Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (36 page)

Perez thought about that. About all these complicated families. About Lowrie, who’d threatened to kill himself over a dark and exotic woman from the south. And about Polly, who had nobody but the man and the friends who’d come with her to Shetland. He was still thinking when he got to his feet and left the house without speaking to Caroline again. He stood outside, just where the track began, and listened. Nothing. He waited for his ears to tune into the tiny sounds all around him. He still had Caroline’s hard English voice in his head, and it took him a while to hear through the silence. The first sound to emerge was water. Always in Shetland there was the background noise of water on the shore or falling as rain. During the day you could usually hear sheep too. And wind, but tonight there was no wind at all.

His phone buzzed, shattering his attempt to listen properly. He moved further up the track. Despite what Caroline had said about despising gossip, he wouldn’t put it past her to eavesdrop through the door.

It was Mary Lomax and her words were tumbling over themselves, so for a minute he couldn’t make out what she was telling him. Then she became more coherent and explained that David Gordon had run away and she didn’t know where he’d gone. Perez thought this was a complication he could do without: all these people wandering around in the dark, all tense and jumpy. But there was no point blaming the police officer, and he cut into her apologies.

‘I’d like you to do something for me, Mary. Make a few phone calls. I know it’s late, but I think these folk will be awake. This is what I’d like to know.’ He spoke carefully and sensed that she was steadying on the other end of the phone. ‘There’s no need to ring me back. Just send me a text with your answer. Is that OK?’

As he switched off his mobile he thought he could hear children singing, but the tune faded away immediately and it could have been his imagination, or a strange echo from the phone.

Then he was still, waiting for his eyes and ears to adjust again, as he tried to put himself in the footsteps of the killer.

He climbed the bank behind the house to the overgrown bones of the farmstead close to the loch where Eleanor’s body had been found. He’d seen George Malcolmson standing here when he and Willow had gone to look inside Utra. From there Perez thought he’d get a sense of the space all around and, when the sun rose, he’d have a view north along the shore. As he watched he saw flames. Someone had lit a bonfire on the beach, probably to celebrate midsummer and the tilting of the year towards winter. Sparks were shooting into the sky like fireworks or an emergency flare. Perhaps people who had been eating in the boat club had decided they would carry on partying. The thought reassured him. If there were other people around, then there was surely less danger of another murder.

His phone buzzed. A text from Mary with the answer to his questions. The words seemed domestic and normal in this wild setting.

Then he heard footsteps. Heavy. Someone wearing boots on the rocky path. Perez moved into the corner formed by two walls so that his silhouette wouldn’t show up against the lightening sky. There were still occasional flagstones on the floor, with cotton grass growing between them. He crouched in the corner and waited, feeling slightly ridiculous, reverting to childhood and hide-and-seek with his cousins. Around him suddenly there was movement. It was as if the wall was alive and shifting. There was a murmuring, the softness of wings against the air. Storm-petrels, bat-like and gentle-eyed, which had nested in cracks in the wall, were flying out towards the sea.

The footsteps got closer and now Perez saw torchlight. Very faint, as if the battery was low. No other sound. No one was shouting out for Polly. If this was a searcher, then perhaps they’d lost heart. Perhaps. Still there wasn’t enough light to make a positive identification.

Standing in the shadow, Perez was thinking about all the people he’d met since he’d come to Unst the week before, and in his head he saw them moving around as if they were actors on a giant stage. But now he’d lost control of their moves. He knew they were scattered around Meoness, on the cliffs and the shore, but didn’t have precise positions for them and that made him nervous. He was a director whose players were taking no notice of him. He’d lost control of the action.

The figure moved on down the path towards the settlement of Meoness and paused briefly to look over the loch, where Eleanor had been lying in her smart silk dress, pointing the torch around the grassy banks as if looking for something specific. It was impossible to tell if the walker was male or female, but they were fit and moved easily down the steep path. Perez waited for a while, indecisive. He still thought Polly might come this way. The fog had cleared above him and, in the last of the darkness, the sky was suddenly filled with stars. He saw the Milky Way as defined points of light and all the space made him feel giddy, made him forget for a moment what he was doing there. Then he came to his senses and followed the figure further down the path.

On the road leading towards the Meoness community hall the torch was switched off. Perez found it more difficult to track the person then. If they stopped in the shadow, he might get too close and he didn’t want to give away the fact that he was following. Utra, the house where Sarah Malcolmson had grown up, appeared as an indistinct silhouette beside the track. Perez stopped and listened. Nothing. Now the footsteps were so far ahead that he could no longer hear them. There was another moment of indecision. Should he run on and try to catch up, or go inside? Polly was the most important person in all this. He still wasn’t sure whom he’d been following. This place was central in the Peerie Lizzie story, and Polly might have been attracted inside for another look. He pushed open the door.

In the old house the darkness felt viscous, like melted tar. Perez imagined that he would have to wade through it to get beyond the lintel. He turned on his torch and walked past the scullery to the bigger room and a smell of damp and decay. He was distracted, remembering his last visit to the house and the feral cat that had shocked Willow, the way her arm had felt under his hand, how the touch had been like an electric shock all the way to his shoulder. Then they’d both been disturbed and he thought they hadn’t searched the place properly. He was torn, aware that the figure he’d been following would soon be lost to him altogether, but curious. Something here had pulled in Polly Gilmour and Charles Hillier. He shone his torch into the corners. The room seemed quite bare. He opened the stove, which stood in one corner. A piece of half-burnt peat. Then as he was leaving he saw, caught on a sharp corner of the metal stove, a scrap of cloth. White. Like the dress worn by Peerie Lizzie every time she’d appeared. The dress, at least, was real and not imagined. In the dust on the floor he saw two long, thin rectangular shapes. Something had been placed here. Or lain here.

In the distance there was the sound of a car engine. Perez went outside, saw the headlights just before they were switched off and thought he could place them in Meoness with some accuracy. He ran down the track and away from the ruined house. As he was running his phone rang. He slowed to take it from his pocket, but continued walking fast.

‘Jimmy!’ Sandy had his panicky
I’m out of my depth
voice. ‘I’m just on my way back to Sletts and I heard a scream.’

‘From inside the house?’ He didn’t need to ask
which
house. He knew now where the focus of the investigation should have been from the start.

‘I’m not quite sure. From near the house at least.’

‘I’m on my way.’ He paused. ‘Sandy, don’t go inside. Wait for me.’

Outside, after the dense darkness of Utra, it seemed that dawn had arrived. There was that cold, grey sky and the stars had disappeared. Birds were singing. Perez ran on. He’d been infected by Sandy’s anxiety and by the thought that he’d misjudged the situation. He’d been following the wrong person all the time and hadn’t considered that he should be looking out for a car.

Sandy was waiting for him, curled into the hillside, so well camouflaged that when he moved, unrolling his body until he was standing, Perez was startled.

‘Willow’s on the beach.’ Sandy’s voice was low, a whisper, though from inside the house surely nobody would hear. ‘With David Gordon. I saw them from the hall.’

Perez nodded. One less thing to worry about. ‘What did you hear?’

‘A scream. A shriek. High-pitched.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Woman, I think. But hard to tell. And because we’re looking for Polly Gilmour, I assumed it must be her.’

‘Of course.’ Expectation altered perception. That was how magicians could so easily confound their audience. ‘That’s natural—’

He didn’t finish his sentence. There was another scream. Terrified, and still impossible to identify as male or female. Perez found it unbearable. ‘Wait here. Stop anyone who leaves. Whoever it is. And don’t let anyone else in.’

Bent double, he ran round Voxter, past the hen house and the shed where George Malcolmson kept his old tractor. The man’s car was parked outside. Perez touched the bonnet and felt that it was still warm. From this side of the house he had a view into the kitchen through a small window in the back door. There was no sign of George.

Inside stood Polly Gilmour. She looked pale, but strangely calm. Even with an arm around her neck and a knife to her throat. Even when she opened her mouth and screamed again, her nerve cracking and tears running down her cheeks.

Chapter Forty-Four

Inside the Voxter kitchen Polly thought she was melting at the edges. She decided she must look as Eleanor had done when she’d sat on the deck, the last night of her life, when the mist had eaten into her and made her slowly disappear. If Eleanor had come inside then, after sharing those silly stories about Marcus, everything would have been well. Her friend would still be alive. The malicious man from the hotel would still be alive. And Polly wouldn’t be here in this strange house by the sea, hardly able to breathe, a knife at her throat.

She thought again that this was like being in the middle of a terrible nightmare and soon she would wake up and everything would be well. As the arm tightened around her throat, she began to slip into unconsciousness and the events of the evening drifted through her mind, very slowly, like shadows in the fog. She watched the action as if from a great height, as if she was Eleanor filming it in a wide-angle shot for her show.

The five of them had walked along the cliff towards the boat club. Ian had been striding out ahead of them, as if he wanted to pretend they weren’t there, that he was quite alone. Marcus had been strangely silent. Polly had turned to him. ‘Is anything wrong?’ She’d been frightened that he might tell her the relationship was over and that he preferred Eleanor’s mother. Because deep down Polly knew that Eleanor had been telling her the truth about the affair. Behind them Lowrie and Caroline were quiet too, as if Marcus’s mood was contagious.

Then the scene in her head shifted to the boat club, and the tone was quite different. Here everything was music and partying. It had felt as if the whole room was celebrating Eleanor’s death, that Polly was the only person there sad that she’d gone. And then she’d seen the girl dancing. Peerie Lizzie, who couldn’t be a ghost, because Polly had heard her singing. She’d been captured as if in a spotlight, as if the camera had zoomed in on her and all around her the scene was blurred. Polly had followed her out into the night and the fog had come down. For a moment she had thought seeing the girl had been a warning, a premonition. Perhaps Polly would drown too, like Elizabeth Geldard, and her body would be washed up on the shore. And nobody would care. Not even Marcus.

At the worst point of the panic, when she was remembering the night of Eleanor’s disappearance, Polly’s phone had rung and a sensible voice at the other end had come to her rescue. ‘Don’t you dare try to find your way back along the top of the cliff. Not in this weather. Walk back along the track to the boat club and we’ll come along and pick you up in the car. It might take you a while but that’s the safest thing.’

And now, as the life was being squeezed from her and the point of the sharp knife was pricking her skin, she relived her relief as the car drew up. Lowrie’s father George had leaned across and opened the door for her, and she remembered that first time they’d danced together, the strength in his arms as he’d almost swung her off her feet, the tingle of excitement when the music had stopped.

‘Come along in out of the cold,’ he’d said. ‘You must be frozen. Grusche says I’m to take you back to Voxter. She has some soup on the stove for all of you. She’ll let the others know, and you can have some supper with us before you go back to Sletts.’

But when they’d arrived back at Voxter there was no sign of the others. There was just Grusche in the kitchen wearing a strange white nightdress, with a hand-knitted shawl tied around her shoulders. And George disappeared, saying something about needing to get to his bed. And suddenly Grusche was standing behind her, muttering about Eleanor and Lowrie, and the arms that had gained their strength through lifting sheep and kneading dough were holding her as if she were in a vice, and Polly began to scream and at last everything went black.

She regained consciousness briefly and thought she saw a figure at the window. Perhaps it was Peerie Lizzie coming to fetch her into the water. But when the door opened, it wasn’t Lizzie standing inside, but the detective with the wild black hair. Polly had thought that sometimes he looked haunted too.

He walked up to Grusche and his voice was gentle, as if he was talking to a child. ‘This won’t do now, will it? You don’t really want to hurt Polly. What has she ever done to you?’

Polly felt the grip on her neck relax a little.

Then an inside door was opened. George stood there. ‘Woman, let that lass go!’ His voice was as clear as a foghorn and roused Polly completely. Grusche turned to face him. Polly felt the movement of Grusche’s body against her shoulders and again a slight release of tension.