Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (7 page)

‘I’ve tracked down Vicki Hewitt,’ he said. ‘She’ll be on the first flight tomorrow. I’ll go out early and pick her up.’ Vicki was the crime-scene manager and had to come in from the mainland too.

‘Follow the sheep track,’ Perez said. ‘That’s the route we’ve all used.’

She saw the standing stone first. It was enormous and shaped into a point, and Willow found her attention wandering. She was thinking about the people who’d worked the monumental lump of rock and fixed it into the peat and was wondering what significance it might have had for them. She thought too that there’d been a settlement on this land more recently than the stone had been erected. Crumbled drystone dykes marked field boundaries and two higher walls formed the corner of what might once have been a house. The land had supported many more families in previous generations in Shetland.

As they got closer Willow saw the woman in the water. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned, and Willow saw what Perez meant about the body having been posed. Even if the victim had been taken ill or tripped into the water, she wouldn’t be lying like this, flat on her back, with her head pointed directly towards the stone. And she couldn’t see how it might be suicide. ‘You say there was a note?’

‘An email,’ Perez said. ‘Sent to one of her friends.
Don’t bother looking for me. You won’t find me alive.
’

‘You could read that as a suicide note.’

‘Except that the iPhone from which she sent it wasn’t with her. It was found on the hill close to where you left your car.’

‘So the murderer is playing games then, you think?’ Willow thought it was the time of year for games.

Perez shrugged to show that he was reluctant to speculate. She was reminded of the old Perez and wanted to snap at him,
And don’t you play games with me, mister. Just give me an opinion.

James Grieve was taking photographs, completely focused on his work and apparently unaware of any tension between them. He looked up suddenly. ‘You do realize that I can’t give you any cause of death until we move the body. I could have had a good night’s sleep in my own bed and come up first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘But then you’d have been deprived of our company this evening.’ Willow thought
she
could have stayed in North Uist, and felt again the relief of being away from the place, where she sensed her father’s disapproval eating into her confidence from the moment of her arrival.

‘Time of death?’ Willow knew she was wasting her time, but couldn’t help asking.

James Grieve glared. ‘Tell me when she was last seen, and when her body was found, and it’ll be somewhere between the two.’

‘You can’t blame a girl for trying.’ She flashed a grin at him, never quite sure when she was pushing him too far. ‘We’ll leave Sandy here, shall we, Jimmy, and have a word with your suspects?’

He led her down a slope and pointed out a low white house at the end of the track and right by the sea.

‘That’s Sletts, the holiday let where they’re staying,’ Perez said. ‘They were two couples, in Unst for a friend’s wedding. Professional thirty-somethings from London.’ He paused. ‘I haven’t given them any details yet, though they know that she’s dead. Mary Lomax, the community officer, is sitting with them. Perhaps I should have gone in earlier. They’ll be tense with waiting for information. Hostile. But I’m not sure where to start with them and so I waited for you. It’s almost as if they speak a different language. As if they’re aliens from a different world.’

‘And you think I’ll have more in common with them than you? You’re joking, aren’t you?’ She looked down at her jeans, bought from a charity shop and the hem let down so that they fitted, at the hand-knitted sweater with the hole in the elbow.

‘You won’t be intimidated.’ His voice was serious. ‘I can’t imagine you being intimidated by anyone.’

The compliment took her breath away for a moment, then she almost ran down the slope to the house below, her face turned away from him so he couldn’t see that she was blushing.

Inside three people sat round a dinner table, though it seemed that the meal had been more like a picnic. There was half a French loaf, some cheese still in its wrapper, a tub of hummus. They weren’t speaking. Willow understood what Perez meant about them being members of an alien species. It was the cut and shine of the hair and the quality of the casual clothes. There’d be no Oxfam-shop jeans here. She knocked on the door and walked straight in through the immaculate kitchen. This holiday house was far better equipped than her flat in Inverness. They turned round to stare at her. Still speechless. Then they saw Perez behind her and the questions came tumbling out, one after another, the voices a chorus of well-bred noise. A motherly woman sat in the corner knitting hand-spun yarn.

Willow held up her hands and the noise faded away. The Englishwoman, Polly Gilmour, stood up. She was blonde and pale. And fraught. ‘We’ve been here for hours with no news. No communication. Mary knows as little as we do. Somebody turned up an hour ago and took our mobiles and our laptops, and he said that you’d explain. We’ve been sitting here waiting for someone to come.’ She paused. ‘Oh God, someone needs to tell Cilla.’

‘Cilla?’

‘Eleanor’s mother.’

‘If you give us the number,’ Willow said, ‘we can do that.’

A solid bruiser of a man stood up. ‘What happened? Did she kill herself? There wouldn’t have been this fuss if she’d had an accident.’

‘And you are?’ Willow turned to him.

‘Her husband. Ian.’

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Longstaff. You shouldn’t have been asked to wait for so long without any information, but it’s hard in the islands when we have so few officers. I’m so sorry about the death of your wife.’ Willow looked for a reaction. None came. His face was blank. He was the sort of man who wouldn’t show emotion, and he’d had time to take in the information of his wife’s death. Willow wished she’d been here when he’d first been told.

‘How did she die?’ The words were as flat and hard as slaps.

‘We don’t know yet. The pathologist has flown in from Aberdeen. He’ll take her south tomorrow for a post-mortem.’

‘Was it suicide?’

‘It’s impossible to say at this point.’ Willow saw now that the three English people were out of their depth. They were accustomed to being in control of their lives.
They
were the ones who felt as if they were in alien territory. They’d come to Shetland expecting a great cultural experience, to meet the locals and experience the traditions. Then they’d expected that they’d all go home. They’d be full of stories to share with their friends in the smart cafes and wine bars, but like visitors to a zoo they’d be untouched by the stay. Instead when they returned to London their lives would never be the same again.

‘Who are you, please?’ It was the man who hadn’t yet spoken. Polly Gilmour’s partner. He had dark curly hair and an unfashionable beard, the sort of voice that made you think of public schools and smart universities. Polite enough, but confident that he’d be answered. His face was tanned and she wondered if he’d just come back from holiday.

‘My name’s Willow Reeves. I’m a chief inspector with the Serious Crime Squad based in Inverness, and I’ll be in charge of this investigation.’

‘You think Eleanor was murdered?’ It was the husband, aggressive now, his head thrust forward towards her. The regional accent was stronger. She wondered if he felt like an outsider in this company too.

She kept her voice calm. Grief took people in different ways. ‘It’s an unexplained death,’ she said. ‘We won’t know until Dr Grieve does the post-mortem what the cause might be.’

‘Where is she now?’ Polly asked.

‘Where she was found.’ Willow turned slowly to face the woman. ‘By the standing stone on the hill behind the house. She’ll be moved in the morning.’

‘Are you sure it’s her?’ It was the husband again. ‘We walked that way this morning looking for her.’

‘She was found by Lowrie Malcolmson,’ Perez said. ‘He could identify her. And if you searched along the cliff you wouldn’t have seen her. She’s lying in a small loch, hidden from the footpath.’

Willow thought Eleanor had probably been lying there since the early hours of the morning; even if the search party
had
looked in that area they must have missed her. On a fine Sunday in June a murderer wouldn’t take time to arrange the body so carefully when there might be walkers around. ‘We’ll need to take detailed statements,’ she said, ‘but that can wait until the morning. Try to get some rest.’ These people had already had time together to prepare any story. Another night would make no difference.

Out on the deck the light was fading. It was nearly midnight. Inside, Polly had lit candles on the table where they’d been sitting. Looking in at them through the window, Willow saw the English people as a beautifully composed painting. It could be a scene from a Parisian bar: Marcus Wentworth, with his dark hair and beard, leaning back on his chair to one side of the table, faced by the woman whose hair looked silver in the candlelight. The clutter of bread and fruit on the white cloth. And staring out, squat and brooding, the dead woman’s husband. What might the title be?
Three Friends.
Except, Willow thought, that Eleanor had been the person who had held the friends together and now they were almost three strangers, caught up with their own preoccupations.

Chapter Nine

George Malcolmson didn’t like chaos. He’d been a keeper at the Muckle Flugga Light until it had been automated in 1995 and that had suited him well. Lighthouse work was all about routine. There were seasons for painting and seasons for maintenance. A time for being sober, when you were on duty, and a time for drinking, during the month onshore. The helicopter had brought them to the rock for their shift every four weeks and had taken them away at the end of it, as long as the weather allowed. George had always been more upset about being grounded onshore than about being stranded on the rock. In Muckle Flugga the keepers had worked in threes. If you had two men on their own in a small space that could be the recipe for disaster – for ill will, fighting and madness. George had a reputation as a peacemaker because he was controlled and never lost his temper. The other men had liked to work with him. He was calm, methodical.

The patterns and rituals of his lighthouse life had made him superstitious. It had pleased him that the rock was the most northerly station in the UK. There was clarity about the fact and that gave it special significance. He still thought that three was a lucky number, didn’t whistle in a boat and sometimes planted his crops at full moon – he knew the power of the tide.

Now he sat in the bar of Springfield House with a pint on the table in front of him. His house at Voxter was in chaos because a woman, a friend of his son, had died. He tried to work out what might have been behind the death. George hated random tragedy and looked for patterns here too; for whatever could lie behind Eleanor Longstaff’s dying. He couldn’t imagine that anything they’d done could have led to the woman being killed, but it was a difficult time and he couldn’t be certain. Lowrie had been influenced by the woman when he was a student, but surely all that nonsense was long finished. George went over and over the events of the previous day in his head, searching for a reason, for any small episode that might explain what had happened.

His wife couldn’t understand his need to organize his life into patterns and rhythms and he no longer tried to explain his obsession to her. Grusche would have liked more children, but he’d known that three was a good number for a family and had made excuses to stop after Lowrie was born. He’d tried to discuss his worry that another child might not be healthy, that she was getting on in years and he feared for her safety too, but she’d laughed at his anxiety. In the end, though, she’d stopped trying to persuade him. He could be stubborn and his wife had had to come to terms with what she called his ridiculous superstitions. And she was so close to Lowrie that perhaps she realized that another child might feel left out.

All the strangers in Voxter and the break in his routine had made George jittery. The fuss of the hamefarin’ had been disruptive enough, but he’d been prepared for that. It was the death of the woman with the dark hair and the flashing eyes that had disturbed him. If he’d stayed in the house he’d likely have taken more drams than were good for him and that would have got him into bother, so he’d mumbled an excuse and come here, driving very carefully up the track because he suspected he might still be a little drunk from the night before. He’d been told that Mary Lomax had gone south and so there’d be no police officer to stop him, but he didn’t want an accident. That would only provide another reason for his wife to be angry with him. He loved Grusche and he didn’t want to hurt her.

Then Sandy Wilson, the young detective from Whalsay, arrived in the bar and George had felt uncomfortable all over again. He got up to leave when he heard the man say that his team were looking for accommodation in Springfield. Suddenly there were too many associations with the past, with this building, and George wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. Driving slowly back to Voxter, he wished again that the lighthouses had never been automated, that he was back with his old life of whitewashing the tower and polishing the lenses, of taking his shifts with his pals. Of returning each month to his exotic foreign wife and his growing son. Back then his world was much simpler.

Chapter Ten

Willow was surprised by the opulence of their temporary accommodation. Sandy had found rooms for them in a hotel just south of Meoness. The house was Georgian, large and very grand, beautifully restored with period furniture and paintings. Peerie Lizzie had grown up here, not far from the cliff where Eleanor’s body was found, and she’d drowned in the voe, the inlet that cut into the land from the sea. The legend was that she’d been caught out by the tide in a thick fog. Now it was the darkest part of the night, the stars were out and the water reflected a sliver of moon. The house stood on a slight rise and had a view of water and, in the distance, the standing stone, breaking the line of the horizon. Lizzie’s father had been an English laird and now it was mostly English tourists who pretended to be masters of their island universe, or at least this house and its surrounding garden. Locals came here too, but to the public bar that had been built in the old stables at the back of the house, and on special occasions to eat in the dining room.