Shetland 05: Dead Water (13 page)

‘That was a woman called Amelia Bartlett. Markham’s boss. Seems she’d been away for the weekend. I’d left messages for her, but she’s only just got them.’ Willow looked at them. ‘She doesn’t have any idea what story Jerry was working on. If there was a story. As far as she was aware, Jerry was in Shetland on annual leave. She said he hadn’t been himself lately. He’d been very quiet. She wondered if he’d been ill. Stress maybe. Burnout. And that was why he’d wanted the time out.’

Chapter Sixteen

Sandy caught John Henderson at work early on Monday morning in Sella Ness, just across the water from the oil terminal. This complex was run by Shetland Islands Council and there were no gates or barbed wire here. Sandy thought a terrorist wanting to attack the terminal could just drive down the road and row a small boat across the voe. Though maybe it wouldn’t be that easy: the harbour master or the pilots would see what was going on, and there were probably closed-circuit cameras covering the water.

He found Henderson in Port Control, drinking a mug of tea and listening to Bobby Robertson, who worked for the vessel traffic service. There was a panoramic view over the water and the place looked just like the bridge of a ship, with radar screens and high-tech equipment that beeped and flashed. Sandy was intimidated by the instruments and the sense of efficient expertise, by the smartness of Henderson in his officer’s uniform. The pilot was middle-aged, grey-haired.

‘What’s this about, Sandy? I don’t have long.’ The pilot looked at his watch. ‘I’m just about to go out on a job.’

Sandy thought he was an intelligent man and he shouldn’t have needed to ask. He’d have heard about Markham’s murder. ‘Just a word,’ he said. ‘And maybe somewhere in private?’ He could sense that Bobby Robertson was listening to every word, and he was a famous gossip.

‘Just come along here then.’ Henderson led him away from the control room and pushed open the door to a small bedroom. ‘This is where I stay when I’m on night shift.’

‘You’ll have guessed what this is about,’ Sandy said.

‘Jerry Markham.’

‘Aye, did you know him?’

Henderson nodded slowly. ‘Not well, but I’d seen him around. Once or twice at the Ravenswick Hotel when he was still working for the
Shetland Times
.’

‘You didn’t like him?’ Henderson had closed the bedroom door and Sandy felt trapped in the tiny space. He’d never liked being shut in. Was this what it felt like to be in a submarine? A prison cell? He was aware of his own breathing and wondered if Henderson could hear it too.

‘I didn’t like his column in the
Shetland Times
. It always seemed kind of unpleasant to me. Sneering and cynical. He made out he was better than anyone else. More cool. Those of us who loved living in the islands weren’t worth bothering with.’

‘And he’d been Evie’s boyfriend,’ Sandy said.

Henderson looked at him. His eyes were blue and sharp.

‘What are you saying?’

‘That there’d be no love lost between you. Nothing more than that.’

Henderson leaned towards Sandy. Not a threat, but preparing for a declaration. ‘Markham treated her badly,’ he said, ‘but if he’d done the decent thing and stood by Evie when he got her pregnant, she wouldn’t be engaged to me. And she’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life since my wife Agnes died. I still wake up in the morning and thank God for sending her to me. I have no reason to kill him.’

Sandy wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. ‘How long have you been on your own?’

‘Five years.’ The man paused. ‘I hadn’t thought I’d miss the company. Agnes and I never had children, and I was used to being on my own. Then I got to know Evie and it was like coming alive all over again. A fresh start, you know.’

Sandy wondered if that might happen to Jimmy Perez one day: he might meet a bonny young woman and fall in love with her. He couldn’t see it. Nobody would make Jimmy light up as Fran had done.

A thought occurred to him. ‘You live in Hvidahus, don’t you? Are you involved in this campaign to stop the tidal energy coming ashore there?’

‘No, I don’t see it as a problem. There’ll be a bit of disruption when they widen the track and build the substation, but I can live with that.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Besides, Power of Water is Evie’s baby. She’d kill me if I objected.’

‘The wedding’s on Saturday?’

‘Aye, in the kirk just up the road from Evie’s house, and a party in the community hall in the evening.’

Sandy wondered how Henderson would get on at a party. It was hard to imagine him drinking too many drams and dancing with the pretty bridesmaids. ‘Evie didn’t fancy going home to Fetlar to be wed?’

‘She has old college friends coming up from the south and it’s easier for them to get to the mainland.’ Henderson smiled. ‘At least, that was what she said. But I think she knew how much it mattered to me to be married close to home. We’re both members of the congregation there. Her family understands, and we’ll go over to Fetlar on Sunday to visit the old folk who can’t get out to the wedding. Evie will put on her wedding dress and we’ll take them some cake. You know how it is.’

Sandy nodded. He knew just what was expected. ‘Did you know that Markham was in Shetland this week?’

In the control room a phone rang. Henderson waited until it had been answered before he spoke again. ‘Evie told me he was back,’ he said. ‘But I heard the news about the murder on the radio like everyone else.’

‘Markham phoned Evie a few times when he was here. I wondered what that was about.’

‘Evie didn’t tell me about the calls until last night. She was worried I’d be upset that Markham was pestering her.’ Henderson had one of those voices that didn’t let on what he was feeling, so Sandy couldn’t tell whether he was angry Evie hadn’t told him about them before, or pleased that she’d let him know eventually. ‘She didn’t answer them.’

‘Markham was over at the terminal on Friday afternoon,’ Sandy said. ‘Did you see him?’

There was a moment of silence. ‘Why would I?’ Henderson said. ‘We bring the tankers in and then we take them out. Then we leave. We have no real contact with the terminal.’ He looked at his watch again – the only indication that the interview was starting to irritate him.

‘Where were you on Friday night?’

‘I was here,’ Henderson said. ‘Catching some sleep because I was on call.’ He stood up. ‘Now is there anything else, Sandy? I should be getting back to work.’

‘Were you called out to work on Friday night?’ Sandy asked.

‘Not until the early hours of Saturday morning.’ Henderson seemed almost amused by the question, but again Sandy had no real idea what he was thinking. ‘But I have no proof for you. No witnesses. They don’t lock us in.’

Outside a helicopter came in to land at Scatsta. The noise was very loud and the room seemed to shake. Sandy thanked Henderson for his help and left the building. As he walked to his car a group of men in identical blue overalls stared at him. He felt as if he was in one of those cowboy films he’d watched as a kid – the stranger riding into town.

In Lerwick the morning briefing was just breaking up. There was a whiteboard on the wall and Willow Reeves was staring at it, absorbed, as if the solution to the case was captured there in the scrawled names and photos. She didn’t notice the rest of the team leaving or Sandy coming in. He coughed to get her attention and she turned, startled.

‘We still don’t know where the man was killed,’ she said. ‘There’s no crime scene. If we had that, maybe we could move the investigation on. There’d be some forensic trace. It’s driving me crazy. It’s as if Markham drove out of Sullom Voe in the fog and then disappeared. How did his body get from there to a boat in the marina at Aith, and his car back to the museum? What did he do that triggered those events?’

‘He gave somebody a lift?’ Sandy said. ‘Anybody walking along a road in the country, you’d stop and see if they needed a ride. Specially in that weather.’

‘And would Markham do that too?’ Willow demanded. ‘Snooty Markham, who’s used to city ways.’

‘Maybe it would depend who it was.’ Sandy was thinking, struggling to keep up. Willow seemed to jump from thought to thought, to build links and conclusions while he was still beginning the process. ‘He always had a reputation for liking a pretty girl, even before he got Evie into trouble.’

‘Could he have bumped into Evie on the road?’ Willow asked. ‘I still can’t get my head round the geography of this place. Wherever I look there’s water. It’s disorientating.’

‘Evie lives off the back road not far from Sullom. If he was going that way and she was out, he could have seen her.’

‘But that’s just about chance, and I don’t see this as a random attack.’ Willow grabbed her jacket from her desk. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘Where are we off to?’

She was already out of the door. ‘I need to find where the man was murdered,’ she said. ‘We’ll drive from Sullom Voe, on the route Markham would have taken towards his parents’ hotel.’

Sandy was about to say that he’d just come back that way. But he saw that it would make no difference to Willow and, whatever he said to her, she’d make him do it again anyway.

A damp drizzle had blown in from the sea. It wasn’t the thick fog that there’d been the day of Markham’s death, but it blurred the outline of the hills and there was the sense of being closed in. Usually Shetland was about low horizons and long views, and today Sandy was reminded about his one trip to London and how trapped he’d felt by the buildings there. He was driving and he took the road slowly. Beside him, Willow was so tense that she made him feel anxious too.

‘So what was it like where you grew up?’ he said. He couldn’t bear the silence. ‘Did you look after your own there too?’

‘I was one of the outsiders,’ she said. ‘I was born in North Uist, but we never really belonged.’

Sandy thought she’d stop there. She didn’t seem the sort who would confide about her personal life. But perhaps she needed to fill the silence as much as he did, or perhaps she needed distracting. This was her first case, her big chance, and so far nothing was going to plan. So while he inched north along the smooth road that had been bought by the oil money, she started talking about her early life in the Western Isles, and by the time the giant tanks of Sullom Voe lurked out of the gloom he thought he knew all about her.

‘My parents were hippies,’ she said. ‘After the good life. And they were good people. With some friends they bought a house in North Uist. A place big enough for a couple of families and outbuildings that could house more.’

‘You grew up in a commune?’ He sounded shocked, but he couldn’t help himself. Communes were for dropouts and druggies, not kids who grew up to be cops.

‘Do you find the idea amusing, Sergeant?’ But she was joking too and not really angry. He liked that about her. You felt she wouldn’t take herself too seriously, even now, when worry about the case was eating into her.

‘I don’t think many detective inspectors grew up in that sort of family,’ he said. ‘Didn’t hippies believe they were outside the law?’

‘Oh, we had our own rules,’ she said. ‘Everything discussed at length at interminable community meetings. No meat. No TV. All our income pooled, for the good of the commune. Children were to be cared for in common. And strangers were to be made welcome.’ The last phrase came out in a hard and bitter voice.

‘What happened?’

‘One of the strangers betrayed us,’ she said. ‘Stole all our money.’ Sandy waited for her to go on, but she stared out of the window into the grey rain and said nothing.

At last she turned back into the car. ‘So you can imagine what it was like growing up there,’ she said. ‘We went to the local school and got teased for being the hippy kids. We wore weird home-made clothes. No leather shoes, naturally. We had no Gaelic of course, no real island culture. The adults tried to learn, but the islanders didn’t make it easy for them to join in. In the end we were isolated and it felt like it was us against the world. I left for university, wanting to be like everyone else, but some of the old commune values stuck.’ She laughed. ‘I’m a veggie to this day. Do yoga. Meditate.’

‘Are your folks still there?’ Sandy asked.

‘Oh yes, they’ll be there forever now, milking their goats and saving the planet. How can they admit to themselves that they made a mistake? It would be as if they’ve wasted the last thirty years.’

He would have liked to ask how often she went to visit, but by now they were nearly at Sullom Voe, and anyway he sensed that she regretted having brought up her family for discussion.

The cloud was even lower. They passed the stuffed figures of the couple in their wedding outfits, and Sandy was driving so slowly that he could see that the photos covering the faces were those of John Henderson and Evie Watt. It seemed a strangely frivolous thing for Henderson to agree to. Even if Evie’s mates had created the figures in the run-up to her hen night, he could have made her take them away now. Perhaps he had a sense of humour after all.

‘What do you want to do?’ He found that his attitude to Willow had changed since he’d found out that she’d grown up in a commune and that he regarded her with something like suspicion. Then he heard Jimmy Perez’s voice in his head.
That’s ridiculous, Sandy Wilson, and you know it.
He tried to make his voice warmer. ‘Should I turn round and drive back more slowly? You can shout if you want me to stop.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Do just that.’ Then, with a smile: ‘I suppose you think I’m daft.’

In the end he was the one to find it. Willow was craning her neck and looking to the verges on either side, while he kept his eyes on the road. There was a junction with a small track leading off to the left. It would go to Swinning and branch again for Lunna. Near the junction the council had built a lay-by so that folk wanting to car-share could leave their vehicles and catch a lift up to the terminal or into town with someone driving from Brae. There were black skid marks on the main road swerving towards the lay-by. Sandy pulled to a stop, but avoided the tracks. They both got out to look.