Shetland 05: Dead Water (26 page)

‘John didn’t say anything about it,’ Evie said at last. ‘If Jerry met him or phoned him, John didn’t tell me.’

‘And things were just the same between you? Those last few days of John’s life?’

There was a silence filled with gulls screeching.

‘I don’t know!’ Evie screamed louder than the gulls. ‘I was busy, about to be married, anxious about dresses and flowers and crazy stuff like that. And about work. If he was different, I didn’t notice. Don’t you think I wish I’d stopped? Dropped everything. Spent every last second with him.’ She stopped abruptly. It was as if the needle had been lifted from a vinyl record mid-track. When she started again, the voice was almost a whisper. ‘We never made love. Came close a few times. But we thought we had years ahead of us. Let’s wait, we thought. Make the marriage night something special. And now? Now, I wish we’d never got out of bed.’ She turned towards Willow and there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘Then I might have been pregnant. Now I’ll never have a child.’ Willow put her arm round her shoulder and walked with Evie back up the beach.

As they approached the house, Willow saw that Evie’s parents were looking out for them through the kitchen window.
Would my parents behave like that if someone close to me had died?
And she thought that they would. They’d be over-protective too. And they’d feel guilty, like Francis and Jessie, convinced that they should have been able to save their daughter from this pain. She thought again that it was time to take a trip to Uist to see them. Before it was too late.

Inside the house Evie reverted to the mode of obedient child. She’d left the anger on the beach. She sat at the table with her back to the window, sipped at her tea and crumbled a biscuit into the saucer. When Willow and Perez stood up to go, she hardly acknowledged their leaving.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Perez wished he were the person walking on the beach with Evie. Here, in the stuffy kitchen, surrounded by the clutter of the family’s life, he could hardly breathe. Jessie chattered, a stream of pointless observations, as if words would somehow prevent her from thinking. She was washing up at the sink and turned occasionally for a response from him. He would nod or prompt her with a short phrase of agreement, and off she would go again. Francis said nothing unless he was asked a direct question.

‘We told Evie’s brother Magnus not to come back just yet,’ Jessie said. ‘He was planning to be here for the wedding of course, coming up on the ferry on Friday night, but we told him to stay put when we heard the news about John. Evie needs her space just now, don’t you think so, Jimmy?’ A look over her shoulder, a nod from him, and the words went on. ‘We’ll organize the funeral when John’s body is released. He has no family of his own left now. There’s a cousin, I think, somewhere in the south, but they’ve not met since they were bairns. Much better that we do it.’

She paused for breath and to carry the dripping baking tray to stand on the back of the range to dry. ‘Was John already dead the last time you were here, Jimmy? I’ve been thinking about that.’

‘I think he must have been.’ Perez supposed this was information that was already generally known. Willow had released a press statement asking for people who might have seen Henderson early on the morning of his death.

‘And we were here, carrying on as normal – me in the fields and Francis in his boatshed – and we knew nothing about it. That’s such a strange thought. I’m glad we live in Fetlar. It means that Evie can escape from all the gossip about the murders. There’ll be talk, because she knew both men. You know what folk are like, Jimmy. You know how cruel they can be.’

He nodded again. Then he spoke just to stop her. It would be easy enough to sit in the traditional Shetland chair with its high wooden back and listen, but he thought she must be exhausted with this need to fill the silence with all those words. He felt it was his responsibility to give her a rest.

‘It seems that Jerry Markham had changed,’ Perez said. It came to him that this was gossip of a kind too. Unsubstantiated gossip. They only had Annabel’s and her father’s word that it was true. Willow had asked Sandy to get details of the vicar, and other members of the congregation, so they could check it out. ‘He’d joined a church in London and had found a girlfriend there.’ Jessie and Francis stared at him.

Again it was Jessie who spoke first. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Jerry Markham we knew.’ Her voice was unsympathetic. She needed to save all her concern for her daughter.

‘I wondered if he’d been in touch with you. Perhaps he’d sent you a letter. An apology for the way he’d treated Evie.’

‘No,’ Jessie said. ‘There was nothing of that kind. And it would take more than a letter to make me feel differently about him. You didn’t see Evie at the time that he left her. You didn’t see how thin and ill she looked.’

Perez turned to the man who was still standing, his back to the stove. ‘Francis? Did you hear from Jerry Markham?’

‘Markham would know better than to try to contact me.’ Watt’s mouth snapped shut like a trap.

‘Peter Markham told me that you’d met him in the street a little while ago,’ Perez said. ‘He told me that you were on friendly terms then.’

‘I had no quarrel with the father,’ Watt said. ‘No reason not to be polite to the man.’

And at that Jessie Watt started talking again about Francis’s work. ‘They’re going to put one of his yoals in a museum in Bergen. Imagine that! He has a waiting list of folk wanting to buy boats from him.’ And then even she lapsed into silence and stared out of the window at Willow and her daughter, walking along the beach. They all watched as Willow put her arm round Evie’s shoulder and started back with her along the path across the field towards the house.

Willow and Perez had to wait a while for the ferry back to Yell and sat in the car at the pier, sharing notes.

‘How was the girl?’ Perez asked.

‘Angry. And who can blame her.’ The walk along the beach had given Willow some colour. She looked fitter, healthier. ‘I don’t think she had any idea that Markham had taken up with Annabel Grey, though. That was a complete surprise.’

‘And she still says that she never met him after he arrived back?’

‘Mmm. And that she deleted the message he’d left on her voicemail.’ Willow turned to face him. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose. ‘Where do we go from here, Jimmy? I still feel we’re nowhere near finding out what went on.’

‘Should we call in on Joe Sinclair on our way back to Lerwick?’

‘Aye.’ She seemed preoccupied. Was she dwelling on her failure to get a result? ‘Let’s do that.’

‘It still seems a coincidence to me that Markham was at the terminal, so close to where Henderson was working, that afternoon. And Joe was out at Hvidahus with Evie and the Fiscal on the morning Henderson died. They were all there, within half a mile of where John was killed. He’s on the edge of both of our investigations.’

‘Sure, Jimmy. Whatever you think.’ But he wasn’t sure that she was really listening. She’d thought the conversation with Evie would bring a new energy to the inquiry. Now perhaps she believed that the long trip to Fetlar had been a waste of time.

Joe Sinclair was short and solid. Confident. Practical. Perez had served with him on a working party that had set out guidelines for a response to a possible major oil spill and had come to respect his straightforward approach to problems. There was no bluster with Joe Sinclair. He might have his own agenda, but there was no obvious power-play.

On the wall of his office had been pinned a detailed large-scale map of Shetland and a photo of the last ship he’d skippered, a colour image of Shetland from space, a photo of his wife and grown-up daughters.

‘You’re here about John.’ There was a coffee machine in the corner of the room. The jug was already filled with water and Sinclair tipped grounds from a jar into the filter and switched it on. ‘I still can’t believe he’s dead.’ And Perez saw that in this case the cliché was true. Joe looked at the door as if he was expecting Henderson to walk into his office for his next shift. ‘He’d worked here longer than me and could have done my job with his eyes shut, but he preferred being out on the water. I’d come to depend on him.’

The coffee gurgled and Sinclair fetched mugs from a drawer, glad of an excuse to turn away.

Perez looked at Willow, offering her the opportunity to lead the interview. He’d already introduced her as the Senior Investigating Officer. But she shook her head briefly and throughout the discussion sat very quiet and still. Listening intently? Or still preoccupied by her encounter with Evie Watt, wishing that she’d taken a different tack, asked other questions?

‘I’d like to talk about Jerry Markham first.’ Perez took his coffee and set it carefully on the floor at his side. ‘You knew him.’ Not a question. Joe Sinclair knew everyone in Shetland. ‘What did you make of him?’

There was a moment of silence. It wasn’t the question Joe had been expecting. But he was accustomed to people asking for his opinion and he answered readily enough. ‘He wasn’t a bad lad. Spoilt rotten, and that wasn’t his fault. Maria ruined him, and Peter would never stand up to her. It left Jerry with an unfortunate manner. Arrogant. He always managed to rub folk up the wrong way.’

‘You came across him when he was working on the
Shetland Times
?’

‘He turned up occasionally, sniffing out stories. Hoping for something from me when Andy Belshaw sent him away with a flea in his ear.’ Joe paused. ‘Andy was one of the people he managed to irritate.’

‘Anything specific?’

Joe smiled sadly. ‘There was a minor incident at the terminal. A bit of a spill. Not even big enough for us to put the boom across the voe. But Jerry turned it into a disaster and sold the story to one of the broadsheets in the south. That gave Andy a lot of hassle with his managers, who wanted to know why he’d let the thing blow out of proportion. Jerry was never his favourite person after that.’

‘Yet Jerry was in the terminal the afternoon before he died. Andy met him and showed him round.’ Perez wasn’t sure how important this was, but wished he knew what Jerry had been doing at the terminal, wished there was a notebook, fragments of an article on a laptop, to point them in the right direction.

‘Mr Markham was a hotshot reporter these days. Andy could hardly turn him away.’

‘Did you know Jerry was back in Shetland?’

‘No,’ Joe said. ‘I haven’t been down at the Ravenswick Hotel for months.’ He gave a brief grin. ‘I can’t afford the prices in the bar these days.’

‘John didn’t mention him?’ Perez finished his coffee, wondered if he needed more.

Joe shook his head. ‘But then John wouldn’t. He was the most private man I’ve ever met. If Markham was trying to get in touch, nobody else would know about it.’

‘Markham didn’t call in here the afternoon he died?’

‘No,’ Joe said. ‘I was working that day and, like I said, I didn’t even know he was back.’ He paused and studied the photo of his family on his desk. ‘Something odd did happen.’

‘Yes?’ Outside the office window, Perez saw that the weather was changing again. A front was coming in, bringing a westerly breeze and scraps of cloud.

‘John was here in the office. He’d just come in from bringing in the
Lord Rannoch
and we were talking about the roster for the next couple of months. His mobile went. Usually he’d just ignore it, switch it off and say he’d deal with it later. But he apologized and went outside to take the call. Then he came back and asked if he could take an hour off.’ Joe looked up from his desk. ‘That was unprecedented. Even when his wife was ill, John organized things so that he never took time off work. So I said fine, of course.’

‘Did you ask him what the call was about?’

‘Not directly. I didn’t want to pry. I probably said “Everything OK?” And he just nodded and went out.’ Joe stood up and went to the window, looked at the sky with a sailor’s eye. ‘I thought it was something about the wedding. Evie panicking about details. You know women before the big day. And John was besotted with her. She was the only person he’d leave work for.’

‘Did he go out in his car?’ Perez was trying to eep his voice calm, but he thought this might be something new. If John Henderson had met Jerry Markham on the afternoon he died, they might be close to finding a motive for Henderson’s death. If he’d seen or heard something, the killer might have been forced to stop him talking.

‘I don’t know. There was a thick fog. It came in very suddenly. It was quite clear when John came into the office for the meeting, but when he went I couldn’t even see the tugs across the water. I don’t think I heard his car, but then the fog muffles sound too. I assumed he’d driven away.’

‘And he came back that afternoon?’ Perez asked. He glanced across at Willow, who seemed sharper, more alert. She’d recognized the significance of this piece of news too.

‘Yes, almost an hour after he’d left,’ Sinclair said. ‘He put his head round the door to let me know.’

‘How did he seem?’

Sinclair gave a little laugh. ‘How could I tell? John was never one for showing his emotions at the best of times. And I saw him for a second as he called in to let me know he was back.’ He paused and became suddenly serious. ‘But he didn’t look like a man who’d just committed murder. Don’t go down that route, Jimmy. John Henderson was a good man. I’ll not have his memory sullied by rumours.’

They sat for a moment in silence. The wind blew some scrap paper round the yard outside the office. Sinclair frowned at it as if it was an affront to his idea of order.

‘John was working here after Jerry had died,’ Perez said. ‘Did he talk at all about what had happened?’

‘Everyone was talking about it! Jerry Markham wasn’t the most popular man in Shetland, as you’ll have gathered. So it was almost as if folk were taking pleasure in the fact that he’d been killed. Enjoying the excitement anyway. The drama of the Fiscal finding him in the racing yoal.’

‘And what was John’s reaction?’

‘He said it was wrong to treat another man’s death as a subject of gossip. There was always something of the preacher in John, and sometimes the men didn’t take to it. For example, he didn’t like swearing. Get a bunch of seamen together and there’s always going to be swearing. Usually he was mild enough and didn’t make a fuss about it. Just a gentle comment that they should watch what they were saying. But the talk about Markham upset him. I thought he was going to lose his temper, but he walked away from them. Again I asked him if he was OK. He didn’t really answer. That was the last time I talked to him.’