, would push him to a place he wasn’t ready to be. But, he told himself, he didn’t have to make those choices yet. Now he had an investigation to run and a murder to solve. He was tempted to leave Deltaness altogether and put some physical distance between Willow and him. He had an excuse. He could drive to Lerwick and pull Magnie Riddell out of work at the power plant. He could talk to him there about his relationship with Emma Shearer.
Then he thought that wouldn’t be fair. If he asked to see Riddell at work, the rumours would start. Folk would see Riddell as a suspect, and before long he’d be down as a killer. Even if they found another culprit, there’d still be a taint of guilt around him. Perez thought he could wait and see the man at home. Instead he picked up his car at the community shop and drove south a little way to Ness House. He’d been there once before. It had been a birthday party. Robert Moncrieff would have been twelve or thirteen and all the boys in their class had been invited. Perez wasn’t sure why he’d been included, because he’d been a year or two younger than the others. Perhaps because the woman in charge of his boarding house had felt sorry for him and pulled some strings.
It had been summer and Robert’s father had organized a cricket match on the lawn behind the house. Perez had never played before, had been out first ball and had dropped a catch. The whole afternoon had been as alien as if he’d been shipped to a foreign country. For a while he’d sat on the grass and talked to Robert’s mother, who seemed frail and insubstantial, very English in a dress and a straw hat. For tea, there’d been little sandwiches that disappeared in a mouthful, and shop-bought cakes.
Now Perez drove through the trees and parked in front of the house. He saw that Emma’s car had been taken away. Sandy must have organized that. He rang the bell, not really expecting an answer, but Belle opened the door. She was wearing leggings and a long black top. Her hair was tied back in a red-and-orange silk scarf.
‘Jimmy, come in. Are you alright in the kitchen? Sorry about the mess. It was such a shock last night and I’m afraid we polished off a couple of bottles of wine between us, once we got the kids to bed.’ Hardly pausing between sentences.
He followed her into the large, rather dark kitchen. Automatically she pushed the kettle onto the hot plate of the Aga, then started to clear plates and pile them into the sink. ‘I’ll stick them into the dishwasher later.’ A pause. ‘Since all the kids started school and Emma had more time during the day, she did a lot of the housework stuff. We’ve been spoilt.’ She turned to him. ‘I was about to have some lunch. Will you join me?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘I suppose you’ve got lots of questions. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help. Emma was a very private person. Self-contained. Even though she was so young when she first arrived, she never confided in me. I was never any kind of mother substitute.’ Still, it seemed, Belle couldn’t stop talking. Perez wondered if she was always like that, or if his presence was making her nervous.
She made coffee, rinsed a mug under the hot tap and poured it out for him, then put a couple of plates, a loaf, oatcakes and a plate of cheese on the table. ‘Help yourself. I expect you’ve had an early start. You must be starving.’ She cut several slices of bread and pushed the board towards him, then, apparently unable to sit still, she jumped up to fetch butter and a bowl of tomatoes from the fridge.
‘Tell me about Emma,’ he said, once she’d taken her seat again. ‘She’s lived in your house for seven years. Even if she was a very private person, you must have got to know her very well.’
‘She fitted in extremely well,’ Belle said. ‘Right from the beginning. I’m not sure what I expected of a seventeen-year-old – that she’d be in Lerwick every weekend partying, or that she’d bring unsuitable boys back into the house – but she seemed very steady, very mature. In lots of ways she was more grown-up than we were. We were the ones with a hangover on a Saturday morning while she was up taking care of the children.’
‘She was good with the bairns?’ Perez was distracted for a moment after asking the question. He supposed that Willow would need to organize some form of childcare because, surely, she was planning to go back to work. How did that come about? How would you be sure that you’d found the right person? He hoped Willow would check references; she had a tendency to be impulsive.
‘Yes, she was. Emma could do the consistent thing that parents find so hard, because we’re emotionally involved. If she said no, she meant it, and they soon learned that. So they didn’t play her up, whereas they’d take no notice at all of me.’ Belle gave a little laugh. ‘The monsters.’
‘Wasn’t that hard for you?’
‘Not at all. They didn’t love her, you see. That would have been difficult, but there was no competition. I’m not even sure they liked her very much. Occasionally they’d come and moan about Emma to us. That she was too strict, that they were too old to need her now, but as I said, she’d made herself pretty well indispensable and we wouldn’t have considered getting rid of her, at least until Kate moved on to the high school.’
‘How did she get on with . . .’ Perez tried to remember the conversation he’d had with Robert at the Sunday teas about his oldest daughter’s exams. ‘Martha? She must think of herself as almost adult now. There must have been some friction between her and Emma.’
Belle was trying to spread butter straight from the fridge onto her bread and paused, knife in the air. ‘It could get a bit tempestuous occasionally, but I think it had settled down lately. They’d even had a couple of girly nights out to the cinema at Mareel.’ She gave up on the butter and cut herself a lump of cheese. ‘To be honest, Jimmy, I’ve been so busy lately working with Helena Fleming that I’ve hardly been here to see what’s been going on.’
‘Had you noticed any change in Emma recently?’
‘No. But really, Jimmy, I’m not sure that we would have noticed. I’m afraid that we took her for granted. She was reliable, quiet, always there. You know.’
Perez thought that wasn’t so different from the time when this was the laird’s house, and the servants who made life bearable for the master and his wife went unnoticed and unrecognized.
‘She was going out with Magnie Riddell, I understand.’
‘Yeah, I think they hung out together for a while. There aren’t that many young people in Deltaness. He came to call for her a few times to take her into Lerwick. All dressed up in his Sunday best. It was rather sweet.’
‘But not serious, you think?’ Perez felt that Emma was sliding away from him. He couldn’t picture her other than as a corpse, lifeless and without personality.
‘I think Magnie was serious. It was impossible to tell with Emma. She never gave anything away. She was inscrutable. All we saw was the retro style, the Fifties dresses and the make-up. That defined her for everyone.’
‘What about girlfriends? Lasses she might have confided in?’ Perez hoped there was someone. He hated to imagine Emma, alone in her room at the top of this house. He wanted to picture her laughing with her mates, texting, sharing stupid photos on Facebook.
‘I’m not sure. She probably had friends in Orkney – there was one girl who came to stay. But there was nobody close in Shetland. I can’t think of anyone she brought back to the house.’ Belle paused. ‘It must have been hard, coming to a small community at the age that she did. The kids would all have been to school together; friendships would have been formed. Emma must have felt like an outsider. She was from Orkney, another islander, but that wouldn’t have mattered. It would still feel as if she’d come from the other side of the world.’ There was another silence before Belle continued, ‘Besides, Emma
never made any effort to fit in. I had the impression that she didn’t really need anyone. She was like the animal in the Kipling story: she was the cat that walked alone.’
Perez thought Emma had done what she’d needed to, in order to survive. She’d come from a troubled home to a place where she’d known nobody. He thought of her now as a cat, slinky and elegant, going through life in her own way and on her own terms, choosing companionship carefully, keeping her distance. But the self-reliance hadn’t been able to protect her in the end. She’d been the cat who walked alone, and it seemed she’d died without friends too.
‘As I said, there was a lass from Orkney who came to stay once,’ Belle said. ‘Emma asked if it was OK. She was lovely and they seemed very close. I offered her the spare room, but she slept on a mattress in Emma’s room in the end.’
‘Do you remember her name?’
‘Claire,’ Belle said. She got to her feet to fetch the coffee pot from the Aga, waved it at Perez, who nodded. ‘Can’t remember her second name, but they’d been to school together in Kirkwall, so I’m sure you’ll be able to track her down. She had curly red hair, the kids adored her and she laughed a lot. Robert and I talked about that afterwards. About how we’d never really seen Emma relax until Claire was with her.’
‘When did you last see Emma?’ Perez asked. ‘I know you heard her television on Saturday night, but when did you last see her?’
‘During supper on Saturday. It was a bit of a bonkers meal. Robert was out with some NHS colleagues in town and I was frantic. I’d been baking all afternoon for the teas, and trying to catch up on some work for Helena too. One eye on the laptop for emails, and the other on the oven for scones. For supper, I just dug a few burgers out of the freezer and Emma made a salad. The kids were hyper – this time of year, when the nights get lighter, they seem to be perpetually wound up. Emma managed to calm them down a bit, but Sam and Kate were still giggly, as if they had some mischief planned. Martha hardly said anything, but that’s how she is at the moment. Moody.’
‘And what happened after you’d eaten?’
‘Emma took the little ones up for a bath and got them ready for bed. Martha slunk up to her room. Charlie was out with a mate and didn’t come back until later.’
‘But you didn’t see Emma again?’
Belle thought carefully about that. Perez thought she was running through the events of the evening in her head. ‘No, I didn’t see her. She shouted down the stairs to say that Katie and Sam were in bed and ready for a story. If I’m at home I always like to read to them before they go to sleep. Then she said that if I didn’t need her for anything else, she’d head up to the attic. That’s usually the deal. When the little ones are in bed, the time’s her own.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘About eight-thirty. A bit later perhaps. Robert got home at ten and we were in bed by eleven.’
Perez imagined Emma retreating to her room, glad to escape at last the messy house and the manic children. It would have been peaceful there. Nothing on that Saturday seemed to have been different from any other. So what had happened to make things change, to persuade someone that the young woman would have to die? He got to his feet. ‘Thanks for the lunch.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Belle said. ‘I haven’t been very helpful, have I?’
‘You’ve painted a picture of a very private person. A bit austere, perhaps.’
‘Have I?’ She sounded surprised. ‘Perhaps I have. And that sums her up, actually. Emma was very private and a bit austere.’
Perez was walking from the house when his phone rang. He looked at it, wondering if it might be Willow, with more explanations, more excuses. Half-hoping that it might be, because a call from her would always excite him. And because he knew that he’d overreacted. At some point they would need to talk. But it was Sandy.
‘Where are you?’
‘Still in Deltaness,’ Perez said. ‘I’ve just been talking to Belle Moncrieff at Ness House.’
‘You might want to come back to the Flemings’ place.’ Sandy paused and Perez could hear muttered voices behind him. ‘We’ve found Emma’s handbag.’
Chapter Eighteen
Willow was sitting outside Hesti, her face turned to the sun. She was drinking tea and nibbling the biscuits Sandy had brought up from the community shop, stealing a few moments to herself. She was thinking about Jimmy Perez. There was nothing unusual about that; she often found herself thinking about Jimmy Perez. Today, though, was rather different. She was contemplating a life without him. She was nurturing the spark of defiance that she’d need to carry her through the investigation with the man as a colleague. If Perez couldn’t accept their child, let him stay in his house in Ravenswick, let him keep it as a shrine to his lost love. Let him wallow in guilt and self-pity. Willow was a strong and independent woman and she would manage without him. If he found it impossible to move on from Fran’s death, she would be better off on her own.
She was still sitting there, this time trying to untangle the strands of the case – two hangings: one suicide and one murder; two educated families, with no motive for killing the woman who’d had dealings with their children – when Daniel Fleming found her.
Willow thought he looked very much like his son. She’d seen photographs of Christopher and Ellie all over the house, and Daniel and the boy had the same dark good looks, the same rather haughty stare that gave them an aura of arrogant self-belief.
‘I need to talk to you,’ Fleming said. It came across as a demand. There was no sign of Helena, who must be doing the afternoon school run. Willow thought he must have come to her straight from the walk. He looked hot and a little dishevelled.
‘Is there somewhere we can use to chat? My colleagues are still in the house and we might be disturbed out here.’ If she had to act the part of senior detective, Willow thought she’d struggle, sitting here on the grass.
‘We could go to Helena’s studio.’
She got to her feet, brushing biscuit crumbs from her sweater. It had never bothered her before that she might seem unprofessional, but now she felt she had to prove herself. She would show Perez that she could work well as a pregnant woman, without his support.
The studio faced onto the courtyard and had been converted from a smaller outhouse. The byre was to the east of it, closer to the shore. If a killer had dragged Emma Shearer’s body to the barn on the afternoon that it had been found, surely Helena would have heard them passing, even if she hadn’t seen them. Willow made a mental note of that. There was no spectacular view from here, but the huge windows in the roof let in light, a vision of clouds as thin as smoke against a blue sky. It contained a drawing board on an easel, a big pale-wood desk with a sophisticated computer. On the walls, photos of people Willow vaguely recognized wearing Fleming creations. She took the seat by Helena’s desk and Daniel sat beside her, as if he were the client.
‘What is it that you want to tell me?’ He looked so serious, so intense, that she half-expected a confession. She wondered if they should be doing this in the police station, where the conversation could be recorded. She saw the possibility of her escape. If Daniel Fleming admitted to the murder of Emma Shearer, she could fly home and get on with her life and let Jimmy Perez get on with his.
‘I was obsessed with Emma Shearer. You’ll see that from my phone calls and emails.’ A pause. ‘I thought I was in love with her.’
‘Are you saying that you stalked her? Made her life uncomfortable?’
‘No! No, I wouldn’t have done that.’ He seemed shocked by the suggestion. ‘When she asked me to stop seeing her – stop contacting her – I did.’ He paused. ‘And in the beginning, she responded to me. I thought the relationship was reciprocal. I never put any pressure on her.’
Oh yeah, even though she was less than half your age, you’re married with two kids, going through some kind of mid-life crisis and she was a damaged young woman.
‘When did this start?’ Willow kept her voic
e gentle, sympathetic even.
‘Soon after we moved here. Helena’s business suddenly took off, big-style. Something to do with the romance of living in the islands adding to her image, perhaps. And I was left looking after the kids, doing the boring stuff. It wasn’t what I was used to. After the excitement of building the house and the move, hardly sleeping, living and breathing the project, everything seemed very flat, meaningless. Maybe I had some sort of breakdown.’
Or maybe you just found out how tough it is to do the domestic stuff, the boring grown-up chores that keep things going.
‘And that was about a year ago?’
‘Less than that. We moved in at the end of last summer.’
So, Willow thought, Emma would have been twenty-three, a lot younger than Fleming, but still an adult. A relationship with her might have been foolish, but not a crime. ‘Tell me about it. About her.’
He sat with his hands on his knees. ‘Now, I think I turned her into my dream woman. Young, stylish, undemanding. I needed someone to be excited about.’ He looked up and for the first time he smiled. ‘Pathetic, huh? Classic mid-life-crisis stuff. I thought Emma might make me feel alive again.’
Willow thought he was hoping for understanding – a rebuttal to the statement that he was pathetic – but she couldn’t give that. ‘And what did she make of you?’
‘Her family was troubled. She grew up with domestic violence, later with a father in prison and a mother who couldn’t cope. She lived in Orkney and had only been to the Scottish mainland a couple of times. I don’t know. Perhaps I represented excitement for her too. Broader horizons. I lent her books about art and architecture, occasionally we watched a film while the kids were here playing. I liked that, playing her teacher.’
‘Her guru?’
Willow had grown up in a commune and she understood the power of a charismatic leader and how easy it was to give up responsibility to someone who claimed to have all the answers.