Perez looked along the valley towards Weisdale Voe.
‘It’s about Jerry Markham again. The meeting he had here the day he died. I wondered if you’d thought any more about it. Can you remember who paid, for instance?’
Brian glanced inside to check that there were no late customers. ‘I wouldn’t know who paid. I just give them the bill and they pay in the shop upstairs.’
‘Who came to the counter for the bill? You’d get a better look then.’
‘Do you know how many people I serve in here on a busy day?’ He dragged on the cigarette.
‘But this was Jerry Markham. A bit of a local celebrity. You’d have noticed, wouldn’t you? Hoped for a tip?’
‘Well, I always hope.’ He pulled his jacket around his huge body, leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes. ‘Markham came to get the bill,’ he said.
‘How did he seem?’
Brian looked at Perez. ‘I don’t know. A bit preoccupied. I had to tell him twice that the till was upstairs. When he was living in Shetland we took the money down here. And sad. He looked sad.’
Perez gave no response. He didn’t want to break Brian’s concentration. ‘And the woman? Was she with him then?’
Brian seemed to sleep again. ‘The woman walked off. She didn’t wait for him. She must have had her own car. Unless she was going to the Ladies.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Look, Jimmy, this is all speculation. You wouldn’t get a court to accept any of this as evidence.’
‘And I wouldn’t call you as a witness,’ Perez said. ‘Honestly.’ He wondered if this had been worrying Brian all along, that he might have to go through the stress of a court case. Reliving unhappy memories. He felt stupid that it hadn’t occurred to him before. ‘So the woman,’ he went on. ‘Can you describe her to me again? One witness described her as middle-aged. Is that how you remember her?’
‘I don’t know, Jimmy! Maybe. Maybe she was younger. Some women could be any age from twenty to fifty, don’t you think? And I wasn’t really noticing. As I said before, it was busy in here.’
‘And she was one of those women it’s hard to age?’
Brian nodded. Perez slipped a photograph from a brown envelope and rested it on Brian’s knee. He said nothing and waited for a reaction. Brian picked it up, holding it carefully by the edges.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. ‘But yes, this could be her.’
He handed the picture of Evie Watt back to Perez.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Perez didn’t want to go back to the station. Once he arrived there he’d have to report to Willow and tell her that Brian had thought Evie Watt might have been Markham’s companion in the Bonhoga on the morning of his death. She’d think he was crazy. He knew what the team would be thinking if he passed on his suspicions. Poor Jimmy Perez. Off work for months with stress-related illness. And now another murder inquiry, bringing that dreadful business on Fair Isle back to him. No wonder he’s coming up with a bunch of strange ideas.
So he drove north. Up to Bixter first, then cutting cross-country through the hills to Aith, following the route of the hennie bus. No real destination in mind. Enjoying the space and the empty road, the view over water. Curlews calling as a background to his thoughts. He wanted to be back to pick up Cassie from his neighbour before it got too late, before her bedtime, but there was no other objective than to let his mind wander around the possibilities. He’d always found driving through Shetland helped in that way. It was something about the space and the long horizons – though tell Sandy that and he’d look at you as if you were talking a foreign language.
In Aith Perez stopped at the marina, got out of the car and looked up at the Belshaw house. From its position at the top of the bank there was a view over the whole settlement to the tops beyond. You’d see the Fiscal’s house from there. He pondered the implication of that before walking back to his vehicle.
The school had closed for the day and Perez was tempted to drive back up the bank to talk to Jen Belshaw. But her children would be at home, it would be all noise and domestic chaos, and besides, he wasn’t sure he was ready yet. He didn’t have the right questions to ask. At Voe he passed the bar, another hennie bus stop and, at the junction to the main road, he looked south to where Markham’s car had been ambushed. All the action surrounding the murders had taken place in such a small area, all in the North Mainland. The biggest proportion of Shetland’s population lived in Lerwick and to the south, so he thought this was significant too, something that Willow, coming in from outside, hadn’t considered. The only major players living outside this region were Peter and Maria Markham in the Ravenswick Hotel. It occurred to him that he’d never seen them away from their business, but of course that didn’t mean they were stranded there, isolated from the rest of the islands. They could travel north too.
Instead of taking the road south towards home, he turned left. He drove on through Brae, where Joe Sinclair lived with his family. There was a kids’ football match on the field, but no sign of Andy Belshaw. These looked like school teams and the woman referee, in a bright tracksuit, must be a teacher. Perez thought Andy would be in his office at the oil terminal, drafting his press releases and selling his stories, perhaps finding it hard to concentrate because he was still mourning his best friend.
There were no scarecrow figures now at the gate where the track led off to Evie Watt’s croft, but in their place a mound of flowers. Some picked from gardens, daffodils and early tulips. Big bouquets, still in their clear plastic wrappers, bought from the supermarkets in Lerwick. Perez pulled his car into the side of the road and went to look. There were pictures and messages, many of them directed to Evie. We’re so sorry for your loss. We’ll miss him, he was a lovely man.
Perez felt relieved that Fran had died on Fair Isle. A small comfort. None of her acquaintances, her students or the other people, who would have enjoyed their own brief role in a life-and-death drama, could make it there. So there’d been no flowers to shrivel in the frost. No dying petals to scatter in the wind.
Perez saw, partly hidden by a bunch of imported roses, the corner of a card and recognized the image just from that. He felt in his pocket for gloves and lifted it out. The black-and-white reproduction of a painting of three fiddle players. The band Fiddlers’ Bid. On the back, no message. He carried it carefully to the car, slipped it into an evidence bag. He knew he should immediately take it back to Lerwick and show it to Willow, but still he continued on his way.
Past Scatsta Airport and the Harbour Authority site: Joe Sinclair’s empire and John Henderson’s second home. Past the oil terminal, with its high security and, next to it, the major construction work to bring the gas ashore. Already the afternoon was drawing into early evening, the colour beginning to drain from the landscape. Cassie would be sitting with her friend at the kitchen table ready for her tea. Really he knew he should turn back, head south. But still he continued until he was driving down a small single-track road towards Hvidahus, realizing only then that this was where he’d been heading all along.
The tiny community was silent. He looked down at the small pier, boats moored ready for the summer. Mark Walsh’s big house waiting for its first guests. The tiny holiday cottage was still empty. The only sound came from the gentle buzz of the wind turbine outside John Henderson’s house. Now that he was here, Perez felt foolish. The house had been made secure and he didn’t have a key. But still he stood there. This place had been built by Henderson and he’d lived here with his wife, nursing her. And this was where he had planned to bring his bonny young wife.
When he was a young DC in Aberdeen, Perez’s boss had been unusual. A strange and thoughtful man, much mocked by his more macho colleagues. ‘Sometimes detection is like acting,’ he’d said once. ‘You have to get inside the offender’s skin, stand in his boots and see the world through his eyes. Understand what makes him tick.’