‘All the same…’ Willow’s face was hidden by the deep hood, but he could tell she found the situation difficult to fathom. ‘If she’d inherited the house, surely there would have been relatives to visit. Otherwise why would she be here? It’s not the best time of year for a holiday. I don’t understand why she wasn’t recognized when you first asked for information. None of it quite makes sense.’
Vicki Hewitt was pulling a scene-suit over her jeans and jacket. She held onto Willow’s shoulder to keep her balance.
‘Do you need that? The scene’s so contaminated anyway?’
‘Old habits die hard. Besides, if we come to court, you might be grateful.’ Vicki straightened. ‘Do you want to leave me here and come back for me later? You’d be two more people to have tramped around, contaminating the place, and I can focus better on my own.’
‘You mean we’d just be in the way!’ Perez found it much easier to be natural with Vicki than with Willow. ‘I’ll get Sandy to come back and work with you, as soon as he’s finished with Craig Henderson’s folks. He’s been through the house already.’
‘Tell him to bring some cans of Coke with him,’ Vicki said. ‘I think better when I’m rattling with caffeine. I can picture the scenario more clearly.’
‘Will do.’ But Perez thought Vicki hadn’t heard him. Her attention was already on the ruin below her. She started to slide down the bank towards it, leaving him alone with Willow Reeves.
Chapter Ten
Craig Henderson’s parents lived in a modern bungalow in a settlement north of Ravenswick, right on the coast. The Hendersons ran a complex of holiday chalets on the same site. The chalets were very smart, upmarket, of Scandinavian design and, according to rumour, cost a fortune to rent. The crazy tourists must be mad enough to pay, because in the season they always seemed to be fully booked. Sandy had been shown round them once by a girlfriend who cleaned there and he had marvelled at the granite worktops and individual saunas, the hot tubs and polished wooden floors.
The bungalow was more traditional, with pebbledash render and decking at the top of the garden, though there was a hot tub there too. Sandy thought it would make a fine place to sit on a summer’s day. He imagined a barbecue, wine straight from the fridge and expensive foreign lager. Stuart and Angie Henderson struck him as the sort of people who’d enjoy a party. Now the decking was slippery and rain dripped from the eaves.
The parents were looking out for Craig and came into the porch to greet him as soon as they saw the car. There were screams of delight from Angie about how brown the man was, and then she started on about it being time he found himself a nice Shetland girl and stayed at home. She’d missed him so much. Her hair was too black to be natural and she wore thick mascara and big earrings. Stuart had thrust a can of beer into his son’s hand before they’d had a chance to get into the kitchen. Sandy could understand why Craig had felt he needed a place of his own.
They sat in the open-plan downstairs room. Angie had offered coffee and was fidgeting with a fancy machine. Sandy felt he was in the way, but Jimmy Perez had asked him to talk to Craig’s parents: If they’re as protective as he makes out, they might have found out more about the owner of Tain.
Sandy found it hard to squeeze into the conversation at first, but once he brought up the subject of the dead woman at Tain, the Hendersons were eager to talk about her.
‘I was just glad that Craig had moved out.’ Angie brought Sandy a cappuccino and set it on a coaster on the glass coffee table. ‘Imagine if he’d still been living there; it could have been him in the mortuary in Aberdeen, not some strange woman.’ The implication was that the only safe place for Craig to be was at home with her.
‘Did you know Minnie Laurenson?’
‘We all knew Minnie. She taught us in Sunday school and terrified the life out of us, didn’t she, Stuart?’
Stuart nodded and took another swig from his can.
‘So you’d have heard that she’d left the house to a relative in America when she died?’
‘We all wondered what would happen to the house when she passed away,’ Angie said. ‘As far as we knew, there were no living relatives. Then nothing happened and I suppose we forgot all about it. The house was hidden from the road, and really it was none of our business. It was only when Magnus put Craig in touch with Minnie’s niece that we found out about the woman in America.’
‘You didn’t get in touch with her yourselves? With Craig travelling so much, it might have made sense if you were the first point of contact.’
There was no immediate reply and then Angie looked at her son. ‘I did try and get in touch once. Just a few weeks ago. I thought I’d go in and tidy the place up a bit, before Craig moved back in, and I wanted to find out who had the keys. I couldn’t find them in Craig’s room.’
‘That had been arranged, had it?’ Sandy directed his question to Craig. ‘You were going to rent Tain again?’
‘The plan was that I’d spend the first couple of weeks here at home and then move into Tain. No chance of that now.’ Craig turned to his mother. ‘You had no right to contact the American woman. How did you find her number anyway?’
‘I must have made a note of it when you first decided to leave us.’ The words were defiant. Sandy thought Angie had taken the number from her son’s phone when he wasn’t looking.
Craig shrugged. He’d obviously decided there was no point pursuing the argument. She would always win.
‘Did you get hold of the keys?’ Sandy asked.
‘I didn’t speak to the woman. All I got was her voicemail message.’ Angie paused. ‘I did go up to the house, though. If it had been empty for a few months, it would be damp and I couldn’t bear the thought of Craig coming back to a place like that. I thought I might be able to get in, air it for him and push the Hoover over it. It might not even have been locked.’
‘When exactly was this?’ Sandy thought Perez had been right about chatting to the parents. There were no boundaries for Angie – no idea of privacy. But then, Jimmy Perez was usually right.
‘About a fortnight ago.’
‘Could you be more precise, Mrs Henderson? I’d be very grateful.’
‘It was the same day as we went up to town for the country-music night at Mareel. When was that, Stuart? It should still be marked on the calendar. Go and have a look.’
Stuart did as he was told. ‘It was February the first.’
Sandy made a note of the date. ‘So you went to Tain. You drove up?’
‘Of course I drove.’ There was a big 4×4 and a new VW Golf parked outside the bungalow. It was hard to imagine Angie walking anywhere.
‘What time of day did you go up to Tain?’ Sandy knew that Jimmy liked detail.
‘Mid-morning. Stuart was doing a bit of maintenance on a couple of the chalets and I thought I’d just go on spec. I stuck the Hoover in the back of the car, just in case I could get in.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘The door was locked. The front door and the door at the back of the house that led into the lean-to.’
Sandy had a sudden thought and turned to Craig. ‘What had you done with your set of keys at the end of your stay?’
‘I gave them in to a solicitors’ office in Lerwick. Rogerson and Taylor. They dealt with Minnie Laurenson’s estate.’
‘You never said!’ Angie sounded hurt. ‘That would have saved me a lot of bother. I could have got the keys from them.’
‘You don’t need to know everything about my life!’ There was a sudden flash of anger and Sandy was reminded of the young man who’d started a fight in the bar in Lerwick, about something so trivial that he couldn’t remember the next day what had set him off. But the man probably had jetlag, and Angie Henderson would try the patience of a saint.