Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (28 page)

David shook his head. ‘We were catering for a fortieth birthday that day. Lunch and afternoon tea, and lots of the guests stayed over. We were both busy for most of the afternoon. I don’t think Charles would have had a moment to slip away to a meeting until late in the evening, and by that time of course the party would have been well under way in the Meoness community hall.’

‘I don’t suppose any of Caroline’s family spent the night here?’ Willow thought it would be the kind of place southerners might like to stay.

Again David shook his head. ‘Caroline asked if we could put up a few of her guests, but we were already full. The birthday party.’

‘And you weren’t invited to the hamefarin’?’ Willow thought that was odd. Grusche baked for them and supplied their eggs. This was a close community and usually everyone would be asked along.

‘We were invited, but we didn’t go. Charles said he might slip out later; he was always up for a celebration. The last thing I needed after a full day in the hotel was being dragged around the dance floor.’ He gave a self-deprecating shrug. ‘As you can imagine, I’m not much of a dancer. Not much of a party animal at all. Charles loved dancing and seemed to remember the steps when he’d only been told them once.’

‘Do you think Charles could have called into the hamefarin’ when you’d sorted out your visitors here?’ Nobody had seen him, Willow thought, and he wasn’t on the guest list supplied by Caroline, but he might have put in a brief appearance. Any proof that the two victims had met would give them something to work on.

‘I don’t think so. He didn’t mention it.’

‘Were you with him all evening?’ But now, thinking about it in more detail, Willow couldn’t see that Charles and Eleanor
could
have met once the hamefarin’ got under way. The woman had been in full view of the other wedding guests, and later she’d been with her friends outside the holiday home. If Charles had been at the party, Ian and Polly would have recognized him when he turned up at the derelict croft. With his strange hair and his large hands he would have stood out.

‘I worked for a couple of hours in the garden. I find it relaxing. An escape. I suppose Charles could have gone out then. I was inside by eleven-thirty, though, and he was certainly in the house when I got in. And if he’d been to the hamefarin’ he’d have been full of it – the gossip and what everyone was wearing. He didn’t mention it.’ David looked up, startled. ‘I can’t believe that we won’t have any more of those conversations. He was such an entertaining man. He delighted in trivial domestic details, things I would never notice if he hadn’t pointed them out.’ He paused. ‘It feels as if my world’s monochrome now. The colour has all drained away.’

And Willow thought he looked as if the colour had drained from
him
. He was a grey man. Burnt-out like wood ash.

‘We’re looking for a woman called Monica. Does the name mean anything to you?’ Willow felt she was desperate, clutching at straws. A scribbled name in Eleanor’s notebook. What could she possibly have to do with the murder of two people in Shetland?

David paused for a while. ‘There’s an artist who works in Yell. Came up from London a while back. Monica Leaze. But I don’t suppose she could be the person you’re after.’

Willow sensed Perez’s interest. Nothing tangible, except a slight tension. She shot a glance at him, but there was no response.

‘Could you tell us what you know about Ms Leaze?’ she said.

‘She held an exhibition in the gallery in Yell. We couldn’t get to that, but I looked her up on the Internet. She paints. Interiors mostly. Interesting. She’s based in London, but spends part of the year in Yell. I’d wondered if there was something that might suit here – we like to support local artists – but I felt that her work was too quirky and gritty for us. Our visitors expect something more traditional. Besides, we couldn’t have afforded her. Then, about a month ago, we called in. The bulk of the exhibition had been moved, but there were still a couple of her pieces.’

‘Did you meet her?’ This was Perez, his voice so quiet that it was almost a whisper. ‘If she stays in Yell, perhaps she was there. Talking about her work.’

‘No, there was nothing like that. I wasn’t even expecting them to have any of her stuff. We were going to Lerwick for shopping and called in on the way home. They do a good tea in the cafe, and we wandered around afterwards to look at the art.’

‘Perhaps Charles met her on a different occasion?’ Perez again, tentative, almost apologetic. ‘If he liked her paintings . . .’

Willow wasn’t sure where Perez was going with this. She couldn’t make a connection between an artist in Yell, a hotelier in Unst and a film-maker from London.

For a moment David didn’t answer. Willow even wondered if he’d heard. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘And Charles was something of a philistine when it came to art. Leaze’s stuff wasn’t really his sort of thing.’

‘But he might have met her in a different context?’ Perez moved to the table and sat between them. His elbows were on the table and his hands cupped his face. He didn’t look at David, but had obviously picked up some uncertainty in his response.

There was another moment of silence. Willow saw Sandy’s car drive into the courtyard. She hoped he wouldn’t come barging in. She sensed that this conversation between Gordon and Perez was important. ‘Charlie was a good actor,’ David said, ‘but I knew him very well.’

‘And you thought he might be pretending that he’d never heard of Monica Leaze?’ Perez tipped his head slightly to the side to put the question.

‘Not exactly that, but I’m not convinced that our calling into the gallery was entirely by chance. I wanted to come straight back. We’d had a long day and had bags of shopping in the boot. Charlie was insistent. “Let’s give ourselves a bit of a treat. A real tea.” He knew I’d never deny him anything that he really wanted. And then he looked at the paintings. I could tell immediately that they weren’t his style, but he looked at them very carefully. Usually he would have been bored. He had a butterfly mind, in turn passionate and dismissive. But he took a sort of proprietary interest in them. As if they’d been painted by a protégée. Or someone that he knew.’

‘Did you ask him if he knew Monica? If he’d met her perhaps in London?’ Now Perez sounded like an elderly teacher, precise but encouraging. Willow wondered how he did it, how he seemed to know exactly what approach would work with a witness. He’d told her once, in a moment of weakness at the end of a case, that his ex-wife had called him ‘emotionally incontinent’ – too empathetic for his own good. Perhaps that was his secret.

Another silence. Sandy looked in through the window and Willow shook her head slightly. He walked away and round to the front of the house. At last David answered. ‘I didn’t ask him. I think we’d become so used to deceiving ourselves, about the business and our life here, that we’d stopped talking about anything important at all. And I was so afraid of prying, you see. We have a right to our own secrets, don’t you think – our own privacy – even in a relationship? I thought if he wanted me to know what scheme he might be dreaming up, then he would tell me.’

Sandy must have gone to his room first and then waited until David Gordon had left the kitchen before coming in.

‘Is that tea in the pot?’

He sounded cheerful, normal, and Willow thought that by comparison the rest of them were being affected by the nature of this case, becoming introspective and frustrated by ideas that seemed to dance away from them like shadows in the fog. ‘How did you get on with your teacher?’

He seemed to blush slightly.

‘Sandy Wilson, have you fallen for her? Do tell.’ Teasing him as if he were a kid, because that was what they needed now. A bit of harmless fun.

‘It’s nothing like that.’ He paused. ‘We went out a few times when we were at school. I don’t think I treated her so well.’

‘Is she holding a grudge?’

He smiled. ‘I don’t think she is. She has a tough time at the moment. Her mother has dementia and Louisa is caring for her at home.’ He paused. Willow decided he’d been thinking of this since he’d left Yell. ‘Louisa was adopted. I’m not sure I could do all that intimate stuff for someone who wasn’t my flesh and blood.’ He looked up at them, realized they were both waiting for relevant information, and turned his attention to the case. ‘She couldn’t tell me anything useful, though. She didn’t think her bairns had learned the song, but there’s a specialist teacher comes in to teach music. A guy called Joey Rickard. She gave me his phone number. I’ve just phoned him and he said he hadn’t done the song with the Meoness kids, though it’s the sort of tune they’d more likely get from parents and grandparents.’ He poured himself tea and sat between them. ‘How did you get on with David Gordon?’

‘We might have found our Monica,’ Perez said.

Willow was surprised by this. ‘Really, Jimmy? There are lots of Monicas in the world. Probably a few in Shetland. It could just be a coincidence, don’t you think? An artist, originally from London, with an exhibition in a gallery in Yell. There was no link with Eleanor, as far as I could see. And only a tentative one to Charles Hillier.’

She looked at him and wondered what she’d missed. What had Jimmy Perez picked up from the conversation?

‘I went to the opening of the exhibition with Fran,’ he said. ‘It was held last summer, a few months before she died. The artist was a Londoner, who’d moved north for a while. There were a number of reasons, I think. A recent divorce, a sense that she wanted her work to move in a new direction and that Shetland might inspire her. Perhaps she was friends with one of the guys at Shetland Arts. We met her and talked for a bit. If I’d known her name I’d already forgotten it. Fran dragged me along to a lot of those occasions . . .’

He paused. Willow could see that he was remembering Fran Hunter, the love of his life. She had the uncharitable thought that no woman would ever compete with Fran in Perez’s life. Fran would remain saintly and beautiful in his mind. She’d died before the couple had fallen into a boring rhythm of domestic chores and petty irritation, while the relationship was still fresh and exciting. Before Fran had developed wrinkles or middle-age spread.

‘So tell me, Jimmy,’ Willow said, pulling his attention back. ‘Why do you think this Monica is the one mentioned in Eleanor’s notebook?’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Perez tried to re-create the evening of Monica Leaze’s exhibition in his head. He hadn’t particularly wanted to be there; the discussion about the trip to the Yell gallery was the nearest he and Fran had come to a real row. He’d faced up to her in the small house in Ravenswick: ‘I never know what to say to that arty lot, and I’m working an early shift tomorrow. You don’t need me there.’ He often felt awkward with her friends – shadowy, not a person in his own right. Sometimes they patronized him. But in the end he’d agreed to go with her. In the end he always did what he knew would make her happy.

‘I’ll drive,’ she’d said. ‘Then you can have a few glasses of wine, and anyway there’ll probably be somebody there that you know.’ And she’d run her finger down his neck, the promise of future compensations.

The gallery was new and seemed to rise organically from the pebble beach. One side was tucked into the hill, the other had a big window that enclosed the exhibition space and let in the clear northern light. The building had won an architectural award for its eco-design. They’d seen the artist outside on the way in. She’d been nervous and sneaking a quick cigarette before the public arrived. Fifty-something with wiry dark hair and button-eyes. Her nervousness had endeared her to Perez.

And so had her art. They were domestic pieces. Mostly interiors of ordinary rooms. Sometimes with a fragment of a person: a leg with a thick, wrinkled stocking and a slipper in front of an old-fashioned gas fire; a hand pouring milk from a plastic container in an untidy kitchen. In the paintings there was often an object that shocked. In an old-fashioned parlour set for afternoon tea – sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a tiered plate of iced fancies – a line of cocaine on an octagonal mirror. In an elderly woman’s bedroom, on a dusty dressing table, a gun.

He’d been fascinated by the paintings, and while Fran caught up with her friends he’d stared at them. He’d decided they were like the photographs of crime scenes. Each piece held a narrative, a history of the room’s owner. Then he’d come to the portrait of the child and he hadn’t known what to make of it. At first sight it was a child from a different era. Dark hair twisted into loose ringlets and tied with white ribbons. A white dress. But the girl had a contemporary face. Knowing. A smile that might have been mischievous or complicit. Perez had stood and looked at it for a long time, and despite his reluctance to talk about art with Fran’s friends – he was always anxious that he would show himself up in front of them – he’d sought out Monica to ask her about the painting. But Monica was standing with a glass in her hand, flushed and talkative, laughing a little too loudly, and he knew this wasn’t a good time. So despite telling Willow that they’d chatted for a while, there’d been no real conversation. He’d stood on the edge of the crowd, listening, while she talked about her inspiration: ‘I glory in the commonplace made weird.’

Instead the gallery owner had come up to him. Perez had met him once at a similar occasion, when Fran had turned out again to support one of her colleagues.

‘What do you think of them?’ The owner frowned.

‘I like them.’

‘I don’t think they’ll do well here. We sell mostly to tourists, and these are too urban. Or suburban perhaps. I’ll keep a few pieces, though. Leaze is a big name after all. And the portrait of the girl. At first glance that’s a traditional work and it might appeal to a grandparent. Something a bit odd about her, though, don’t you think? Disturbing.’

Perez had agreed that there was. Then the evening was over and they’d driven to get the last ferry to Shetland mainland. And three months later Fran was dead. It occurred to him now, in a moment of complete madness, that the painting – so like the image of Peerie Lizzie described by the Sletts women – had somehow foreshadowed the tragedy.