'Do you know if Robert was there?'
'I don't know. Duncan didn't say. Quite often he was! Her voice was dry, slightly hostile.
'You don't like him!
'He's a spoilt rich kid. Hardly his fault, I suppose! 'Not a kid any longer!
'Shame he still acts like one! She turned round, brushing Perez's knee with her shoulder. 'Look, take no notice. I hardly have an unbiased view of that family. His mother wrecked my marriage. At least, Duncan wrecked it. She was complicit. Only it seems she's had enough. She's walked out too. Gone back to Michael full-time. Convenient, just before Up Helly Aa.
She'll be there to support him in front of the cameras. Everyone will say what a lovely family they are. Duncan's on his own again. Poor, lonely Duncan!
For the first time he thought she must have started drinking before he'd got there.
'Did Catherine ever mention knowing him?' 'Robert? No!
'And Duncan?'
'No, but then she wouldn't, would she? She must have known he was my ex. Even new to the place, she'd have picked up that bit of gossip. And you can't imagine Duncan would have had a fling with Catherine? She was only a child!
But as she spoke he saw that she was considering the possibility and not dismissing it out of hand. Perhaps she'd considered it before.
'Can you tell me anything else about the party? Did Duncan mention any of the other guests?'
'No. But I had the impression he was in such a state about Celia, that Posh and Becks could have wandered in and he'd not have taken any notice. Not like him at all!
Perez stood up reluctantly. Different circumstances and he'd have stayed to share the rest of the bottle with her, suggested that they might go out sometime. The film club. She was an arty woman. It might be the sort of thing she'd like. By the end of the week, knowing him, he'd probably have told her he loved her. It was probably just as well that she was involved in a murder case and he couldn't even kiss her on the cheek as he walked out.
Chapter Twenty-One
Magnus sat upright in his chair and listened. He couldn't see outside the house. That was his own doing.
During the day there had been people looking in and by the afternoon he hadn't been able to bear it. The first caller had been a young policeman asking for his boots.
'What boots?'
He hadn't understood. Was it a trick to stop him going out?
'The boots you were wearing when you saw the girclass="underline" the man said. 'You told Inspector Perez you crossed the field and saw her!
'Aye!
'We need them. 'To compare with the footprints we found!
Still Magnus didn't really understand, but he'd pointed to the boots, which were standing on a piece of sacking in the porch. The policeman had stooped, lifted them into a plastic bag and carried them away.
Soon after there'd been another sharp knock. Magnus had opened the door, expecting more police, but it had been a woman from a newspaper with a notebook, talking so quick - clack, clack, clack - that he couldn't make out what she was saying. She'd scared him with her squawking voice, her pointed nose pushing into his face, the pen she poked towards his chest. After that he didn't answer to their banging. He sat at the table pretending to read an old magazine which had been lying around since his mother had died. Why had he kept it? He thought once there had been a reason, but he couldn't remember now.
They'd seen him through the window, peering at an angle to make him out and rapping on the glass to catch his attention, scaring the raven in its cage. That was when he acted. He flattened out a couple of boxes and nailed the cardboard over the window. Now nobody could see in, but he couldn't see out and that made him feel like a prisoner already. He couldn't tell what the weather was doing, or if the coastguard team had finished walking over the hill. It must be dark. He could tell that from the time on his mother's clock.
In his head there were still people waiting for him outside the house, waiting to shout filth and push their faces right against the glass and their shoulders to the door. He hadn't heard anyone outside for some time, but they could be there, silent, waiting to surprise him, like the monsters in a nightmare he'd had as a boy.
After Agnes died, the nightmares became worse. In his dreams he'd seen her, pale and thin as she'd been when the whooping cough turned to pneumonia and they finally took her to the hospital. Spitting out blood when she coughed. Arms and legs white and bony so they reminded him of a sheep's bones, when the carcass has been left out in the weather and picked over by animals and birds.
But in his dreams she was still at Hillhead, doing the things she always did, helping his mother with the cooking - peeling tatties or baking, milking the cow that they'd had then in the byre by the house, squatting beside the animal, pulling and squeezing the teats, murmuring a little song to herself as she worked. And all the time getting thinner, so at the end of the dream, just before he woke up sweating, all that was left of her was her smile caked in blood and her slanting grey eyes.
Now, sitting in his mother's chair, watching the hands of her clock, those nightmares returned. The people he imagined waiting outside weren't strangers. He had a vision of his sister, banging on the window, rattling the door, surprised that it was locked.
He stood up and poured himself a tumbler of whisky. His hands were shaking. He was going daft, sitting here. Anyone would be the same, locked in a room with no view out, just waiting for the police to take him. He shook his head to clear it of the foolishness, and tried to remember Agnes as she was when she was well. He'd always been ungainly and slow, but she was dainty as a bird, flying across the fields on the short cut to school, her hair streaming behind her. 'Look at your sister,' his mother would say, trying to shame him. 'She's younger than you and she doesn't break everything she touches. She's not a big, clumsy fool. Why can't you be more like her?'
He pictured her in the schoolyard skipping. 'Two other girls were holding the ends of a long rope and Agnes had been jumping, not chanting the rhyme, but frowning in concentration, counting the steps in her head. He'd watched, proud of her, so proud that the grin had spread across his face and had stayed there all day. She'd been wearing a cotton print dress, faded from too much washing and so short now that when she jumped you could almost see her knickers.
Had Catriona been one for skipping? It bothered him that he couldn't be certain. He'd seen her sometimes in the schoolyard, when he'd found reason to walk down to the shore, to pull out a useful piece of driftwood, some netting or a barrel. Mostly she'd been standing, surrounded by two or three of her chums, chatting and giggling. Those had been different times, he thought. It wasn't like when he and Agnes were children. When Catriona was growing up, she had television in the house and there'd been catalogues to buy modern clothes from. There'd been more to play with than an old piece of rope.
The oil had come to the islands and there'd been money for computers and fancy games and the teachers had taken the children on trips south. Once there'd been a school trip to Edinburgh. A couple of the mothers had gone, all dressed up for the adventure, and Mrs Henry, the teacher, standing there with her sheet of paper when the bus came to take them to the airport, ticking them all off, though surely she must know them all. Catriona had loved the city. She'd talked about it for days when she got home.