White Nights (27 page)
Authors: Ann Cleeves
The subject must have been on her mind throughout the evening, because at the end of the meal she returned to it. She reached across the table and took his hand.
‘It was because of Cassie I didn’t rush into this. We come as a package. You understand that, don’t you? If you want me, you take her on too.’
He said that of course he understood. He wanted to tell her that he wanted above all things to make a family with her and Cassie, but he thought that would have sounded sentimental. She hated it when he was soppy.
He left early the next morning to go into Lerwick, to his narrow house on the waterfront. Despite the weather, he could smell the damp as soon as he unlocked the door. It was as if he’d been away for weeks. He loved the house, which was just as well, because no one else would be foolish enough to pay good money for it. He opened all the windows to let in the salt air, and checked his answer machine. There was a message from his mother, easy and chatty with news of Fair Isle. He wondered when he should take Fran home to meet his folks and what they would
make of her. They didn’t have much experience of people who’d grown up in the city. He made a jug of coffee and sat by the open window, watching the terns diving into the shallow water.
Later he went into the station to check if they’d had any report back on the bag belonging to Jeremy Booth, which had been recovered with Roddy Sinclair’s body from the Pit o’ Biddista. Sandy was on his way out, scrubbed and smart. Every week he went home to Whalsay to take Sunday lunch with his parents.
‘Have you seen the TV news?’ he said. ‘Roddy Sinclair was all over it.’
‘No.’ Perez didn’t keep him. He knew Sandy would be on his way to Vidlin for the ferry, and anyway he wasn’t the best person to ask about the bag. He was never brilliant at detail.
The incident room was quiet, flooded with midday sunshine. Taylor was at his desk in a corner, drinking coffee, looking as if he’d been there all night.
‘Good night?’
Perez couldn’t quite tell if he was really interested or if that was a sneer. ‘Sorry, to leave you in Biddista. Like I said, it was something I couldn’t get out of. How did you get on with Bella?’
‘She was pissed. Talking about old times. Lost loves.’
‘Oh?’
‘Kenny’s brother, Lawrence.’
‘The way I heard it, he loved her, not the other way round.’
‘Not according to Bella Sinclair.’ Taylor crushed the polystyrene cup in his fist and hurled it across the
room into a waste basket. It hit with such force that it bounced out. ‘According to her, she’d have married him like a shot if he’d asked. But he never did.’ He got up and retrieved the cup. ‘I finally met Kenny’s wife. Edith. She seemed surprised by the new twist on the old story too. Hardly bosom pals, those two, are they?’
‘Those sorts of communities, people come together if there’s a tragedy.’ Perez spoke without really thinking about it.
‘Nobody seemed much concerned about Booth.’
‘He was an outsider. A bit different.’
‘That stuff about the past doesn’t help much anyway,’ Taylor said. ‘If any of them met Jeremy Booth when he was here on
The Motley Crew
all those years ago, they’re not saying.’
‘Maybe they don’t remember. People change in fifteen years.’ Perez still thought there was a history to this case.
‘Perhaps.’ But Taylor sounded sceptical.
‘Anything on the contents of Booth’s bag?’
‘I’ve just had the report. It gives us a definite confirmation that he was the person handing out the flyers cancelling the art exhibition. The found the costume and the sequinned bag some of the witnesses described. Nothing else of much use. Just a few clothes and toilet things. No letters, no address book. No mobile.’
‘Booth didn’t have a mobile with him when he staged that scene at the Herring House,’ Perez said. ‘I checked his pockets for ID.’
‘Could it have been thrown separately down the hole?’ Taylor asked.
‘Maybe. Then sucked into the tunnel. Or washed out to sea.’
‘Worth getting a search team down to take a look? Even if the phone’s damaged, there’s a chance the SIM card is still intact. Might be quicker than trying to track down his account with the phone companies, especially if he had one of the pay-as-you-go deals.’
‘I know a couple of climbers,’ Perez said. ‘I’ll ask them to go down for us. I could scramble to the bottom of the grass slope myself, but I’d not be confident to go through the tunnel, and it could be wedged on a ledge in the rockface.’ He knew he should have thought of the phone himself. His head was too full of personal stuff. He was losing concentration.
Before he could forget, he went through to his office and called a friend who volunteered with the Cliff Rescue. She couldn’t make the climb that day, but said she’d sort something out for Monday if that would do. The tides were low now, so if the phone was down there it wouldn’t be shifting anywhere.
Back in the incident room, Taylor was still at his desk, staring at the computer screen as if he could force it to provide answers just through the effort of his will.
‘We need to find a link between Booth and someone at Biddista,’ he said. ‘That’s all it’ll take.’ He swivelled round in his chair so he was facing Perez. ‘Fancy a pint? I’m going crazy sitting here.’
Perez hesitated. In the previous case they’d worked on together, he’d enjoyed the informal contact, Taylor’s relentless energy. But Fran would be waiting for him. ‘I thought I’d take a run out to the Sunday teas in Middleton, see if I can find the lass who
sold the masks. Maybe it’s not so important now, but it’d tie up a loose end.’
He waited for Taylor to ask if he could come too. He was like a hyperactive boy who needed constant stimulation. But the Sunday teas were too tame for him and he turned back to the computer screen.
The hall in Middleton had been the school before the new smart place was built. Perez parked in what had once been the playground, next to a row of trestle tables where a big woman was selling plants. Fran was with him. Cassie was spending the afternoon with Duncan.
He’d asked Fran the night before if she’d like to come with him to the teas. He hadn’t thought she’d be interested. Usually she spent the days when Cassie was away working, and he’d thought she’d be used to more sophisticated entertainments. ‘Are you joking? Of course I want to come. It’s shopping, isn’t it? I’m a shopaholic and I’ve been seriously deprived since moving here.’
And as soon as they got out of the car she pulled him over to look at the plants, although she had no garden in Ravenswick. Her house was surrounded on all sides by the hill.
Inside the hall there were more stalls. Junk and bric-à-brac and hand-knitted sweaters. At the other end of the room tables were laid out for tea with plates of home-bakes. Middleton women in aprons were wielding huge metal teapots. Urns hissed. It reminded him of the dances at home. Pooled baking and flustered
women serving the men. What would Fran make of that?
Again she went immediately to the stalls, picking up pieces of china to look at the marks on the bottom, shaking out a jumper to see if it might fit Cassie, chatting to the women who were selling. Dawn Williamson came in with Alice holding her hand. She saw Fran and went up to her. By now the noise level in the hall was so high that Perez couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was like watching a mime. Suddenly Fran threw her arms around Dawn. Dawn’s told her about the baby, he thought. What is she feeling? Then the two women separated. Dawn sat Alice at one of the tea tables with a carton of juice and a biscuit and Fran came back to him.
‘Dawn’s pregnant,’ she said.
‘I know. She told me when I went to the school to talk to her.’
‘Lucky thing,’ she said. But there was no passion behind the words so he didn’t feel the pressure of expectation.
‘The woman with the masks isn’t here.’ He was disappointed, but thought that since they’d found Booth’s bag it didn’t matter so much. Booth could have bought the mask anywhere. He’d have had it in the bag he’d left on the beach before the Herring House party. The murderer would have found it and put it over his face. Why anyone would want to do that was a different matter entirely.
‘No,’ Fran said. ‘She just came that one week with all sorts of novelty goods. She doesn’t live in Shetland. She was up visiting relatives for a few days. They let her have a stall because she was raising money for a
children’s hospice. Her mother-in-law is the lady who knits the sweaters and she’ll give you the phone number if you ask. But she says she’d probably not be able to give you the names of the people who bought from her. Because she’s not from here, she wouldn’t be able to recognize them. One interesting thing though. The daughter-in-law lives in Yorkshire. So that might be where Booth bought it.’
‘How did you find all that out?’
‘I asked,’ Fran said. ‘Now I want a cup of tea. And home-made meringues.’
Kenny postponed the clipping of the sheep until Monday. He couldn’t have done it on Saturday, just after he’d found Roddy’s body. He might not have thought much of the boy, but it was a matter of respect. Some things had to be done properly, whatever he made of the personalities involved. In the same way, it had been the right thing for Edith to spend Saturday at the Manse with Bella. She was grieving and couldn’t be left on her own the state she was in. Edith was the only person in Biddista to calm her. Aggie was frail and nervy herself and Dawn, though she was capable enough, came from outside and wouldn’t really understand what was needed.
He would have been able to get more of the boys out on Sunday to help, but he had a kind of superstition about working on Sundays. When he’d been growing up, nothing was done on the Lord’s day. The women wouldn’t have considered hanging washing on the lines and most of the preparation of the dinner was done the day before. Certainly there was no work outside on the croft. Kenny wasn’t religious himself, but he liked to keep the old traditions. If Willy had still lived in his house it would have upset him to see the line of men crossing the hill on a Sunday morning.
He’d been a regular at the kirk in Middleton. One of the congregation would collect him each Sunday. Willy would be ready and waiting at the door, dressed in a suit which was quite shiny with wear. Kenny wondered if they still took him to the kirk from the sheltered housing. He hoped they did.
So there would be fewer men available to help on the hill on Monday; they all had their own work to go to. But if they missed a few sheep, he could go back later in the week and fetch them in. Edith had arranged to take the day’s leave from the care centre so she would be there to help. He was grateful for that. He knew she’d been saving as much holiday as possible to go south when their grandchild arrived.
Martin Williamson came along. He’d opened the Herring House on Saturday, because it was always so busy and he’d heard nothing from Bella to the contrary. But when she’d found out she’d been furious and had insisted on closing the gallery and the restaurant for the rest of the week. He said he didn’t mind as long as she continued to pay him and he’d be glad to help with the sheep. Kenny was surprised by his flippancy. He’d thought Martin and Roddy had been friends of a kind. But perhaps that was just the way he was, always making light of things. And there was a group of retired men, all from Unst, who still worked a bit of croft land as a hobby. They turned out for events like this and stood now outside the house, identical in their caps and boiler suits, talking about the old times, their dogs panting at their feet. Kenny could tell the men were happy to be there. It was such fine weather and they were glad to be useful.
Although he knew exactly what he planned to do
when he got on to the hill – he had almost as much experience as them – he asked their opinion, and nodded seriously when they told him the best line to take. Edith came out of the house to join them. She was wearing overalls and boots and had her hair tied away from her face. She’d caught the sun in the last few weeks of good weather and there was a pale mark where her hair usually hung. She carried the stick that his father had always used.
At the last minute Peter Wilding turned up. They’d just started up the track and he chased after them.
‘I heard from Martin what you were up to. I wondered if you could use an extra pair of hands.’
‘Of course,’ Kenny said. ‘The more the merrier.’ It was true that the more people there were to cover the hill, the easier it was to round up all the sheep. There was less chance for the odd beast to escape. But he couldn’t quite take to the man and he wished he wasn’t there. He thought the writer was like some sort of parasite. He only wanted to be on the hill so he could write about it later. It was the first thing to spoil the day for him.
The second was seeing Perez and a young couple on the lip of the Pit o’ Biddista. They weren’t in the way to scare the sheep – Kenny and the others would be walking the animals away from them – but Kenny found them a distraction. He’d hoped today to forget about the man hanging in the shed on the jetty and Roddy Sinclair’s twisted and broken body.
While the others lined up down the length of a gully to begin the walk, Kenny went up to talk to Perez. The young couple had climbing gear. He didn’t understand that. If they wanted to get to the
bottom, why not just go down the grass slope? They were young and fit.
‘What are you doing?’
Perez turned very slowly to him. Kenny thought he was probably working out in his head how much to tell him. Instead he ignored the question.
‘You’re clipping today,’ he said. ‘If we get finished here in time I’ll come and help you.’
‘What’s going on here?’
He thought Perez would refuse to answer again. But he said, ‘I want a thorough search. Of the rockface and the tunnel at the bottom. There are some items that are still missing.’
‘How long will this go on?’ Kenny demanded. ‘When will we be left in peace?’
‘When I know what happened,’ Perez said. ‘When I know who killed two men.’