‘Where are the coins now?’
‘We’ve taken them to Evelyn. She’s locked them up in a drawer in her desk. Val Turner, the Shetland archaeologist, will come in later and Paul Berglund will be in too.’
The little Glaswegian came out with food for Hattie and Sophie. Perez watched Sophie slice her steak with complete focus. He thought she was like a man. She didn’t like to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. But now she’d started Hattie was happy to continue talking. ‘We’ll get an expert to look at them of course. I mean they could be more modern, but they look like right to me and Sophie thought so too as soon as she saw them. We ’re both familiar with the Wilsness coins. But we do need Paul’s advice about what we should do next.’ She stopped abruptly and forked a tiny piece of lasagne into her mouth, frowned as she chewed.
‘When’s Mr Berglund coming in?’
‘Professor Bergland,’ Hattie corrected him. ‘Tomorrow or perhaps the next day. He’d hardly got home when he got our call. He needs a bit of time to sort things out at home. He’s got a young family.’ Perez thought she seemed subdued. Did she resent her supervisor coming in and taking over her project? Or the fact that he hadn’t left immediately to return to Whalsay?
‘Are these coins worth anything?’ Sandy asked.
‘They’re invaluable.’
‘But if I was to try and sell them on the open market?’
‘You mean money?’ Hattie seemed startled by the question.
‘Aye, money.’ Sandy looked at her as if he was tempted to add, What else would I mean?
‘I don’t know. If they were sold at auction to a collector perhaps they would.’
She seemed uncertain; the whole concept of private collection and trading in artefacts was strange to her. Perez felt a rush of sympathy. She seemed too frail and innocent to be living alone here in Whalsay. Sophie the Sloane Ranger was no sort of guardian. How would Hattie survive in the big world outside? He wanted to ask if she kept in touch with her parents. He imagined a protective mother who’d had to find the courage to let her daughter go, but who had sleepless nights about her, who held her breath every time the phone went in case there’d been a disaster. Because somewhere in Hattie’s history there must be illness or tragedy, he thought. No one got that haunted look if they’d had a happy childhood.
Curiosity led him to form a question about her family in his head. Your parents must be very proud of you. Will they get a chance to visit the islands?
Then he heard Fran’s voice, had a very clear picture of her tipping her head to one side, a half-smile, her nose slightly wrinkled as it was when she meant to tease. What business is it of yours, Jimmy Perez? You’re a policeman, not a psychotherapist. Let the poor child alone.
So he said nothing. There was a moment of awkward silence at the table. Sophie picked up a piece of creamy fat which remained on her plate and bit into it with sharp white teeth. She looked around her.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘which of you lovely men would like to buy me another glass of wine? I thought this was supposed to be a party.’
Chapter Eighteen
Outside the Pier House, Hattie and Sophie stood briefly before separating. Hattie had only drunk two halves but felt disengaged and a little woozy. She wasn’t used to eating a big meal at lunchtime.
‘The boys have promised me a look round one of the big ships,’ Sophie said. ‘I’d like to see what it’s like inside and they might not ask again. Don’t suppose you want to come?’
‘Who’s going to be there?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual Artemis crew.’
Hattie shook her head. The way she was feeling a boat would make her sick, even if it were moored at the harbour. Anyway, she never knew what to say to most of the fishermen with their unintelligible voices and their stories of adventures at sea. Besides, she had other plans.
‘They said I could go out with them sometime,’ Sophie said, looking out towards the Shetland mainland. ‘There’s a spare cabin I could use. It’s got a DVD, everything. Do you think they’d take me for a spin today? The sea’s flat calm.’
She turned back to Hattie, a challenge as well as a question in her look.
‘You should be careful,’ Hattie said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’
Sophie laughed, her head thrown back, so Hattie could see her long neck, stretched even further, much paler than her face.
‘Do you think I care about that? It’s not as if I want to make my life here.’
‘Shouldn’t you be here when Paul gets in?’ Hattie was thrown by the thought that she might have to deal with Paul on her own. She felt a return of the old panic.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t really want to go.’ Sophie grinned, so Hattie realized the woman had just been winding her up. ‘But don’t expect me back until the morning!’
She grinned again and loped away quite steadily, though she’d had twice as much to drink as Hattie. There was a rip in her jeans and the flesh of her thigh showed through. It reminded Hattie of the fat on the steak Sophie had just eaten. Hattie watched her walking away down towards the harbour. There were times when she hated Sophie for her beauty, her easy way with men, her thoughtlessness. There were times when Hattie wanted to lash out and slap her.
It seemed to Hattie that the walk down the island had a hallucinatory quality. Phrases and ideas came into her mind with no logic or reason.
April is the cruellest month.
Living in the south of England, that had never made sense to her in a literal way. Spring was a time of gentle rain and imperceptible growth. Now she thought of the last ewes lambing untended on the hill with the ravens circling above, Mima lying on the sodden ground at Setter. She repeated the phrase under her breath to the beat of her footsteps.
She wasn’t used to drinking in the middle of the day. Perhaps that was it. She hadn’t slept the previous night, consumed by a recurring paranoia that the shot that had killed Mima might really have been meant for her. The implication of that was so shocking that now she couldn’t bring herself to consider it in any detail and she allowed her thoughts to float away from her.
Instead she tried to relive the moment of finding the silver coins in the Setter dig, from glimpsing the first glint of metal. The scene was so close to what she’d dreamed of that she found it hard to believe in the reality of it. Still walking, keeping the rhythm of her feet on the road and the words of T. S. Eliot at the back of her mind, she took her hands out of her pockets and looked at them. Under the fingernails she saw the soil in which the coins had been buried. In that one moment, the instant of rubbing the earth from the dull silver, she’d justified the project, established a future for herself in the islands. Unreal, she thought. It’s unreal.
She decided to walk on to Utra. She’d ask Evelyn to open the drawer of her desk and show her the coins. There was a British Museum website with images of coins and she wanted to check it out, see if there was anything similar to her find. Evelyn had a computer with internet access. Hattie thought if she didn’t do something constructive, in her present state she’d go crazy, maybe even manage to convince herself that the find was a dream; in the past after all she’d muddled fantasy and reality. She wished Mima were still alive; she’d always helped Hattie get things in proportion.