White Nights (9 page)

‘Aye well, none of my business anyway.’ She hesitated. ‘Bella asked me to go along, but you ken, Jimmy, it’s not my thing. All sorts of folk I don’t know.’

‘Not my kind of thing either, really.’

‘And I find Bella kind of scary. Even after all these years.’

He smiled. He understood what she meant. He found Bella scary too. ‘You must have grown up together. Here in Biddista.’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘We all lived in these houses. Willy was in the end one. He never married and his mother had died by the time we were old enough to notice. The Sinclairs were in the middle house. And I lived in here with my mother and father.’

‘So you’re back where you started.’

‘I never really wanted to move away.’

‘Bella just had the one brother?’

‘Alec, Roddy’s father.’

‘What was he like?

‘Oh, he was a quiet man. Not at all like his son. He had cancer, you know. So sad for such a young man. He got very thin in the end. It must have been terrible for Roddy. Maybe that explains why he turned out so wild.’

Perez thought he could see a faint flush on her face and wondered if she had felt something special for Alec Sinclair, but perhaps that was just the heat of the kitchen. ‘Kenny Thomson was at Skoles then too,’ she went on, eager, it seemed, to change the subject. ‘Him and his parents and his brother Lawrence. So nothing much has changed at all. Lawrence moved into Lerwick and then he left Shetland all together.’

‘You haven’t heard of any strangers around? Maybe one of the houses on the way to Middleton has started taking paying guests?’

She shook her head. ‘Not that I’ve heard.’ She
cracked one of the eggs against the bowl and used both thumbs to pull the shell apart. ‘It couldn’t have been Peter Wilding? He’s the man who’s taken over Willy’s house. He’s an Englishman.’

‘Martin would have recognized him. He met my stranger last night.’

‘Then I can’t help you.’

‘Have you had any visitors into the shop in the last few days?’

‘A few. A group of young Australians at the beginning of the week wanting cold drinks. And there was a tour bus yesterday. It stopped at the Herring House so folk could have coffee. Most of them walked down here afterwards to stretch their legs, buy postcards and sweeties. But they were all elderly people. How old is your man?’

‘Not that old. Forty. Forty-five.’

‘Not old at all then.’ Another egg went into the bowl. She sifted a spoonful of flour on top, folded it in carefully.

Perez waited until she’d finished before asking, ‘Where did Alice get the clown’s mask?’

‘Why do you need to know, Jimmy? Do you want to get one for Fran Hunter’s lass?’ A faint mischievous smile, hoping to make him react again.

‘No, not that.’ He paused, then thought there was no harm in telling her. Word would get out soon enough.

‘The dead man was wearing something like it.’

She stood quite still, the bowl under one arm, the spoon in her other hand. Perhaps she had the picture in her head of a man she didn’t know, the kiddies’
mask around his head. ‘I didn’t buy that thing for Alice.’

‘Neither did Martin.’

‘It must have been Dawn then. If you like I’ll talk to the child. See if she remembers. If you think it’s important . . .’

He shrugged. ‘It might help us identify him. There’s not much else to go on.’

He was thinking that he might ask Dawn about the mask. She’d know more about it than Alice. He was intrigued by the coincidence and was tempted to drive to Middleton to talk to her. But he couldn’t justify the time. He wanted an incident room ready and waiting when the Inverness boys got in. He didn’t want them thinking the Shetland team couldn’t handle a serious crime. Last time they were here the thing had dragged on too long. Besides, he didn’t want to make such a big deal of the man and the mask. If he turned up at the school and pulled Dawn out of her class, he’d have rumours spreading throughout the islands. He remembered the last murder they’d had in Shetland, the fear that seemed to freeze the community and change it into a quite different place. This was different. This was a stranger. But he didn’t want that icy panic to take over again.

‘If Alice can’t help, maybe you could mention it to Dawn,’ he said.

‘I will.’

‘And I don’t want news of this getting out just yet. I’d like to inform the relatives first.’
If we can ever find them
.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll not tell anyone and I’ll ask Dawn to keep it to herself.’ She spoke with a quiet assumption
that her request would be honoured. Perez couldn’t imagine Fran being as compliant with his mother’s wishes. She’d had a successful career before she moved to Shetland. Her confidence had taken a bit of a knock recently, but she still knew her own mind. Fran and my mother, he thought. How will that work?

Aggie set down the mixing bowl and walked with him to the door. He realized for the first time that she was anxious for him to be gone.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this is difficult for you. The way Andrew died . . . I should have realized.’

She gave him a long, hard stare. ‘My husband’s death was an accident. Not like this at all.’

‘Of course.’ He could feel his face become red, turned away quickly and walked out.

Back in the street he heard the distant sound of a foghorn. Here the sun was still shining and he thought at first they were testing it. Sometimes they did that and it always shocked him, hearing the great booming noise in full sunlight. Then out to sea he saw the thick bank of mist. It was just below the horizon but it was rolling closer. Further south it must already have hit the land.

Sandy had strung the tape around the hut. Blue and white.
POLICE
.
DO NOT ENTER
. There was a police car parked, blocking off any vehicular access to the jetty. Now Perez could send Sandy back to Lerwick. It was just a matter of saving the scene from any further contamination before the CSI arrived. He wondered if Sandy had thought to tell the doctors that the CSI would need their shoes, and maybe their clothes for comparison. It was his fault; he should have reminded him.

He was halfway along the road when his phone rang. Morag, one of his team. He’d set her to book places on the last plane for the Inverness team.

‘What’s it like there with you?’

‘Sorry?’ Was she being polite? Passing the time of day? Did she have no sense of urgency?

‘I’ve just had Sumburgh on the phone. They’ve got thick fog.’

‘Any chance of it lifting this afternoon?’

‘I’ve just been on to Dave Wheeler.’ Dave was the met. man who lived in Fair Isle. He took all the weather readings for the shipping forecast. ‘Highly unlikely, he says. And the airport say they’re not expecting any more planes in or out today.’

Perez switched off his phone and stood for a moment. The sun was already covered in a milky haze. So the team from Inverness wouldn’t be in today. If the fog stayed down and they had to get the ferry tomorrow evening they wouldn’t arrive until seven o’clock the following morning. He was in charge. It was his investigation. He’d thought it was what he always wanted.

His phone rang again. ‘Jimmy. It’s Roy Taylor here. From Inverness.’

So, not his case at all.

‘This is how I want you to play it until we arrive.’

Singling neeps was the sort of job you could only do if your mind was somewhere else. It hurt your back, and thinning out the tiny turnip plants took no concentration or thought. It was mindless. The worst thing was when you looked up, thinking that by now you must have nearly finished, done half the field at least, you’d see you’d hardly started and there were rows and rows still left ahead of you.

When they’d been boys, Kenny and Lawrence had played games to make it less boring. Had races, working down the rows next to each other. Lawrence always won. He was faster at most things than Kenny. But not so thorough. Kenny’s rows were always tidier, the plants evenly spaced, so he hadn’t minded Lawrence winning. Though it would have been nice to be first once in a while.

Today, while he was working in the field, Kenny found himself thinking quite a lot about when they were children. The games they’d all played together. Perhaps that was to take his mind off the sight of the body swinging from the roof of his hut, the hut he’d built with Lawrence. He wondered if he’d think of the dead man every time he went in there to get his boat ready.

He’d begun with the neeps as soon as Perez had gone and now it was time to stop for lunch, but he had that compulsion to carry on, at least until he’d come to the end of the row. So he pushed the hoe backwards and forwards down the line and remembered what it had been like here nearly fifty years ago. When he’d been a peerie boy, all scabbed knees and snotty nose, blushing like a girl whenever anyone spoke to him.

Today there was only one child in Biddista, Aggie Williamson’s granddaughter, Alice. When he’d been growing up there’d been five – him and Lawrence, Bella and Alec Sinclair, and Aggie, who hadn’t been a Williamson then. He struggled for a moment to remember her maiden name. Watt. She’d been Aggie Watt. A timid little thing. Looking at her now when he went into the post office, seeing her with her nose in a book, he thought she’d hardly changed in fifty years. She’d looked like an old woman when she was a child. Small and peaky and delicate.

Lawrence and Bella had been just like each other even then. Headstrong and determined to get their own way. And bright. Fighting to be top of the class in Middleton School, laughing at jokes nobody else could understand, annoying the teachers with their cheek and their quick, slick answers. In competition, but attracted to each other just the same. Kenny had only wanted not to be noticed.

Now there were three of them left in Biddista. Bella had turned into a grand artist. She’d been away to college, studied in Barcelona and New York, but she’d been living in the Manse for more than twenty years. Aggie was back staying next door to the house where
she’d grown up. And he was in exactly the same place, doing much the same things as he had as a child. It occurred to him that fifty years ago to the day he could have been in this field helping his father to single turnips. Only two of us escaped, he thought. Alec died while he was still young and handsome. And Lawrence ran away when Bella broke his heart.

He reached the end of the row and straightened his back, felt the muscles pull in his shoulders. If Edith was here she would rub them for me, he thought, pull the tension out of them. And he thought how much more skilled Edith was at touching him now than when they’d first got together. There was a lot to be said for getting older.

Edith’s family hadn’t come from Biddista. He hadn’t met her until he started at the big school. She was a few years younger than him. They’d gone in on the bus together, but he’d hardly noticed her until he was fifteen. She’d had freckles then and curly hair. Mousy brown with a touch of red in it. He’d been too nervous to ask her out and the first approach had come from her. She’d always known what she wanted. Later he brought her to Biddista, and she’d met the others – Lawrence and Bella, Alec and Aggie. She’d never quite fitted in. They’d been kind enough to her, even Bella, but Edith had always kept herself a little bit aloof.

As he straightened he saw that the sun had gone in, covered by a bank of mist which had slid in from the sea. Further inland it was still clear. Standing still after the work he felt the cold air dry the sweat on his forehead and his neck.

In the kitchen he put the kettle on and looked in
the fridge for food. At one time Edith always made him lunch. When he was doing building work and it was too far from home she’d pack him up sandwiches, a thick piece of date slice or that chocolate biscuit cake they all called peat. If he was out on the croft, there’d be something hot on the table for him when he came in. Soup usually. Then she got the job in the care centre and even before she was made manager and started at college things had changed.

‘We’re both working now. You’ll have to look after yourself. It’s only fair,’ she’d told him.

Kenny could see the justice in that. It was the sort of thing Bella might say. Bella had never married because she wanted to keep her independence. ‘I like being a single woman. I celebrate being alone.’ Kenny had read that in one of the Sunday papers. An interview with Bella after an exhibition in Edinburgh. Edith had brought back the paper one of the days she was at college and shown him.

There was some cold lamb in the fridge left over from the roast they’d had on Sunday. He sliced it up and made a sandwich with it. By the time he’d finished doing that the kettle had boiled and he made tea. Now the fog was so thick that he couldn’t see anything out of the kitchen window. Not even the wall which marked the end of the garden or his truck standing outside the door. He was glad now he hadn’t taken the boat out. He didn’t have any of that fancy GPS equipment. He’d have been left to find his way back to the jetty using a compass and chart, and he was a bit rusty these days. He hoped Edith would take care driving back from the centre. It would be easy to leave the road in this weather, or to hit something coming in
the other direction. Since seeing the man in black hanging in his hut, he’d had death at the back of his mind.

He sat in the easy chair with his plate on his knee and the mug of tea within reach on the Rayburn, listening to the news on Radio Shetland. There was nothing about the dead man. But Jimmy Perez wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet for very much longer. Then he switched the radio to long wave for the shipping forecast. That was habit. When he finished eating he felt himself doze. Half asleep, he found himself remembering the summer he’d met Jimmy in Fair Isle, working in the South Lighthouse. It seemed even longer ago than when he’d been a boy, singling neeps.

Kenny came to with a start and realized that someone had opened the door. He knew where he was at once. It had been one of those afternoon naps that are more like daydreaming than sleep. His first thought was that it must be Edith, home early for some reason, and he decided they might go to bed. He liked sex during the day more than anything. It seemed stolen time to him, illicit. But when he turned, his arms slightly open to hold her, he saw that it wasn’t Edith at all. It was Aggie Williamson. The mist was caught in her hair. Millions of tiny drops of water trapped in the thin, wispy tangle. Silver on grey.