High Island Blues

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• Ann Cleeves
  
• Author’s Note
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three
  
• Chapter Twenty-Four
  
• Chapter Twenty-Five
  
• Chapter Twenty-Six
  
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-One
  
• Chapter Thirty-Two
  
• Chapter Thirty-Three
  
• Chapter Thirty-Four
  

Ann Cleeves is the author behind ITV’s VERA and BBC One’s SHETLAND. She has written over twenty-five novels, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez – characters loved both on screen and in print. Her books have now sold over one million copies worldwide.

Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for Best Crime Novel, for
Raven Black
, the first book in her Shetland series. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame. Ann lives in North Tyneside.

There is a small town on the Upper Texas Coast called High
Island. The Houston Audubon Society has two sanctuaries
and birdwatchers visit the area from all over the world. There
is no Oaklands Hotel and all the characters in the book are
fictitious.

Cecily had wanted George there at nine, had insisted on it, so he had left home in the dark. It was impossible to argue with Cecily. In the end he had time to kill and he took the last ten miles slowly, driving down straight lanes between potato fields. Miles away across the flat land a line of poplars broke the horizon, shadows in the gloom. There was an icy drizzle. When he came to a village there were still lights on in the red brick houses and a group of children, shrouded in hoods and scarfs, waiting for the school bus stood miserably in the doorway of Fred’s Mini Mart. He passed battery chicken sheds, an immense glasshouse, a sugar beet processing plant. The agricultural heart of England, he thought, with depression. The heart of the agricultural industry, at least.

There was a second, identical village. A bridge over the canal and then the turning so overgrown that he almost missed it. No sign. Lady Cecily Jessop did not need to advertise her presence. No gate. An attempt had been made to fill the pot-holes with gravel and he had an image of Cecily herself with a wheelbarrow and shovel doing the work. It wouldn’t have surprised him. She had told him once that she disliked employing menials. This was not, he thought, through any liberal notion of social justice, but out of meanness. Why pay someone to perform a task one could easily perform oneself?

Why then, he wondered, is she prepared to pay me?

The summons had come two days before by fax. It was written in the third person as if she were royalty: ‘Lady Cecily Jessop wishes to consult Mr Palmer-Jones professionally. She would be grateful if he could attend The Deuchars at 9 a. m. on March 5th.’ The formality had been broken by a handwritten note on the bottom: ‘I’m bloody busy at the moment, so don’t be late!’

He had tried to contact her for more details but she was too busy, it seemed, to answer the telephone.

Molly had been affronted by the rudeness of the fax and by the fact that she had not been invited.

‘Ignore it,’ she said. ‘If she wants us to work for her badly enough she’ll be in touch again. And you can tell her we’re a partnership. We make joint decisions about the cases we take on!’

George, however, had been unable to ignore the fax. Since his retirement from the Home Office he had been asked to serve on environmental working parties and committees. He had met Cecily Jessop at these meetings and had been impressed by her tenacity and her ability to drink whisky by the tumblerful and still talk sense. She was a celebrity and he was flattered, despite himself, that she had called on him for help. He was curious to see what she wanted of him.

She called the house ‘the mouldering heap’, though he knew she felt an affection for it. Why else would she stay on? She had no close relatives and could have sold it without causing offence. She wasn’t the type to feel any obligations to maintain the ancestral home. Maintenance came low on her list of priorities. ‘It’ll see me out,’ she said as it crumbled about her. He had visited her there before and thought she was like a squatter, making the best of the discomfort. It was another example of her meanness. She was a wealthy woman but she preferred to camp out in one room, with a tin bucket to catch drips from the ceiling.

There was no reply from the grand door under the pillared portico, though he heard the bell echo inside. He had expected none. Cecily disliked casual callers. He found her in the kitchen drinking rum in hot milk and smoking a pipe. She had left her wellingtons at the door and wore hand-knitted woollen socks with holes in the toes, a pleated tweed skirt and a sweater with a Fair Isle pattern which George supposed had been knitted by Vanessa. Vanessa had been her friend and companion since they had met as girls during the war. Vanessa had stuck by Cecily through her two divorces and her drinking. It was Vanessa who brought a semblance of order to the house. ‘My housekeeper’ Cecily called her, and Vanessa accepted that without a fuss though George doubted that it was a paid position.

‘Rum, George?’ Cecily said. ‘You need something to keep out the cold. It might be March but it’s bloody freezing.’

‘No thank you, Cecily,’ George said politely. ‘Coffee will be fine.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘Suit yourself.’ Then, with a sergeant major’s roar, ‘ Nessie, come and make George a coffee.’ There was a pause and she added, ‘There’s a dear.’

She was seventy, but fit and formidable. Very tall. Very thin. And still working, as she made clear to everyone she met. She might have left the university but there was no retirement for
her.
No sliding quietly into her grave while the bastards fucked up the planet. She’d been a delegate at the Rio summit meeting and she was still collating data for her work on bird migration and environmental damage. One room at the Deuchars had been made reliably waterproof and there she kept her computer. She had never learned to use it but employed a sixth-former, the son of one of her farm labourers, to come in every Sunday to work the magic. The figures which spilled from the printer she knew how to use and she still produced papers which made the scientific world take notice. The latest was on the decrease of bird migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

‘I’ll have to go out again in a minute,’ she said. ‘I’m working a constant effort ringing site for the BTO. You’ve got to show willing, haven’t you?’ She raised her voice and shouted again: ‘Come on Nessie, we haven’t got all day.’

‘Perhaps I could put the kettle on,’ George said, ‘while you tell me what this is all about.’

‘Extortion, George,’ she said darkly. ‘ That’s what this is about.’

She got to her feet and padded across the tiled floor to a dresser so riddled with woodworm that it was surprising it stood up. From a china toast-rack she took a letter, still in its envelope, and set it on the table before him. It was addressed by printed label to Hubert Warrender MP at his home address. George recognized the name. Warrender was a junior environment minister.

‘Bertie’s an old chum of mine,’ Cecily said. ‘He mentioned it in passing: “See you’ve got a finger in another pie, Cec. I can’t even open my mail without bumping into you.” I couldn’t think what he was talking about so he passed the thing on.’

It was a letter soliciting support for a new charity – the Wildlife Partnership. The Partnership had worked successfully in the States for some time, buying land, especially in threatened areas of Central and South America. Now it was extending its operation to Europe. Many natural history groups in Britain and the United States had already made donations and famous British naturalists had added their support to the venture. There followed a list of names including that of Lady Cecily Jessop. Also in the envelope was a brochure with photos of the rain forest and of fetching Brazilian children.

‘Bertie gave them a hundred quid,’ she said. ‘Soft bugger.’

‘By cheque?’ asked George. ‘ Made out to the Partnership?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He telephoned in a credit card donation. The only address is a Post Office box number.’

‘I take it you hadn’t given permission for your name to be used,’ George said.

‘I’ve never even heard of them.’

‘Are you sure there wasn’t a letter, asking perhaps for you to get in touch with them if you had any objection? It could have been overlooked as junk mail.’

‘I’m not a fool George, and I read everything that comes to this house addressed to me.’

‘Have you complained to the charity?’

‘I’ve tried,’ she said. ‘But is doesn’t seem that easy. I phoned the telephone number. It’s answered by some inarticulate youth who only seems programmed to accept donations. I asked to speak to his employer but I was told he was on his own in the office. When I asked where the office
was
I was told he wasn’t at liberty to say.’ She mimicked a West Country accent: ‘I’m sorry madam but we haven’t got the facility to welcome personal callers,’ and then continued, ‘He’d obviously been told to say that. He was too dim to dream it up for himself.’

She looked at her watch.

‘Sorry, George,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to make that coffee later. Come into the garden with me to check the nets.’

Outside, the rain had stopped, but droplets of water still clung to the fine mesh net strung between two poles in the bushes. A song thrush was caught in one of the shelves in the net. She extracted it carefully and took it to a wooden shed where she kept her ringing pliers and scales.