Perez would have liked another coffee, but he didn’t want to call the barmaid in. This was a conversation he didn’t want anyone listening to. He shook his head and sat down.
‘The church was full,’ Berglund said. ‘Mima must have had a lot of friends.’
‘I wanted to talk about Hattie.’
‘Of course.’
‘Another funeral you’ll have to attend.’
Berglund seemed shocked. ‘I suppose I will. Someone will have to represent the university. That makes it seem horribly real. I presume her mother will deal with the details once the body is released. I’d planned to phone Mrs James tomorrow, to offer our condolences and see if we can help in any way.’
‘You gave me the impression that you hadn’t met Hattie before you started supervising this project.’
‘Did I?’ Berglund frowned. He didn’t have much of a neck and now he tucked his chin towards his chest so it disappeared altogether. It gave him the look of a cartoon bulldog.
Perez looked at him but said nothing, waiting for an explanation.
‘I met her when she was an undergraduate,’ Berglund said. ‘A few years ago. That hot summer. She was volunteering on a dig I was managing in the south of England.’ He stopped speaking, stubborn, challenging Perez to ask more detailed questions.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d met her previously?’ Perez kept his voice pleasant. If the man felt threatened he might stop talking altogether.
‘It slipped my mind. I’ve worked with a lot of undergraduates over the years. Then when I did remember I didn’t want to make too big a deal of it. I thought you might misinterpret the incident, take it out of context.’
‘You took her out to dinner,’ Perez said. ‘One evening in that hot summer, you asked her to go out with you. Just her, not any of the others. Tell me about it.’
Berglund hesitated. Perez thought he was deciding how much he would have to give away. At last he started talking and it was almost as if he was telling a story.
‘She was a pretty little thing. I suppose she was still attractive when she was working in Whalsay, but here she could be so earnest. Back then she seemed happier, funny, full of life. Yes, I invited her out to dinner. A couple of times, actually. A spur-of-the-moment decision that I went on to regret. I was married and I had a small child. But after a long day in the field I wanted someone to share a beautiful evening with. I like female company and my wife was two hundred miles away. That was all.’
‘Did she know you were married?’
‘I didn’t tell her but it certainly wasn’t a secret. The other volunteers would have known.’
‘What happened?’
‘The first time, nothing. We shared a meal and I dropped her back at the site. The next time was more intimate. We had a meal in the pub where I was staying. The windows were open and there was honeysuckle in the garden. I remember the smell of it. We shared a bottle of white wine. Then we went to bed together, inspector. Not a crime. I wasn’t even her teacher and she was a consenting adult.’
‘She was young and very naïve.’ Not a judgement, a comment. Perez wished now he’d asked for a drink. His hands were on the table in front of him and he didn’t know what to do with them.
‘As you say she was young and naïve. She read more into the encounter than I’d expected. Most students are more sexually experienced than I am. She was an exception.’ He paused. ‘She was nineteen, I was thirty-five. She fancied herself in love with me.’
‘Did she make life difficult for you?’
‘Not particularly. There was one embarrassing encounter, then she left the dig. I never expected to see her again. Then I changed jobs and found myself supervising a colleague’s postgrad student while she was on maternity leave. Hattie.’
‘Did you recognize her?’
‘Of course, inspector. I don’t make a habit of sleeping with my volunteers. But she made no sign that she knew me, so I assumed that was how she wanted to play it.’
‘She never mentioned the previous relationship?’
‘It wasn’t a relationship, inspector. It was a one-night stand.’
‘Did you know she’d suffered with depression?’
‘No, but I’m not surprised. In our previous encounter and in her work there was a lack of proportion. She took herself too seriously. I can see that might have been a symptom of her illness.’
‘She had a spell in hospital after her encounter with you.’
There was another, longer pause. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘You and Hattie spent some time together on the afternoon before she disappeared. Was any of this mentioned then?’
‘Absolutely not, inspector. It was a professional conversation between colleagues. Just as I explained earlier.’
‘Is it significant, do you think, that she used your knife to kill herself?’ If that is what she did.
‘You think she still felt rejected by me? That the suicide was some sort of romantic gesture?’
Perez sat for a moment looking at the man on the other side of the table. Berglund seemed almost flattered by the notion and that made Perez feel ill. He thought Berglund had deceived him. He was missing something and he hadn’t been told the full story, but he wasn’t sure which questions to ask. He couldn’t face reading any more of Hattie’s letters just now. He went back to his room and phoned Fran. She asked about the inquiry but he refused to talk about it. He wanted her to tell him about Cassie and about everything they’d been doing. He wanted her to make him laugh.
Chapter Thirty
It seemed to Sandy that the funeral service in the kirk passed in no time, like a kind of dream. The place was full of people. The tradition was that it was mostly men who came to a Shetland funeral and when a woman had passed away there were fewer people in the congregation, but today the kirk was packed and there were as many women as men. He wasn’t sure why that was – more because they didn’t want to miss out on the drama, he thought, than that they’d miss her. She’d always had more male friends than women. Sandy remembered sitting there in the front row and thinking that Mima would have liked the singing. She’d always been one for a great tune. Joseph hadn’t said anything throughout the service, but Sandy could hear his mother’s voice speaking the Lord’s Prayer and in the hymns. She had a high, piping voice that could keep a tune but that still wasn’t very pretty. Sandy thought he’d like to marry a woman with a pretty voice.
Then they were outside in the sunshine watching the coffin being lowered into the ground. There was a crowd of gulls fishing from the point below the kirk and he wondered if that meant there was a shoal of mackerel there; that led him to think about Mima frying fresh mackerel on the Rayburn at Setter when he was a boy. She’d roll it in oatmeal and throw it in the pan. When he came to again the service was over and it was just him and his father and brother standing by the grave. His mother had gone back to the house to prepare the tea and the people left behind were hanging around, wanting to give their condolences, but not liking to intrude either. The breeze blew at the women’s skirts and messed up their hair.
Ronald came up while they were still standing there. Sandy could tell folk were watching, wondering what the response of the family would be. Michael had said hard words about Ronald when he’d arrived on the island, his big hire car packed with so much stuff for the baby you’d think he was staying for a month: ‘Completely irresponsible. He should have known better than to take out a gun after he’d been drinking. I can’t believe the Fiscal intends to let him get away with it.’ Sandy had thought it sounded more like Amelia speaking than Michael. She’d let slip at one point that she thought the family should sue if the Fiscal refused to prosecute. Now Sandy was worried there might be a scene and that Michael would shoot his mouth off in that pompous, arrogant way he sometimes had about him these days. But seeing Ronald, he seemed to come to his senses. Ronald said how sorry he was. He looked grey and gaunt to Sandy, worse even than when Sandy had found him in the bar the morning after Mima had died. Michael must have realized he meant it, because he took his hand and smiled. It was the old Whalsay Michael, not the new one who lived in Edinburgh and never took a drink.