Shetland 05: Dead Water (32 page)

‘And Richard might be hurt too,’ Willow said. ‘Annabel obviously worships him. I imagine that relationship would take a bit of a nosedive if she found out about his sordid past.’

‘We know Grey disliked Jerry and didn’t want him as a son-in-law.’ Willow stretched. The loose sleeves of her shirt fell back to her shoulders. Perez turned away briefly. ‘I’d have him down as a ruthless kind of man, but I can’t believe he’d come all the way to Shetland to commit murder. He’d have more subtle ways of warning Jerry off.’

‘How did Rhona seem to you?’ Perez remembered the message left on his answer machine.

‘OK. A bit jumpy at first. But happy to talk about Richard Grey. Reliving the passions of her youth maybe.’ Willow was getting to her feet. ‘Why?’

‘She wanted to talk to me, but I haven’t been able to get hold of her. Obviously nothing urgent, or she’d have got back to me.’

Willow was fishing in her bag for her purse, but Perez told her he’d settle the bill. ‘I want a chat with Brian anyway.’

She turned to him, on her way out. ‘What’s this, Jimmy? I hope you’re not going freelance on me again.’ A joke, but also a warning.

‘If I have anything,’ he said, ‘you’ll be the first to know.’

She nodded and ran up the stairs, her hair flying behind her.

Brian made them both tea and they sat outside so that he could have a cigarette. There was a gusty breeze and he cupped his hand around it to get it lit.

‘What is it now, Jimmy? People will be talking if you keep coming in here. You know Shetland. They have long memories. There’s no escaping the past, even if you want to.’

Perez looked along the valley towards Weisdale Voe.

‘It’s about Jerry Markham again. The meeting he had here the day he died. I wondered if you’d thought any more about it. Can you remember who paid, for instance?’

Brian glanced inside to check that there were no late customers. ‘I wouldn’t know who paid. I just give them the bill and they pay in the shop upstairs.’

‘Who came to the counter for the bill? You’d get a better look then.’

‘Do you know how many people I serve in here on a busy day?’ He dragged on the cigarette.

‘But this was Jerry Markham. A bit of a local celebrity. You’d have noticed, wouldn’t you? Hoped for a tip?’

‘Well, I always hope.’ He pulled his jacket around his huge body, leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes. ‘Markham came to get the bill,’ he said.

‘How did he seem?’

Brian looked at Perez. ‘I don’t know. A bit preoccupied. I had to tell him twice that the till was upstairs. When he was living in Shetland we took the money down here. And sad. He looked sad.’

Perez gave no response. He didn’t want to break Brian’s concentration. ‘And the woman? Was she with him then?’

Brian seemed to sleep again. ‘The woman walked off. She didn’t wait for him. She must have had her own car. Unless she was going to the Ladies.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Look, Jimmy, this is all speculation. You wouldn’t get a court to accept any of this as evidence.’

‘And I wouldn’t call you as a witness,’ Perez said. ‘Honestly.’ He wondered if this had been worrying Brian all along, that he might have to go through the stress of a court case. Reliving unhappy memories. He felt stupid that it hadn’t occurred to him before. ‘So the woman,’ he went on. ‘Can you describe her to me again? One witness described her as middle-aged. Is that how you remember her?’

‘I don’t know, Jimmy! Maybe. Maybe she was younger. Some women could be any age from twenty to fifty, don’t you think? And I wasn’t really noticing. As I said before, it was busy in here.’

‘And she was one of those women it’s hard to age?’

Brian nodded. Perez slipped a photograph from a brown envelope and rested it on Brian’s knee. He said nothing and waited for a reaction. Brian picked it up, holding it carefully by the edges.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. ‘But yes, this could be her.’

He handed the picture of Evie Watt back to Perez.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Perez didn’t want to go back to the station. Once he arrived there he’d have to report to Willow and tell her that Brian had thought Evie Watt might have been Markham’s companion in the Bonhoga on the morning of his death. She’d think he was crazy. He knew what the team would be thinking if he passed on his suspicions.
Poor Jimmy Perez. Off work for months with stress-related illness. And now another murder inquiry, bringing that dreadful business on Fair Isle back to him. No wonder he’s coming up with a bunch of strange ideas.

So he drove north. Up to Bixter first, then cutting cross-country through the hills to Aith, following the route of the hennie bus. No real destination in mind. Enjoying the space and the empty road, the view over water. Curlews calling as a background to his thoughts. He wanted to be back to pick up Cassie from his neighbour before it got too late, before her bedtime, but there was no other objective than to let his mind wander around the possibilities. He’d always found driving through Shetland helped in that way. It was something about the space and the long horizons – though tell Sandy that and he’d look at you as if you were talking a foreign language.

In Aith Perez stopped at the marina, got out of the car and looked up at the Belshaw house. From its position at the top of the bank there was a view over the whole settlement to the tops beyond. You’d see the Fiscal’s house from there. He pondered the implication of that before walking back to his vehicle.

The school had closed for the day and Perez was tempted to drive back up the bank to talk to Jen Belshaw. But her children would be at home, it would be all noise and domestic chaos, and besides, he wasn’t sure he was ready yet. He didn’t have the right questions to ask. At Voe he passed the bar, another hennie bus stop and, at the junction to the main road, he looked south to where Markham’s car had been ambushed. All the action surrounding the murders had taken place in such a small area, all in the North Mainland. The biggest proportion of Shetland’s population lived in Lerwick and to the south, so he thought this was significant too, something that Willow, coming in from outside, hadn’t considered. The only major players living outside this region were Peter and Maria Markham in the Ravenswick Hotel. It occurred to him that he’d never seen them away from their business, but of course that didn’t mean they were stranded there, isolated from the rest of the islands. They could travel north too.

Instead of taking the road south towards home, he turned left. He drove on through Brae, where Joe Sinclair lived with his family. There was a kids’ football match on the field, but no sign of Andy Belshaw. These looked like school teams and the woman referee, in a bright tracksuit, must be a teacher. Perez thought Andy would be in his office at the oil terminal, drafting his press releases and selling his stories, perhaps finding it hard to concentrate because he was still mourning his best friend.

There were no scarecrow figures now at the gate where the track led off to Evie Watt’s croft, but in their place a mound of flowers. Some picked from gardens, daffodils and early tulips. Big bouquets, still in their clear plastic wrappers, bought from the supermarkets in Lerwick. Perez pulled his car into the side of the road and went to look. There were pictures and messages, many of them directed to Evie.
We’re so sorry for your loss. We’ll miss him, he was a lovely man.

Perez felt relieved that Fran had died on Fair Isle. A small comfort. None of her acquaintances, her students or the other people, who would have enjoyed their own brief role in a life-and-death drama, could make it there. So there’d been no flowers to shrivel in the frost. No dying petals to scatter in the wind.

Perez saw, partly hidden by a bunch of imported roses, the corner of a card and recognized the image just from that. He felt in his pocket for gloves and lifted it out. The black-and-white reproduction of a painting of three fiddle players. The band Fiddlers’ Bid. On the back, no message. He carried it carefully to the car, slipped it into an evidence bag. He knew he should immediately take it back to Lerwick and show it to Willow, but still he continued on his way.

Past Scatsta Airport and the Harbour Authority site: Joe Sinclair’s empire and John Henderson’s second home. Past the oil terminal, with its high security and, next to it, the major construction work to bring the gas ashore. Already the afternoon was drawing into early evening, the colour beginning to drain from the landscape. Cassie would be sitting with her friend at the kitchen table ready for her tea. Really he knew he should turn back, head south. But still he continued until he was driving down a small single-track road towards Hvidahus, realizing only then that this was where he’d been heading all along.

The tiny community was silent. He looked down at the small pier, boats moored ready for the summer. Mark Walsh’s big house waiting for its first guests. The tiny holiday cottage was still empty. The only sound came from the gentle buzz of the wind turbine outside John Henderson’s house. Now that he was here, Perez felt foolish. The house had been made secure and he didn’t have a key. But still he stood there. This place had been built by Henderson and he’d lived here with his wife, nursing her. And this was where he had planned to bring his bonny young wife.

When he was a young DC in Aberdeen, Perez’s boss had been unusual. A strange and thoughtful man, much mocked by his more macho colleagues. ‘Sometimes detection is like acting,’ he’d said once. ‘You have to get inside the offender’s skin, stand in his boots and see the world through his eyes. Understand what makes him tick.’

And this was what Perez did now. He imagined himself as Henderson, a cautious man, who valued routine and order. A man who was struck suddenly, in a thunderbolt from the blue, by a passion for a young woman called Evie Watt. A man who would have handed his love the world and denied her nothing. That thought helped Perez to shake and rearrange the facts as he knew them. Later he would remember nothing of his journey back to Ravenswick because his attention was focused on the characters in the drama. As he drove up to his neighbour’s house he saw Cassie looking out of the window towards the Ravenswick Hotel. He stopped the car and followed her gaze, and for a moment he saw how the murders might have happened – Willow’s mirror made whole.

Chapter Forty

Willow slept deeply, without dreams, and woke to the sound of gulls and a foghorn – childhood noises, comforting. Outside the light was grey and she could see nothing from her window, not even the blurred outline of the island of Bressay. The mist hid everything.

When she got to the police station Perez was already there. She saw his black hair through the opaque glass pane in the incident-room door and recognized him from that. She opened the door and went in. He was using a corner of the long table as a desk. He’d never mentioned the fact that she’d taken over his office.

‘Could you not sleep, Jimmy?’

He looked up, his face a series of planes and shadows. It could have been carved roughly from some hard wood.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not very well. And Cassie always wakes early, so I dropped her at her friend’s house and came along here. She’s staying at her father’s tonight.’

Willow saw that Cassie was always at the front of his mind, his most important preoccupation.

‘Anything come of your chat with Brian?’

He hesitated and she felt the return of the anger. Why was he so determined to go it alone? If he’d obtained information from Brian in the Bonhoga, he should have been on the phone to her immediately. What right did he have to keep it to himself? Was he trying to protect someone here? One of his old cronies? The Fiscal? But then the thought of Perez as a corrupt officer was so ludicrous that she smiled.

‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said. ‘You can tell me then.’

She set the coffee in front of him and felt suddenly like some sort of therapist or counsellor.
Go on, Jimmy, tell me all about it.
And when he did speak, it was as if he’d bought into that fantasy too.

‘Ah, the ideas I’m carrying around in my head, you’d think I was mad,’ he said. ‘You’d think I was stark staring bonkers. You’d lock me up and throw away the key.’

She thought that was just another way of shutting her out, and she had too much pride to grovel to him.

‘We’ll stick to the facts then, shall we, Jimmy?’ Her voice was frosty. ‘The theories can come later.’

As soon as she’d spoken she realized her mistake. If she’d gone in gently and played the therapist, he’d have confided in her, but now she was just his boss again. He’d be worried about making a fool of himself.

He put a photograph of Evie Watt on the table in front of her. It wasn’t the one they’d used on the board here in the incident room, and Willow wondered where Perez had found it. It had been taken at some Shetland Island Council function and Evie was smartly dressed in a skirt and a jacket, looking oddly grown-up. Willow had only ever seen Evie in jeans before.

‘Brian thought this might have been the woman who met Markham the morning before he died.’

‘Is he sure?’ Willow remembered the young woman on the beach in Fetlar, her anger and her grief. Surely her judgement couldn’t be that flawed. Evie Watt was no killer.

Perez shrugged. ‘Brian’s a reformed junkie. He’s never been sure of anything.’ He paused and was about to continue when Willow broke in.

‘Hardly a star witness then. I’ll need more than that, Jimmy.’ She waited for him to continue, to defend his position, but Perez just shrugged again. He’d become moody, the man she’d first met when she arrived on the islands. She’d made this man coffee, bent over backwards to be pleasant to him and he behaved like a graceless and uncommunicative teenage boy.

‘Anything else?’

‘I went past the track to Evie Watt’s croft yesterday afternoon. Where you found John Henderson’s body. They’ve turned it into a kind of shrine. Flowers, candles, you know.’

She nodded.

‘I found this there.’

It had been on the table all the time, but she’d been focused on Evie’s photo and she hadn’t noticed it. The postcard in the clear-plastic evidence bag. He slid it towards her. She turned it over. Nothing written on the back.