And that sucked away all her anger and made her feel deflated and flat.
‘I need to know where you are,’ she said. ‘Where all the team are.’ Which sounded pathetic and as if she was some sort of control freak.
‘Of course.’ He slowed down to let a boy racer overtake on the straight road close to Tingwall airstrip. ‘Maybe I’ve been on my own too long. I’ve lost the knack of communication.’ He hesitated. ‘Like when you’ve had a stroke. You have to practise all over again.’
‘Did you speak to the manager at the Bonhoga?’ she said. Best to be crisp and professional.
‘Aye. He didn’t recognize the woman speaking to Jerry Markham.’
‘Evie wondered if it might be Maria Markham,’ Willow said. ‘She said they were always very close. “More like lovers than mother and son.” That was how she described them.’
‘Maria didn’t mention meeting Jerry for coffee.’ Perez kept his voice flat. No indication whether he thought this might be a possibility or whether he thought Willow was talking rubbish.
‘Could she be involved in the blackmail, do you think?’ It was quite dark now. Willow had forgotten how black it was with no street lights, no car headlights. She was transported back to Uist, to the star map and the silence of her childhood.
‘She could be protecting Jerry’s memory,’ Perez said. ‘Oh yes, definitely that. But working with him to extort money? I’m not sure.’ He paused. ‘Maybe, if she’d convinced herself that it was due to him, that he had a right to it. But if that’s the case, I’m not sure what the secret he was planning to share could have been.’
He slowed down to turn off the main road. There was still a white tent where the dummies of Evie and her fiancé had once lain in the grass. A police car with Davy Cooper inside.
‘Do you want to stop?’ Perez asked.
‘No. I want to get to Evie’s place while they’re still up.’
On the walk from the car to the little house all they had to guide them was the light coming from one of the windows. At least the Watts weren’t in bed and asleep. It hadn’t rained again, but still there was the smell of damp grass and wet sheep’s wool. At one point Willow stumbled and Perez caught her arm.
The family sat round a kitchen table. Willow looked in from outside and thought it could have been a stage set. The small table at the centre of the room. The sheepskins: two on the floor and a black one thrown over the back of the plain wooden chair. The brightly woven blanket covering the sofa. Photographs and drawings on the wall facing the window. A jam jar of meadow flowers, already fading on the table. And three characters.
The man was sitting stiff and upright. Willow thought he could have walked out of a play by Ibsen or Strindberg. In his mid-fifties, he had a brown face and a little moustache. His legs were hidden by the table, but he was wearing a hand-knitted sweater, Fair Isle-patterned in browns and greys. A sweater for special occasions, Willow thought. For church and parties, and for mourning the man who might have been a son-in-law. For comforting a daughter who’d lost the love of her life.
Each side of him a woman. The mother small, her hair still dark. One of those Celtic women, who keep their dark hair into middle age. Bright-blue eyes. Bright with a feverish concern for the daughter who sat across the table from her. She reached out in front of her husband to clasp the young woman’s hand. And Evie Watt, as still and upright as her father, still wearing the clothes she’d been in when Willow had met her for lunch, allowed her mother to take it.
Willow remembered meeting Evie for their lunch in the Tollclock Centre, the conversation about the wedding, the impromptu invitation to the celebration party and thought: This woman isn’t a killer. She didn’t stab her fiancé, dump his body by the road and make it look like a dummy, then talk to me about Jerry Markham. Nobody is that good an actor.
Jimmy Perez approached the door and knocked. Willow continued to stare through the window. Jessie was startled by the noise and Francis got to his feet to answer. Evie didn’t move. It was as if she hadn’t heard it.
‘Francis, I’m so sorry.’ As Willow watched from the shadow, Perez put his hand on Watt’s shoulder. The men stood very close for a moment, then pulled apart. ‘This is Inspector Reeves,’ Perez went on. ‘She’s in charge of the investigation. You don’t mind if we come in?’
‘Come away inside,’ Francis said. The habit of good manners and hospitality meant he wouldn’t refuse them entry, even tonight, even when his family was in crisis.
The women looked up when the visitors walked into the room, but didn’t get to their feet. Willow saw that the mother had shifted chairs in the moment that her husband had left the kitchen; now she was sitting next to her daughter. Francis moved around the room, which was obviously familiar to him, switching on the kettle, putting teabags in a pot. Still Willow felt removed from the action: she had wandered onto the stage, but she wasn’t part of the play. She needed to become engaged. She pulled out a chair so that it was facing Evie.
‘I’m so sorry about John, Evie, and I know it’s the last thing you need, but we have to talk. You do understand?’
Evie nodded.
‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would have wanted to hurt him?’
‘No! He was a good man. Everyone liked him.’ She looked at her parents for confirmation.
‘No one had anything but good to say about John Henderson,’ Francis said. ‘He didn’t have an enemy in the world.’
‘Yet someone stabbed him in the garage of his home at Hvidahus, drove him almost all the way here and set his body beside the dummy of you on the verge. Our crime-scene investigator found the original in the ditch further up the road. That would suggest to me that John had an enemy.’ Willow kept her voice even, but looked to check that Evie had heard her and was taking in the words. She would have preferred to talk to the woman on her own, but could hardly send the parents away. ‘I assume that you do want the murderer caught and punished.’
‘That’s not for me to worry about,’ Evie said. ‘That way lies madness.’
Willow saw that one of the photographs pinned to the board on the wall was of Evie at her hen party. She was in the bar in Voe, dressed up in some sort of animal costume. A fake-fur suit and furry ears. A glass of beer was on the table in front of her and she had her arm round a plump woman dressed liked a pirate. Both of them were pulling faces.
The silence that followed the words was broken by Francis Watt, who put the teapot on the table and handed round mugs. The ritual of tea, Willow thought, is like a liturgy itself, comforting because it’s so familiar. She watched Jessie pour, waved her hand to show that she didn’t take milk.
‘But you will help us,’ Perez said. ‘You will answer our questions truthfully?’
‘Of course! But I won’t guess. I won’t speculate.’
‘When did you last speak to John?’ he asked.
OK! Willow thought. So now Perez is taking over my interview. But she didn’t interrupt. Perez seemed to have grasped Evie’s attention. Demanded it and held it tight. Her eyes were fixed on his face. Two people who had lost the people they loved. They could have been alone in the world.
‘On the phone this morning,’ Evie said. ‘We spoke to each other when we first woke up. Every day. Even if we planned to meet up later. He was an early riser and so am I. It was seven o’clock. I made tea, sat here and phoned John.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘The usual things.’ For the first time Evie sounded close to tears. ‘How much I loved him. How I couldn’t wait to see him. How I was counting the minutes to Saturday when we could be together as man and wife.’
‘He was going to work at lunchtime?’ Perez asked.