‘Why would he come home,’ Perez said, ‘if he wasn’t here for work?’
‘He would have needed money. That was why he usually came back.’ Markham took a crumpled cigarette packet from his coat pocket and struggled to light one, drawing deeply when he managed it.
‘Had he asked you for a loan?’
‘Oh, he wouldn’t have asked me,’ Markham said. ‘As I said, his mother would refuse him nothing.’
‘Is it OK if I talk to Maria?’
‘Why not? She’ll believe her son’s a good man, whatever you say to her.’
Perez found the man’s cynicism unbearable. He stood up. Markham spluttered on his cigarette. ‘I loved him, you know,’ he said. ‘I just wish things could have been different.’ Another cough. ‘I wish he could have been different.’
Maria was in her nightclothes and dressing gown and in the living room the curtains were still drawn. Perez opened them and saw that Peter Markham was still on his bench in the garden below. The flat smelled stale, and Perez wondered if Maria had washed since Jerry’s death. She had family in the islands. Why weren’t they looking after her?
‘Have you thought of moving out for a little while?’ he asked. ‘There are people who would put you up.’
She looked horrified at the prospect, and he thought briefly that she would never leave the flat at the top of the hotel. Like Miss Havisham in the Dickens book he’d read at school, she’d stay there mourning Jerry until she was covered in cobwebs and dust.
‘I couldn’t face it,’ she said. ‘Not yet. People want to visit, but I tell Peter to send them away.’
‘Did you give Jerry some money when he came home this time?’ Perez was sitting on a low easy chair and he was so close to her that he could keep his voice very quiet. Almost like a lover’s whisper.
‘I offered,’ she said. And she turned to Perez, her eyes feverish and sparkling, glad of a reason to be proud of her boy. ‘I offered him money, but he said he didn’t need it. “I won’t need your cash ever again.” That was what he said.’
‘What do you think he meant by that?’
‘He was on the track of a story.’ Maria was animated again. Manic. ‘A story that would make his fortune.’
‘Is that what Jerry told you?’ Perez spoke again in his soft seducer’s voice. ‘That his story would make him a fortune?’
But she seemed caught up in her memories and didn’t answer directly. ‘That was what Jerry always wanted,’ she said. ‘Fame and fortune. From when he was a little boy. He thought he’d find it in London, but all the time it was here.’
‘What did he tell you about his story?’ Perez thought this was like groping in the dark for a shadow that kept slipping out of reach.
‘Nothing!’ Maria sat suddenly upright and he thought he caught the smell of spirit on her skin. She’d been drinking as well as taking prescribed medicine. Not this morning perhaps, but last night. Perez imagined her and Peter sitting in this room and drinking away the guilt in silence. ‘It was secret.’
‘Is that why Jerry’s editor knew nothing about it?’ Perez asked. ‘Because he needed to keep it to himself?’
Maria nodded energetically. ‘Anyone might betray him.’ Perez thought that sounded more like her son’s statement than Maria’s, and another scene came into his head. This time he pictured Maria and Jerry sitting in this room the night before the journalist died. Dinner was over and they were drinking. No Peter this time. He wouldn’t be able to face it. He’d be downstairs playing the gracious host in the bar. But mother and son. Maria delighted to have her boy home, perhaps sitting literally at his feet. Good wine. The most expensive the hotel could provide. No expense spared for the prodigal son. And Jerry holding forth, talking about his plans, refusing her money with a grand gesture: ‘Just you wait. I’ll never need to borrow from you again.’
‘But he’d have confided in you,’ Perez said gently. ‘He’d have told you what his story was about.’
Maria looked at him as if she suspected Perez of betraying Jerry too.
‘It might help us find out who killed him,’ Perez said. ‘We have to know what brought him here, what he was planning to write about.’
She looked at him, seemed at last to be wavering, to be ready to tip over the edge and answer. Then there were footsteps on the stairs. Peter, chilled now and ready to come into the warm, appeared at the door.
‘Jimmy!’ he said, his voice so jolly that he must have been practising the tone all the way from the garden. ‘Still here then? I was just going to make some coffee. You’ll join us?’
Perez looked at Maria, hoping that she still might be persuaded to talk to him, but it seemed that whatever spell he’d put on her had been broken. She stood up. ‘I’ll take a bath,’ she said. ‘Leave you boys to it.’ But at the door she paused. ‘He was going to tell us,’ she said. ‘He was going to tell us his secret the night he died. We were waiting up for him.’ She left the room before Perez could talk to her further.
‘Do you know what that was about?’ he asked Peter.
The man shrugged. ‘I know nothing about any secret,’ he said. ‘You should take it with a pinch of salt. Jerry and Maria both enjoyed a drama.’
Perez declined the coffee and walked back to his house. He collected his car and set off for the Bonhoga.
Chapter Eighteen
Perez arrived at the gallery before the lunchtime rush. Once the Bonhoga had been a water mill and it was still a grand three-storeyed building. On the ground floor there was a shop and reception, and upstairs in the roof the exhibition space. Perez couldn’t go up there. Whenever he’d come to the Bonhoga with Fran she’d drag him up to look at the paintings and drawings, and the memory was too raw. She’d exhibited there herself on a number of occasions. So he went straight downstairs to the coffee shop, where one wall was made up of huge windows looking over the burn.
Brian was a large man, hardly fitting into the narrow kitchen. If he was pulling a baking tray from the oven he had to twist his body sideways to reach inside. He’d been thinner when Perez had first met him. Then Brian had been cooking at the Sullom work camp, an English university dropout with a drug habit to fund, and Perez had charged him with possession of heroin. Now he was clean, but he was still in the islands, still cooking. Perez hoped he was settled and happy. It was hard to tell. Brian rarely smiled and carried around him an air of gloom. A habit as entrenched as the heroin.
The cafe was separated from the kitchen by a counter. Brian was standing there, wrapped in a huge black apron, cutting slices of cake for two German tourists. Otherwise the place was empty. He nodded to Perez, but didn’t speak until he’d carried the cake and coffee to his customers.
‘What can I get for you, Jimmy?’
‘Coffee,’ Perez said. ‘Black.’ He paused. ‘I’m here about Jerry Markham, the guy whose body was found in Aith last week. He was in here the morning that he died.’
Brian was pouring coffee and turned slowly to face Perez. ‘I didn’t even know the man.’
‘I’m not accusing you of killing him.’ Perez remembered that Brian had always had a streak of paranoia, was always frightened that he was being set up. ‘But he was with a woman. Middle-aged. We’re trying to trace her.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘You would recognize Markham? You’d know him when he worked on the Shetland Times?’
‘Yes, I recognized him.’
‘And the woman? Did you know her?’
Brian shook his head. ‘I’d never seen her in here before.’
‘Was she local?’
‘I didn’t hear her speak. They shut up when I took their drinks over.’
Perez thought about this. ‘Did you have the impression that they were friendly?’
Brian seemed to have got the message that he wasn’t a suspect and became more forthcoming. ‘They weren’t having a stand-up row, but I had the feeling there was an argument. No warmth. You know. One of them might leave at any time.’