Raven Black (18 page)

But as she spoke he saw that she was considering the possibility and not dismissing it out of hand. Perhaps she'd considered it before.

'Can you tell me anything else about the party? Did Duncan mention any of the other guests?'

'No. But I had the impression he was in such a state about Celia, that Posh and Becks could have wandered in and he'd not have taken any notice. Not like him at all!

Perez stood up reluctantly. Different circumstances and he'd have stayed to share the rest of the bottle with her, suggested that they might go out sometime. The film club. She was an arty woman. It might be the sort of thing she'd like. By the end of the week, knowing him, he'd probably have told her he loved her. It was probably just as well that she was involved in a murder case and he couldn't even kiss her on the cheek as he walked out.

Magnus sat upright in his chair and listened. He couldn't see outside the house. That was his own doing.

During the day there had been people looking in and by the afternoon he hadn't been able to bear it. The first caller had been a young policeman asking for his boots.

'What boots?'

He hadn't understood. Was it a trick to stop him going out?

'The boots you were wearing when you saw the girl: the man said. 'You told Inspector Perez you crossed the field and saw her!

'Aye!

'We need them. 'To compare with the footprints we found!

Still Magnus didn't really understand, but he'd pointed to the boots, which were standing on a piece of sacking in the porch. The policeman had stooped, lifted them into a plastic bag and carried them away.

Soon after there'd been another sharp knock. Magnus had opened the door, expecting more police, but it had been a woman from a newspaper with a notebook, talking so quick - clack, clack, clack - that he couldn't make out what she was saying. She'd scared him with her squawking voice, her pointed nose pushing into his face, the pen she poked towards his chest. After that he didn't answer to their banging. He sat at the table pretending to read an old magazine which had been lying around since his mother had died. Why had he kept it? He thought once there had been a reason, but he couldn't remember now.

They'd seen him through the window, peering at an angle to make him out and rapping on the glass to catch his attention, scaring the raven in its cage. That was when he acted. He flattened out a couple of boxes and nailed the cardboard over the window. Now nobody could see in, but he couldn't see out and that made him feel like a prisoner already. He couldn't tell what the weather was doing, or if the coastguard team had finished walking over the hill. It must be dark. He could tell that from the time on his mother's clock.

In his head there were still people waiting for him outside the house, waiting to shout filth and push their faces right against the glass and their shoulders to the door. He hadn't heard anyone outside for some time, but they could be there, silent, waiting to surprise him, like the monsters in a nightmare he'd had as a boy.

After Agnes died, the nightmares became worse. In his dreams he'd seen her, pale and thin as she'd been when the whooping cough turned to pneumonia and they finally took her to the hospital. Spitting out blood when she coughed. Arms and legs white and bony so they reminded him of a sheep's bones, when the carcass has been left out in the weather and picked over by animals and birds.

But in his dreams she was still at Hillhead, doing the things she always did, helping his mother with the cooking - peeling tatties or baking, milking the cow that they'd had then in the byre by the house, squatting beside the animal, pulling and squeezing the teats, murmuring a little song to herself as she worked. And all the time getting thinner, so at the end of the dream, just before he woke up sweating, all that was left of her was her smile caked in blood and her slanting grey eyes.

Now, sitting in his mother's chair, watching the hands of her clock, those nightmares returned. The people he imagined waiting outside weren't strangers. He had a vision of his sister, banging on the window, rattling the door, surprised that it was locked.

He stood up and poured himself a tumbler of whisky. His hands were shaking. He was going daft, sitting here. Anyone would be the same, locked in a room with no view out, just waiting for the police to take him. He shook his head to clear it of the foolishness, and tried to remember Agnes as she was when she was well. He'd always been ungainly and slow, but she was dainty as a bird, flying across the fields on the short cut to school, her hair streaming behind her. 'Look at your sister,' his mother would say, trying to shame him. 'She's younger than you and she doesn't break everything she touches. She's not a big, clumsy fool. Why can't you be more like her?'

He pictured her in the schoolyard skipping. 'Two other girls were holding the ends of a long rope and Agnes had been jumping, not chanting the rhyme, but frowning in concentration, counting the steps in her head. He'd watched, proud of her, so proud that the grin had spread across his face and had stayed there all day. She'd been wearing a cotton print dress, faded from too much washing and so short now that when she jumped you could almost see her knickers.

Had Catriona been one for skipping? It bothered him that he couldn't be certain. He'd seen her sometimes in the schoolyard, when he'd found reason to walk down to the shore, to pull out a useful piece of driftwood, some netting or a barrel. Mostly she'd been standing, surrounded by two or three of her chums, chatting and giggling. Those had been different times, he thought. It wasn't like when he and Agnes were children. When Catriona was growing up, she had television in the house and there'd been catalogues to buy modern clothes from. There'd been more to play with than an old piece of rope.

The oil had come to the islands and there'd been money for computers and fancy games and the teachers had taken the children on trips south. Once there'd been a school trip to Edinburgh. A couple of the mothers had gone, all dressed up for the adventure, and Mrs Henry, the teacher, standing there with her sheet of paper when the bus came to take them to the airport, ticking them all off, though surely she must know them all. Catriona had loved the city. She'd talked about it for days when she got home.

She came up to Hillhead specially to tell Mary Tait about it and he'd broken off from his work to listen. He'd never left Shetland and asked so many questions - about the buses and the big shops and what like it was to travel on a train - that Catriona had laughed at him and said one day he should go to Edinburgh. It was only an hour on the plane.

The next time she'd come to Hillhead was the day she disappeared. It had been dreadful weather, an awful wind for the season, not cold, but fierce, blowing from the south west. And her mother had sent her out and she'd been bored, so she'd landed up here, teasing and tormenting, wicked as if the wind had got inside her and made her flighty and wild.

But he didn't want to think of that day. He didn't want to think of the peat bank and the pile of rock on the hill.

It would bring the nightmares back.

Roy Taylor had called the meeting for mid-morning, not first light. He'd hoped to have some feedback from the pathologist by then, though he knew he was pushing it and now it was ten-thirty and he was still waiting. He'd asked Billy Morton to ring him from Aberdeen as soon as he had anything useful to report. They had the crime scene investigator's report at least. Nothing back from the lab yet. That took bloody days, even fast-tracked.

Jimmy Perez sat quietly on a desk at the back of the room, listening to Taylor explaining about the delay and how frustrated he was by it. You had to listen carefully because of the unfamiliar Scouse accent, the strange, mangled vowels. The inspector had grabbed their attention from the beginning. He had the stage presence of a fine actor or a stand-up comedian. He was compulsive viewing. Perez wished he had that sort of presence, the same ability to motivate his team.

Outside the weather was milder and there was the beginning of a thaw. In the lulls in conversation Perez thought he could hear the dripping of melted snow. The clouds which had been lurking out to sea all night had rolled inshore and the room was almost as dark as during the last team meeting at daybreak.

Taylor was going through the evidence of the crime scene investigator. 'Besides the constable who was first called to the scene there are three sets of footprints: he said.
Constable.
He was being more polite than most. Perez thought on his home patch Taylor would have a different name for the uniformed men who did the routine work.

Here, he was careful not to offend. 'The snow was deep enough to get good impressions and it didn't melt during the day so the crime scene investigator was lucky. She's a bit of an expert on boots and shoes. Apparently.

'One set belonged to Mrs Hunter. Size six wellington boots. Of course really there are two tracks in each case -

one going into the scene and one coming away. Another, more recent, in places crossing the prints of Mrs Hunter came from Mr Alex Henry, the teacher's husband from Ravenswick. Size nine walking boots. Again, only to be expected. We know that Mrs Hunter waved at him, he crossed the field to join her and he used his mobile to call us.

The third set belongs to Magnus Tait. His prints aren't very clear. It's hard to tell how long he was there and what he was up to. That's because the other sets are laid on top of his. He was there before either of the others. Our examiner is quite clear on that.'

Sandy Wilson gave a cheer, punched his fist in the air, then fell silent when everyone else just sat and watched him.

'You think this is a cause for celebration, Sandy?' Taylor asked. The voice deceptively mild, but with an edge of sarcasm which Perez and the Inverness team recognized. He could be polite only for so long.

'Well it means we've got him,' Sandy said. 'Doesn't it?'

'He's already admitted to being at the scene,' Perez said. 'He didn't attempt to hide it. He told me on my first visit. It's in the day log, Sandy. But maybe you've not had a chance to look at it:

'Well, he would, wouldn't he? He'd know that we'd find his prints and he'd come up with a reason. . !

'I'm not sure he's capable of that sort of thinking: Perez said. He wished Sandy would admit defeat, not show himself up in front of the others.

'Besides,' Taylor said, 'if he killed Catherine, how did she get there, Sandy? There are none of her prints. Tell me, did she fly? Did those bastard birds pick her up in their talons and carry her?'

'Maybe Tait did!

'Catherine was a tall young woman. He's an old man. Strong once, perhaps, and still used to some physical work, but I don't reckon he'd have been able to hoist her over two fields without putting her down for a breather.

Even if she was already dead!

'Then how did she get there?'

The question was directed to Taylor, but the inspector from Inverness only looked at Sandy for a long time in silence. 'Tell him, Jimmy: he said at last. 'You've worked it out, haven't you?' Perhaps he didn't feel he could explain to Sandy without really losing it, saying something he'd regret later.

'She walked: Perez said. 'She walked in with whoever killed her. Then it snowed and her footprints were covered up. There was a heavy squall at about midnight. I phoned Dave Wheeler the meteorologist on Fair Isle.

There was snow on part of the body, though according to the crime scene investigator it had been stroked carefully away from her face and upper torso. That's why Fran Hunter could see her from the road!

'So Tait could still be the murderer? No reason why not. He could have gone back later, early the next morning.

He could have swept the snow from her face.'

'He could be the murderer,' Taylor said, interrupting, finding it impossible now to restrain himself. 'Of course he could. Still most likely prime suspect. But let's picture the scene. It's dark. He took the girl into his house for tea early in the afternoon. We know that. He's admitted it and they were seen getting off the bus together. Let's suppose, just for a minute, that he managed to entertain her all afternoon. How did he persuade her to go out on to the hill with him in the pitch black? She was an intelligent young woman. Brought up in the big city.

Not naive. Streetwise. Even if she hadn't heard the rumours about him and Catriona Bruce, do you think she’d just wander off into the night with him? That's what the defence lawyers will say. And it worries me too!

Taylor turned quickly, so he had his back to Sandy, as if he wasn't worth further attention. 'Jimmy, what do you think?'

'I don't think she was the sort to be easily scared. And here, in Shetland, there's a sense of security isn't there?

Bad things don't happen here. Not the sort of things that happen elsewhere. We let our kids wander round on their own. We might worry about them getting a bit close to the cliffs, but we don't worry about them getting abducted by perverts!
Except now. Now we're just like everywhere else. All over the islands children are being kept indoors and
being told
to
beware of strange old men.

'So I think she might have gone with him. If she thought he had something interesting to show her. Or for a challenge or a dare. A story to entertain her friends with the next day! He paused. 'But she wouldn't just have stood there and let him strangle her. She'd have fought him back. And there's no sign of that. No scratch marks on his hands or his face. They'll take a sample from under her fingernails. Perhaps we'll know more then!

'So how do you see it, Jimmy?' Taylor asked. 'Set the scene for me. 'Tell me what you think happened?'