They walked between the tide line and the water. There was that sense of free floating, of the air and the sea all around them. The tide was low, but there were no other footprints on the beach. Evie was wearing a long hand-knitted cardigan, the colour of heather, and though it wasn’t a cold day she huddled inside it.
‘Every day is worse than the one before,’ she said. ‘At first there was just shock, and I thought I could deal with it. With my faith, and the help of my friends and family, I thought I could cope with anything. But I can’t. Not this.’
Willow had nothing to say.
‘Everyone thought John was the lucky one,’ Evie went on. ‘Lucky to be marrying me, I mean. A widower. So much older. But it was quite the other way round. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when he asked me to marry him. I’d dreamed of nothing else since our first date. Of that ring on my finger. Sharing the rest of our lives.’
Willow bent to pick up a shell. It was pink and perfect, a series of shining chambers inside, smooth to the touch.
‘I don’t think I believe in God any more,’ Evie said. The confession was defiant. She sounded like a three-year-old shouting out forbidden smutty words: bum, willy, poo. Willow was sure she hadn’t admitted any loss of faith to her parents. But this anger was surely healthier than the dumb compliance that she’d shown in the house.
‘Have you any idea what Jerry Markham might have wanted to talk to you about?’ Willow asked. ‘You said he’d left a message on your voicemail.’
‘No!’ It was as if bereavement had given her the licence to be rude. Perhaps for the first time in her life. ‘I don’t care about Jerry. I don’t give a shit about him.’
Willow wondered if Perez had behaved like this when his fiancée had died. Had he stamped his feet like a three-year-old and yelled at strangers. Perhaps in his own way he was still doing that. ‘Would the message still be on your phone?’ she asked.
Evie looked at her. ‘I deleted it. Why?’
‘Because if we find out why Jerry came to Shetland it might help us make an arrest, lock up John’s killer.’
‘I never believed in the death penalty,’ Evie said. ‘Not before this happened. I thought it was barbaric. Now I think I’d be prepared to kill the bastard myself. I’d stab him as he stabbed John.’ She picked up a pebble and hurled it into the water.
‘Jerry Markham had a new girlfriend,’ Willow said. ‘A young woman named Annabel Grey.’
‘Is that relevant?’ Evie’s voice was flippant. ‘I can’t imagine Jerry going for very long without a girlfriend.’
‘He met her in the winter, an advent course at a church in north London.’
There was a pause. ‘You’re telling me that Jerry got religion?’ Now the woman sounded incredulous.
‘According to Ms Grey.’
‘Then she’s lying!’ Suddenly Evie took off her shoes and rolled up the legs of her jeans. She ran towards the sea. A tiny wave rolled over her feet. The water must have been freezing, but it was as if she hadn’t felt its iciness. When Willow joined her she was still standing there, staring out to the horizon. ‘Jerry was a committed atheist. He mocked me for my faith. There is absolutely no way he’d have changed his mind on that. He was too proud to admit anything beyond his own experience. Too arrogant. And even if he had been tempted to explore belief, he’d have kept it secret. Trust me, turning up at a church just wasn’t his style.’ She looked up at Willow. ‘What’s she like, this Annabel Grey?’
Willow thought for a moment. ‘Young,’ she said. ‘Tall. Pretty.’
‘Of course.’ Evie’s voice was bitter. ‘Any girlfriend of Jerry’s would have to be pretty.’ She continued in a rush, an admission of hatred: ‘I’ve been thinking that it was Jerry’s fault. That John’s dead, I mean. It was Jerry coming back that started this off. If he’d stayed away, I’d be married by now. I’d be happy.’
‘We don’t know yet what happened, what triggered these dreadful events.’ But Willow thought that was probably true. Out at sea there was a huge tanker on the way south. Was that carrying crude oil from Sullom Voe? She turned back to Evie. ‘Jerry hadn’t mentioned in his voicemail message that he had a girlfriend?’
‘He didn’t tell me anything. The message was just: Please call me back. Something of that sort. A request. But I owed him nothing.’ Evie walked on through the shallow water. Willow couldn’t see her face and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
‘Weren’t you interested in knowing why he wanted to see you?’ Because surely we’re all interested in ex-boyfriends. Especially the ones who have dumped us, the ones we really adored.
‘Perhaps I was a bit curious.’ Evie stopped, watched the tide suck at her toes, the tiny eddies in the sand. ‘But I didn’t see him.’ She focused on a gull tugging at a bit of seaweed on the shore. ‘I’d been besotted with him, you know. Part of me was afraid that all the old feelings would come back if we met, that some of the old attraction would still be there. I didn’t need the complication. And I thought he’d want something. Jerry always did want something.’
‘Might Jerry have contacted John?’ Willow thought if the man had been desperate for Evie’s forgiveness, he might have asked her fiancé for help in setting up the meeting. Jerry had been at Sullom Voe on the afternoon of his death. John Henderson had been working there, just across the water from the terminal. She imagined how that conversation might have gone: I took advantage of your woman, got her pregnant and dumped her. Please help me to put things right. You’d think that Jerry Markham would have realized that the right thing to do just before the marriage was to leave things alone. To stay away. But then Markham had always been self-absorbed and self-indulgent. He’d probably be selfish even in this.
‘John didn’t say anything about it,’ Evie said at last. ‘If Jerry met him or phoned him, John didn’t tell me.’
‘And things were just the same between you? Those last few days of John’s life?’
There was a silence filled with gulls screeching.
‘I don’t know!’ Evie screamed louder than the gulls. ‘I was busy, about to be married, anxious about dresses and flowers and crazy stuff like that. And about work. If he was different, I didn’t notice. Don’t you think I wish I’d stopped? Dropped everything. Spent every last second with him.’ She stopped abruptly. It was as if the needle had been lifted from a vinyl record mid-track. When she started again, the voice was almost a whisper. ‘We never made love. Came close a few times. But we thought we had years ahead of us. Let’s wait, we thought. Make the marriage night something special. And now? Now, I wish we’d never got out of bed.’ She turned towards Willow and there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘Then I might have been pregnant. Now I’ll never have a child.’ Willow put her arm round her shoulder and walked with Evie back up the beach.
As they approached the house, Willow saw that Evie’s parents were looking out for them through the kitchen window. Would my parents behave like that if someone close to me had died? And she thought that they would. They’d be over-protective too. And they’d feel guilty, like Francis and Jessie, convinced that they should have been able to save their daughter from this pain. She thought again that it was time to take a trip to Uist to see them. Before it was too late.
Inside the house Evie reverted to the mode of obedient child. She’d left the anger on the beach. She sat at the table with her back to the window, sipped at her tea and crumbled a biscuit into the saucer. When Willow and Perez stood up to go, she hardly acknowledged their leaving.