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‘What did you do when you couldn’t get into Tain? Did you drive straight home?’ But Sandy thought that wasn’t Angie’s style at all.

‘I had a quick look through the windows,’ she said. ‘I had given the place a good clean the day before Craig left it. I wanted to see what sort of state it was in. I thought I’d have heard if there’d been another tenant in, but you can never tell.’

‘And what state was it in?’

‘Someone was staying there!’ She seemed as affronted as if the place had been taken over by squatters.

‘You saw somebody inside the house?’

‘No.’ Angie was obviously disappointed. ‘I knocked at the door, but there was no reply. There were signs that the place was lived in, though. I walked round the house while I was trying the doors and I looked through the windows.’

‘Could you tell me what you saw?’

‘It was tidy enough.’ There was a pause and she shut her eyes as if she was trying to picture the rooms she’d seen through the small windows. ‘The bed had been made up. We took bedding down from here for Craig when he first moved in, and brought it all home the day before he flew out. He spent his last night here with us. We had a bit of a party to see him off. The new stuff looked expensive. I’m not sure where you’d get it locally. It must have been bought online. Some of Minnie Laurenson’s furniture was still there – it had been there when Craig had the place too. He wanted to keep it. I’d have got in new.’ Another pause. ‘I suppose there’s not much left of it now.’

Sandy thought of the house, wrecked by the landslide and flooded with mud. He shook his head. ‘Not much. What did you do then?’

‘I came home,’ she said. ‘What else could I do?’

Sandy phoned Jimmy Perez from his car. He’d stopped at a community shop on the way through to buy Coke and chocolate for Vicki and made the call before setting off again. He was eager to tell Jimmy that Tom Rogerson’s firm had managed Minnie Laurenson’s estate, but there was no answer and he had to leave a message. Back at Tain, he found Vicki Hewitt in the garden, sifting through the debris close to the wall. It was midday, but there was hardly any light and in her scene-suit she looked like a small, white ghost in the gloom. He pulled on a scene-suit of his own. Vicki heard his footsteps and turned.

‘There’s enough stuff here to take a whole team a month to sort through properly.’ But she sounded cheerful enough and he could tell that she wasn’t daunted. She wasn’t the sort to complain.

‘You’ll have to make do with me,’ Sandy said. ‘Sorry.’

She grinned. ‘I thought it was best to start out here. The material still inside the house is relatively stable – it survived the landslide, after all. A bad gale and all this could disappear. I’m bagging as much as I can and pegging the plot, taking lots of photos. If you follow behind me and mark up the bags, that would speed us up.’

So Sandy squatted beside her and followed her instructions. He was always happiest when he had clear instructions to follow, and the crime-scene investigator was very precise about what she wanted him to do. Vicki seemed not to notice the drizzle or cold. Occasionally she stood up to stretch or take a drink, but her focus was always on the small patch of ground just in front of her. Close to the ruins of the house, tucked out of the worst of the weather, a pile of plastic bags showed how much progress she’d already made.

Now she was sorting through a small pile of kitchen implements: a corkscrew, a cheese grater and a sieve; they were all intact, and all had been trapped by the wall. The tide of mud must have swept them out through the kitchen door. The random nature of the items reminded Sandy of the bric-a-brac stalls that appeared occasionally at the fund-raising Sunday teas run in community halls throughout the summer. Vicki was like one of the elderly women who scrabbled through the junk hoping to find treasure. He couldn’t see how the objects might be of interest, but each item was bagged and he scribbled on the labels. There was a single woman’s shoe, size five, suede, with leather trimmings, an ankle strap and small heel.

‘Was she wearing shoes when they found the body?’ Vicki sat on her heels and stretched her back and arms.

‘No.’ Sandy wondered if that was significant, but Vicki didn’t say anything and he couldn’t work out how it might be.

She turned her attention back to some sodden scraps of paper, sliding them carefully into a bag.

‘This isn’t newsprint. It could provide corroboration of identity, if the techies can dry it out.’

Or it could be some junk mail, trying to sell the occupant a credit card or double glazing. Sandy was starving. He’d missed out on lunch, but he knew Vikki hadn’t eaten, either. She seemed to keep going with the bottle of Coke, which she drained in one go and then returned carefully to her rucksack. He wasn’t going to be the one to call it a day, but he was thinking ahead to his night out with Louisa. He’d told Jimmy Perez that he was happy to work if he was needed, but Jimmy had only laughed and told him that nobody was indispensable. So Sandy had booked a table for dinner in the Scalloway Hotel. And a room for afterwards. He’d blinked when he’d heard the price of the overnight stay, but Louisa was worth every penny. Anyway, it would save him the bother of tidying his flat, if they weren’t going back there for the night.

The light was fading now and the cars crawling along the road above them were already using their headlights. Soon it would be too dark to continue working and then even Vikki would have to give up. The firefighters had taken away their generator and lights and there was no colour left in the landscape.

‘Ten more minutes.’ She stood upright. ‘Then it’s back to civilization for a bath and a meal.’

He nodded. And Louisa.

Vicki crouched again, began sifting through another square foot of debris and then froze.

‘Didn’t Prof. Grieve say the ligature that killed the woman could be a belt?’

‘I think so.’ Sandy never liked to be too definite. ‘Narrow. No sign of the buckle piercing the skin, but some marks, which might have come from indentations in the leather.’

‘Best get a photo of this, then.’ There was a flash that blinded him for a moment. Vikki shifted position and took another photograph, then she pulled out a thin leather belt embossed with flowers.

‘A woman’s.’ Sandy was disappointed. ‘It could have belonged to the victim and been swept out of the house with all the other junk.’

‘Maybe. If it matches the marks on the neck, it could tell us something about the crime, though.’ She curled the belt so that it looked like a snake and dropped it into a bag.

‘Yeah?’ Sandy thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it would make this the crime scene. Tain, I mean. Unlikely that she was killed elsewhere, if the murder weapon is here.’

‘And it would suggest that the murder was opportunistic. If the killer was a man, that is. He didn’t bring the murder weapon with him. It belonged to the victim, and the killer picked up what was to hand.’ Hours on her hands and knees in the damp soil didn’t seem to have dulled Vicki’s enthusiasm.

‘It’s all kind of negative, though, isn’t it? And uncertain.’ He felt almost disloyal, as if he was questioning her expertise.

‘It’s a start,’ she said. ‘It’s more than we had this morning.’

Chapter Eleven

Willow Reeves thought this Shetland – the Shetland of winter gloom and dark shadows – was quite different from the midsummer Shetland of her memory. That had been all pink and silver, sparkling light on water, flowers on the headlands. This was her third time in the islands, but it was as if she was making her first visit, seeing the place as a stranger. Perhaps she needed a reality check, she thought. She couldn’t go through life like a teenager, dreaming for the tall, dark man who brooded about the perfect woman who’d died. Her parents had been dreamers. They’d thrown away their comfortable life as academics to set up a commune on the Hebridean island of North Uist. In the end, the other settlers had lost enthusiasm and drifted away, but Willow’s parents were still there, scraping a living from the sandy soil, unwilling to admit that the experiment had been a huge mistake.