‘You’ll have guessed what this is about,’ Sandy said.
‘Jerry Markham.’
‘Aye, did you know him?’
Henderson nodded slowly. ‘Not well, but I’d seen him around. Once or twice at the Ravenswick Hotel when he was still working for the Shetland Times.’
‘You didn’t like him?’ Henderson had closed the bedroom door and Sandy felt trapped in the tiny space. He’d never liked being shut in. Was this what it felt like to be in a submarine? A prison cell? He was aware of his own breathing and wondered if Henderson could hear it too.
‘I didn’t like his column in the Shetland Times. It always seemed kind of unpleasant to me. Sneering and cynical. He made out he was better than anyone else. More cool. Those of us who loved living in the islands weren’t worth bothering with.’
‘And he’d been Evie’s boyfriend,’ Sandy said.
Henderson looked at him. His eyes were blue and sharp.
‘What are you saying?’
‘That there’d be no love lost between you. Nothing more than that.’
Henderson leaned towards Sandy. Not a threat, but preparing for a declaration. ‘Markham treated her badly,’ he said, ‘but if he’d done the decent thing and stood by Evie when he got her pregnant, she wouldn’t be engaged to me. And she’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life since my wife Agnes died. I still wake up in the morning and thank God for sending her to me. I have no reason to kill him.’
Sandy wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. ‘How long have you been on your own?’
‘Five years.’ The man paused. ‘I hadn’t thought I’d miss the company. Agnes and I never had children, and I was used to being on my own. Then I got to know Evie and it was like coming alive all over again. A fresh start, you know.’
Sandy wondered if that might happen to Jimmy Perez one day: he might meet a bonny young woman and fall in love with her. He couldn’t see it. Nobody would make Jimmy light up as Fran had done.
A thought occurred to him. ‘You live in Hvidahus, don’t you? Are you involved in this campaign to stop the tidal energy coming ashore there?’
‘No, I don’t see it as a problem. There’ll be a bit of disruption when they widen the track and build the substation, but I can live with that.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Besides, Power of Water is Evie’s baby. She’d kill me if I objected.’
‘The wedding’s on Saturday?’
‘Aye, in the kirk just up the road from Evie’s house, and a party in the community hall in the evening.’
Sandy wondered how Henderson would get on at a party. It was hard to imagine him drinking too many drams and dancing with the pretty bridesmaids. ‘Evie didn’t fancy going home to Fetlar to be wed?’
‘She has old college friends coming up from the south and it’s easier for them to get to the mainland.’ Henderson smiled. ‘At least, that was what she said. But I think she knew how much it mattered to me to be married close to home. We’re both members of the congregation there. Her family understands, and we’ll go over to Fetlar on Sunday to visit the old folk who can’t get out to the wedding. Evie will put on her wedding dress and we’ll take them some cake. You know how it is.’
Sandy nodded. He knew just what was expected. ‘Did you know that Markham was in Shetland this week?’
In the control room a phone rang. Henderson waited until it had been answered before he spoke again. ‘Evie told me he was back,’ he said. ‘But I heard the news about the murder on the radio like everyone else.’
‘Markham phoned Evie a few times when he was here. I wondered what that was about.’
‘Evie didn’t tell me about the calls until last night. She was worried I’d be upset that Markham was pestering her.’ Henderson had one of those voices that didn’t let on what he was feeling, so Sandy couldn’t tell whether he was angry Evie hadn’t told him about them before, or pleased that she’d let him know eventually. ‘She didn’t answer them.’
‘Markham was over at the terminal on Friday afternoon,’ Sandy said. ‘Did you see him?’
There was a moment of silence. ‘Why would I?’ Henderson said. ‘We bring the tankers in and then we take them out. Then we leave. We have no real contact with the terminal.’ He looked at his watch again – the only indication that the interview was starting to irritate him.
‘Where were you on Friday night?’
‘I was here,’ Henderson said. ‘Catching some sleep because I was on call.’ He stood up. ‘Now is there anything else, Sandy? I should be getting back to work.’
‘Were you called out to work on Friday night?’ Sandy asked.
‘Not until the early hours of Saturday morning.’ Henderson seemed almost amused by the question, but again Sandy had no real idea what he was thinking. ‘But I have no proof for you. No witnesses. They don’t lock us in.’
Outside a helicopter came in to land at Scatsta. The noise was very loud and the room seemed to shake. Sandy thanked Henderson for his help and left the building. As he walked to his car a group of men in identical blue overalls stared at him. He felt as if he was in one of those cowboy films he’d watched as a kid – the stranger riding into town.
In Lerwick the morning briefing was just breaking up. There was a whiteboard on the wall and Willow Reeves was staring at it, absorbed, as if the solution to the case was captured there in the scrawled names and photos. She didn’t notice the rest of the team leaving or Sandy coming in. He coughed to get her attention and she turned, startled.
‘We still don’t know where the man was killed,’ she said. ‘There’s no crime scene. If we had that, maybe we could move the investigation on. There’d be some forensic trace. It’s driving me crazy. It’s as if Markham drove out of Sullom Voe in the fog and then disappeared. How did his body get from there to a boat in the marina at Aith, and his car back to the museum? What did he do that triggered those events?’
‘He gave somebody a lift?’ Sandy said. ‘Anybody walking along a road in the country, you’d stop and see if they needed a ride. Specially in that weather.’
‘And would Markham do that too?’ Willow demanded. ‘Snooty Markham, who’s used to city ways.’
‘Maybe it would depend who it was.’ Sandy was thinking, struggling to keep up. Willow seemed to jump from thought to thought, to build links and conclusions while he was still beginning the process. ‘He always had a reputation for liking a pretty girl, even before he got Evie into trouble.’
‘Could he have bumped into Evie on the road?’ Willow asked. ‘I still can’t get my head round the geography of this place. Wherever I look there’s water. It’s disorientating.’
‘Evie lives off the back road not far from Sullom. If he was going that way and she was out, he could have seen her.’
‘But that’s just about chance, and I don’t see this as a random attack.’ Willow grabbed her jacket from her desk. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
‘Where are we off to?’
She was already out of the door. ‘I need to find where the man was murdered,’ she said. ‘We’ll drive from Sullom Voe, on the route Markham would have taken towards his parents’ hotel.’
Sandy was about to say that he’d just come back that way. But he saw that it would make no difference to Willow and, whatever he said to her, she’d make him do it again anyway.
A damp drizzle had blown in from the sea. It wasn’t the thick fog that there’d been the day of Markham’s death, but it blurred the outline of the hills and there was the sense of being closed in. Usually Shetland was about low horizons and long views, and today Sandy was reminded about his one trip to London and how trapped he’d felt by the buildings there. He was driving and he took the road slowly. Beside him, Willow was so tense that she made him feel anxious too.
‘So what was it like where you grew up?’ he said. He couldn’t bear the silence. ‘Did you look after your own there too?’