Red Bones

Inspector Jimmy Perez arrived in Whalsay on the first ferry. He was there at Laxo, the terminal on the west of Shetland mainland, waiting on the pier when the boat arrived from Symbister. There was no one else in the queue; that time of the morning traffic was mostly the other way: folks coming off the smaller island for work in town, teenagers too old for the Whalsay Junior High, still half asleep, on their way to meet the bus for Lerwick. He watched the ferry approaching, waited for the half-dozen cars to leave and the gaggle of sixth-year students for Anderson High to walk off to the waiting bus, then he started his engine. Billy Watt was working the ferry today. The crew were all Whalsay men; that was how it worked with the inter-island ferries. Billy waved Perez’s car into position, watched while he drove slowly forward so his bumper was inches off the iron ramp, then gave a genial nod. Whalsay was known as the friendly island; it was famous for the way folk waved when cars passed on the road. When he came to take Perez’s money, Billy didn’t ask what the detective was doing there. He didn’t need to: by now most of the people in Whalsay would have heard about Mima Wilson’s accident.

Perez had been in the sixth form with Billy, remembered him as a pale, quiet boy who’d always come top in French. Perez wondered if he used his flair for languages on the overseas visitors who came to the islands. Not that Whalsay was really on the tourist map. There wasn’t anywhere for them to stay apart from the camping bod that attracted students and backpackers, and one hotel. Symbister was a working harbour and seven of the eight pelagic fishing boats in Shetland put in there. For this reason Whalsay folk didn’t need to sell cups of tea or hand-knitted mittens to make a living. They kept up the old traditions of hospitality and knitting but money didn’t come into it.

Sandy’s phone call had woken Perez up. His first reaction had been fear, which had nothing at all to do with his work as a detective. His girlfriend, Fran, had gone south for a couple of weeks over Easter, taking her daughter Cassie with her. ‘My parents haven’t seen her for months,’ Fran had said. ‘And I want to catch up with all my friends. It would be so easy to lose touch, living here.’ Perez knew it was ridiculous but when he thought of London he thought of danger. So while Fran dreamed of nights out at the theatre with her friends, leaving doting grandparents to make up months’ worth of babysitting, he’d been thinking gun crime, stabbings, terrorism.

The anxiety must have been with him even in his sleep, because the noise of the phone triggered an immediate panic. He sat up in bed and grabbed the receiver, his heart was racing and he was wide awake. ‘Yes?’

Only to hear Sandy Wilson, mumbling and incoherent as only he could be, with some story about his family, an accidental shooting, his grandmother dead. Perez listened with half his brain, the other half flooded with relief, so he found himself grinning. Not because an old woman was dead but because nothing terrible had happened to Fran or Cassie. He saw from the clock on the bedside table that it was nearly three o’clock.

‘How do you know it was an accident?’ Perez had said, interrupting at last.

‘My cousin Ronald was out after rabbits and it was such poor visibility, you can see how it might have happened. What else would it be?’ A pause. ‘Ronald likes his drink.’

‘And what does Ronald say?’

‘He couldn’t see how it could have happened. He’s a good shot and he’d not have fired into Mima’s land.’

‘Had he been drinking?’

‘He says not. Not much.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I don’t see what else could have happened.’

On the ferry, Perez left his car and climbed the stairs to the enclosed deck. He bought a cup of coffee from the machine and sat, looking through the grimy glass to watch Whalsay emerge from the dawn and the mist. Everything was muted green and grey. No colours and no hard edges.
Shetland weather
, Perez thought. As they came closer he could make out the shape of the houses on the hill. Large, grand houses. He’d grown up with myths about how rich the Whalsay folk were and he was never sure how much of it was true: Shetland was full of stories of buried treasure and trowie gold. It was said that one year a skipper was worried about the tax he’d have to pay and needed to take some money out of the company accounts. His crew were called to the pier on Christmas morning and each found a brand-new Range-Rover with his name on it. Perez couldn’t remember seeing any of the Whalsay men driving a Range-Rover and anyway the boats were co-operatively run, but it was a good story.

Sandy was waiting for him in his own car at the pier. Before the ferry had tied up, Perez saw him get out. He stood, his hands in his pockets, the hood pulled up against the damp, until Perez had driven his car from the boat, then walked up to join him. He climbed into the passenger seat. Perez could tell that he’d had no sleep.

‘I’m sorry about your grandmother.’

For a moment there was no reaction, then Sandy smiled grimly. ‘It’s how she’d have wanted to go,’ he said. ‘She always liked a bit of drama. She’d not want to slip away in her sleep in some old folks’ home.’ He paused. ‘She’d not want Ronald to get into any bother over this.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Perez said, ‘it’s not her decision.’

‘I didn’t know what to do.’ Sandy seldom knew what to do, but didn’t usually admit it. ‘I mean, should I have arrested him? He must have committed some sort of crime, mustn’t he? Even if it was an accident. Reckless use of a shotgun . . .’

Perez thought recklessness was a tricky concept to prove in law. ‘I don’t think you could have done anything,’ he said. ‘Besides, you’re involved. You found the body and you know everyone. It’s not allowed. Certainly, it won’t be your decision whether or not to arrest Ronald.’
Nor mine
, he thought.
That’ll be down to the Fiscal
. The Fiscal would take formal charge of the case and he didn’t know her well enough to guess what her response would be. His windscreen had steamed up. He wiped at it with a cloth. Now there was only mist on the outside. The ferry had already loaded the cars and started to make its way back to Laxo. Perez thought that would be a relaxing sort of job, moving back and forth between the islands. Perhaps that was what had drawn Billy Watt to it. Though he supposed it might get boring after a while.

‘You know you should go back to Lerwick,’ he said to his colleague. ‘Leave the case to me now.’ If there was a case, which most likely there wasn’t.

Sandy looked wretched, fidgeted in his seat but made no move to leave the car. Perez wondered how he would feel if his own family was caught up in a sudden death. If anything happened to Fran and Cassie. In the past, they’d been too close to one of the cases he’d been working on and he could never have walked away from that and handed responsibility to another officer.

‘I don’t know Whalsay,’ Perez said slowly. ‘I suppose it would be helpful to have you around for a while to show me the lie of the land. But you don’t interfere. You introduce me to your folks and then you keep quiet. Do you understand?’

Sandy nodded gratefully. His long fair fringe flapped over his forehead.

‘We’ll leave your car there then, shall we? You’re in no state to drive. Let’s go to Setter and see where you found your grandmother.’

‘I moved her body,’ Sandy admitted. ‘It was dark and cold and I couldn’t see the wound then. I thought she was ill and she might still be alive. I’m sorry.’

There was a moment’s pause. ‘I would have done exactly the same myself,’ Perez said.

Sandy directed Perez to his grandmother’s house. Perez could count the number of times he’d been to Whalsay on one hand. There’d been a piece of vandalism – one of the yoals they used for racing had been holed and then tipped into the harbour. No one else had been available and he’d come to deal with it out of interest. Then Sandy had asked him and Fran along to his birthday party – a do organized by his parents in the Lindby community hall. Perez knew that the night before Sandy had been out in Lerwick with his younger friends, but Perez hadn’t been invited to that. The party in Whalsay had been an old-fashioned community do – a hot meal of boiled mutton and tatties, a band, dancing. It had reminded Perez of the dances at home in Fair Isle, raucous and good-natured.

His infrequent trips to Whalsay had given him no real idea of the geography of the place or of the relationships there.
People from the outside see Shetland as one community
, he thought,
but it’s not like that at all
.
How many of the people who live in Lerwick have ever been to Fair Isle or Foula? Some of the Biddista folk managed to keep secrets from the rest of us for decades. The visitors are more adventurous than any of us.

Sandy directed him to take a road to the right from Symbister and soon they were on the southern shore of the island, in the community of Lindby, a scattering of crofts running down to the water, surrounded by the crumbling walls of old abandoned houses. Not a village in the English sense of the word, but half a dozen families, mostly related, separated from the rest of Whalsay by sheep-grazed hill, peat banks and a reed-fringed loch.

Setter took Perez back to the old days at home too, to a croft run by an old man who found the work too much for him but refused to let anyone help.

Someone had let out the hens and they were scratching around in a patch of weeds by the door, looking damp and bedraggled. Everything was untidy and overgrown. An ancient piece of agricultural machinery – quite unidentifiable now – rusted against the cowshed wall. These days, people wanted a better income than this sort of smallholding could provide. In Fair Isle families from the south had taken over some of the crofts and set up small businesses – IT, furniture-making, boat-building. There were even recent incomers from the United States. He knew he was a soppy romantic, but he quite liked the old ways.

‘What happens to this place now?’ he asked Sandy. ‘Did your grandmother own it, or was she a tenant?’

‘It was her own place. It always was hers. She inherited from her grandmother.’

‘What about her husband?’

‘He died very young. My father was just a bairn.’

‘Had she made a will?’

Sandy seemed shocked by the idea. ‘It’ll just come to my father,’ he said. ‘She had no other close relatives. I don’t know what he’ll do with it. Take on the land and sell the house, perhaps.’

‘You said there was a cousin, Ronald. He has no claim?’

‘Ronald’s related to me on my mother’s side. He won’t get anything as a result of Mima dying.’

They were still standing outside the house. Perez was what the locals called a black Shetlander; his ancestor had been washed up from a sunken Spanish Armada ship. He’d inherited the name, the dark hair and Mediterranean skin. Now he felt the cold seeping into his bones and thought he’d inherited a love of sunshine too. He couldn’t wait for the summer.

‘We should tape off the garden where the body was found,’ Perez said gently. ‘Even if the Fiscal puts it down as an accident, at the moment we have to treat it as a potential crime scene.’

Sandy looked up at him, suddenly horrified. Perez realized the suggested piece of routine police work had made Mima’s death real again.

Sandy pushed open the door and they arrived in the kitchen. Again Perez was taken back to his childhood. His grandparents, and a couple of elderly aunts, had lived in houses like this. It was the smell as much as the furniture that took him back: the smell of coal-dust and peatsmoke, a particular brand of soap, damp wool. At least in here it was warm. The solid-fuel Rayburn must have been banked up the night before and still gave out plenty of heat. Perez stood in front of it and put his hands on the covered hotplate.

‘I don’t know what will happen to the cow,’ Sandy said suddenly. ‘My father milked her this morning, but I know damn well he’ll not want to do that twice every day.’

Reluctantly Perez pushed himself away from the range.

‘Let’s go outside,’ he said. ‘You can show me where she died.’

‘I keep thinking that if I hadn’t stayed for that one last drink I might have been here in time to save her,’ Sandy said. ‘I might have stopped her going outside at all.’ He paused. ‘But I only came in to give me time to sober up before going back to my parents’ house. If I’d gone straight home, I’d have taken the first ferry out this morning and someone else would have found her.’ He paused. ‘She phoned me earlier in the week and asked when I’d next be home. “Call in and have a dram with me, Sandy. It’s a long time since we had a chat.” I should have spent the evening with her instead of going down to the Pier House with the boys.’

‘What was she doing outside at that time of night?’ Perez asked. He tried to imagine what would have taken an elderly woman from the warmth of her fire into a sodden, cold field long after darkness had fallen.

‘There was washing on the line. Maybe she’d gone to fetch it in.’

Perez said nothing. Sandy led him round the house. The laundry was still there, so wet now that it dripped on to the grass beneath it. This was rough grazing rather than garden, though a strip of ground running parallel to the washing line had been dug over for planting. Sandy saw Perez looking at it. ‘My father did that. She’ll have one strip of tatties and another of neeps. He sows a planticrub with cabbage each year for feeding the cow.’

‘There’s no laundry basket,’ Perez said. ‘If she’d come outside to fetch in the washing, what would she put the clothes in?’