Hay followed, but put a hand on Perez’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get too close, Jimmy. The hill’s not too stable. There could be another slide. And I don’t think there’s anyone to save in there. No point putting your life at risk.’
Perez nodded. He saw that the mourners had reached the car park and people were driving away north, carrying with them friends who lived to the south of the slide. He supposed they’d be moving on to the community hall. The women would have a spread laid out. No point wasting that, and they’d all be ready for a hot drink.
‘We should join them, Jimmy,’ Kevin Hay said. ‘Nothing we can do here.’ In the distance they heard the sound of sirens. He looked back at the hill, worried about another landslide.
‘You go. I need to stay anyway.’ Perez looked beyond the house. There’d been a lean-to shed on the back of the kitchen and that had been completely destroyed: glass and the corrugated iron roof would have been swept into the mud. Beyond it, though, a stone wall that separated the small garden from the open grazing beyond was almost undamaged; it seemed to have funnelled the landslip through a gap where a wooden gate had once been. Nearest the space, the edges of the wall were ragged, eaten away like unravelled knitting, but beyond the gap on each side they were quite solid. The tide of earth had deposited debris there, thrown it up on its way through. Perez saw a bedhead, a couple of plastic garden chairs that must have been stored in the lean-to. And something else, bright against the grey wall and the black soil. A splash of red. Brighter than blood.
He scrambled down the bank towards it. A woman’s body had been left behind by the ebbing tide of earth. She wore a red silk dress, exotic, glamorous. Not the thing for a February day in Shetland, even if she’d been indoors when the landslide swept her away. Her hair and her eyes were black and Perez felt a strange atavistic connection. She could be Spanish, like his ancestors of centuries ago. Kevin Hay was already walking back to the cars and Perez stood alone with her until the emergency services arrived.
Chapter Two
The landslide caused chaos. The main road from Lerwick to Sumburgh Airport would be closed for at least the next day, and just where the slip had been there were no roads to set up a diversion. Flights into Sumburgh had been diverted to Scatsta Airport in North Mainland, which was normally only used for oil- and gas-related traffic, but was now stretched to capacity. Business people fired off emails of complaint to the council, as if they could influence the elements, and then booked themselves onto the ferry. Power lines were down – the slide had snapped poles and dragged them from their foundations. In the south of the island, people lucky enough still to have them reverted to the little generators they had used before mains electricity, and which they kept for emergencies. Others made do with candles and paraffin lamps.
The day after the incident Jimmy Perez was busy. He was the boss, so it was mostly meetings: with the council, to work on getting the road open as soon as possible; with social services, to check that the vulnerable and elderly had food delivered to them, and that their houses were warm. Not exactly police work, but in the islands it was important to be flexible. He disliked being trapped in the police station and in endless discussions. And still it rained, so he looked out at a grey town, the horizon between the sea and the sky blurred with cloud. Today it hardly seemed to get light.
The main focus of his colleagues was to identify the woman who’d been killed in the landslide. As far as they could tell, she’d been the only casualty. There were no pockets in the silk dress and no handbag had been found. So there was nothing to identify her, no credit card or passport. The fire service said it was too dangerous yet to get into the ruined house to search for belongings. The bottom of her face, her jaw and her nose had been damaged beyond recognition and there were wounds to the back of her head; Perez thought she’d been gathered up by the moving hillside, tumbled and battered until she’d been left adrift at the stone dyke. Yet her forehead and her eyes had seemed oddly untouched. There were scratches and tears in the skin, but the structure of that part of the face had been left intact. Her dark eyes had stared out at him. Perez hoped that the first impact had killed her, knocked her out at least, so she’d had no knowledge of what was happening to her. He still felt the weird and irrational attachment that he’d experienced at the scene.
They assumed she must have been staying in the croft house that had been half-flattened and filled with black earth. On holiday perhaps. Yesterday had been the eve of St Valentine’s, and in Perez’s head she’d been trying on the red dress for her lover. Making sure that she would look good for the following evening. Perhaps she’d planned to cook him dinner. Something spicy and Mediterranean, made with peppers and tomatoes as red as the dress. Perez knew all these were fantasies, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted a name for her.
They still hadn’t tracked down the owner of the house, though they did have a name for it: Tain. Apparently it had been inherited by a woman who lived in America, from an elderly aunt. Word in the community was that she rented it out on an ad hoc basis. She had plans to do it up and didn’t want to let it out long-term. Robert Henderson, whose brother had been the last tenant, was enjoying a Caribbean cruise, and the brother himself was working in the Middle East. It was all frustrating and unsatisfactory. Perez knew there would be a logical explanation and that soon somebody would come forward to identify her, but at present the dead woman remained mysterious, fuelling his imagination and making him feel ridiculous.
Her body would be sent by ferry to Aberdeen for the post-mortem and Perez hoped they could get a name from dental records, once the pathologist James Grieve had started his work, but that could take days. And they needed some idea who she was before they could find her dentist. Perez didn’t think there was any point checking in the islands. She wasn’t local. He would have seen her in town or heard about the dark lady who lived on the edge of his community.
Now he was between meetings. He’d made coffee and stared out of his window towards the town hall. Its bulk was a shadow against the grey sky. Sandy Wilson knocked and came in.
‘I’ve spoken to most of the estate agents in Lerwick. None of them managed the Ravenswick house or rented it out.’
‘We need to track down the owner then.’ Perez continued looking out of the window at the rain. ‘The dead woman might have been their friend or relative. Do we still have no idea who it belongs to?’
Sandy shook his head. ‘The person who might have had an idea is dead.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Magnus Tait. He would have grown up with Minnie Laurenson, the old lady who used to live there. He might have been able to point us in the direction of the niece who inherited it.’
But Magnus had died after a stroke at the age of eighty-five and Perez suddenly realized that he still needed to grieve for the man. Magnus had been a part of his life for the past few years. The landslide cutting short the funeral had disturbed the natural process of mourning. At least Magnus had been laid to rest with some dignity, lowered into the ground before the cemetery had been inundated with mud.
Perez had first met Fran, his fiancée, because she’d been Magnus’s neighbour, and the crofter had arrived at Perez’s door soon after Fran’s funeral. Looking as awkward as a shy child. Clutching in his hand a bag of the sweets he knew Cassie loved. For the bairn. Yon wife was a good woman. Then he’d turned and walked down the bank to his croft, making no other demands, not expecting Perez to chat or to invite him in.