‘Mother’s right about Setter,’ Michael said. ‘Father should sell it.’
‘He’ll never do that.’
‘I don’t think he’ll have any choice,’ Michael said. ‘How much do you think he makes from the crofting? I doubt Duncan Hunter gave him a pension plan and he’s not getting any younger.’
‘They manage OK.’
‘Do they? I don’t understand how.’
They sat for a while in silence. Sandy offered Michael another dram but he shook his head. ‘I should get back and see how Amelia’s getting on.’
Sandy would have liked to ask about Amelia. What possessed you to take up with a woman like that? But what good would it do? They were married with a bairn. Michael would have to make the best of it. ‘Will you find your way back?’ Michael laughed again. ‘Oh, I think I’ll manage.’ The first thing Sandy did when he was on his own was to change out of his suit. Then he began to think of what Michael had said about their parents’ income and the implications of it. It kept him up late into the night. Once he got up to make coffee, but the rest of the time he sat in Mima’s chair, thinking. He would have liked to discuss his thoughts with Perez. Perez would likely reassure him that he wasn’t on the right track at all. He was Sandy Wilson and he always got things wrong. But Perez must have thought Sandy would want to be on his own on the evening of his grandmother’s funeral and he never turned up.
Chapter Thirty-one
Perez woke the next morning to the sound of his phone ringing. Again his first thought was of Fran and Cassie and their safety in London. The voice was English and female, and at first he didn’t recognize it. Suddenly he lost control of his imagination; gothic images of spilled blood and smashed limbs flashed into his head. The woman was a nurse in accident and emergency, he thought. Or a cop, specially trained to break bad news.
‘Inspector Perez, I’m sorry to call you so early.’
He struggled to sit upright in the bed and to clear the nightmare pictures from his mind.
‘This is Gwen James, inspector. You asked me to contact you if Hattie had been in touch with the psychiatric nurse who looked after her when she was ill at university.’
At last he felt he had a grip on the conversation. ‘And had she?’
‘Not recently, I’m afraid, but the nurse thought you’d find it interesting to talk to him. He didn’t feel he could discuss Hattie’s case with me.’ Her voice was tight, clipped. Perez thought she’d had a battle over that. She’d demanded information and the nurse had stood up to her. A brave man.
She waited impatiently while he found paper and pencil to write down the man’s number. The bedroom was cold. He’d found it stuffy and airless after his discussion with Berglund the night before and had switched the heating off. Shivering, he got back into bed to complete the call. Despite her apparent impatience, in the end Gwen was reluctant to end the conversation.
‘Did you find Hattie’s letters useful, inspector?’
‘Thank you. Very. We will get them back to you as soon as we can.’
‘When you have news about the circumstances of Hattie’s death, you will tell me?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ He switched off the phone before she could ask any more questions.
It was too early to contact the nurse. He’d wait at least until nine o’clock. In the dining room Jean was just laying the tables for breakfast. ‘Could you not sleep?’ she said as she snipped the top from a carton of juice and poured it into a jug. He wondered when she had the chance to rest. She was still behind the bar when the last customer left at night and the place always looked clean in the morning. ‘Cedric is still in his bed. He stayed up last night drinking to Mima. He was always very fond of her.’
‘Did he ever go to visit her at Setter?’
‘Aye, every Thursday afternoon. To talk over old times, he said. To flirt, more like. Mima was a dreadful old flirt.’ She hurried away to make his coffee.
Cedric appeared just as Perez was finishing the meal. He looked bleary-eyed and grey.
‘Paul Berglund didn’t go out on the early ferry, did he?’ Perez asked. He supposed he’d finished with the academic, for the moment at least, but he didn’t want the man slinking away without his knowing.
‘No, he’ll be down later, I’m sure. He doesn’t usually get up so early.’
‘Did Mima have a good send-off?’
‘I suppose she did. I didn’t stay long at Utra. All those people sitting round saying fine things about her. They had little enough good to say about her when she was alive. I came back here to have a few drams to her memory in peace. I’ll miss her.’ Cedric looked up at Perez. The flesh around his eyes was soft and creased like folded suede. ‘It seems a strange thing, two bodies on an island this size. What are you doing here, Jimmy? What’s going on?’
Three bodies, Perez thought. There are the bones they found on Setter too.
‘I’m working for the Fiscal, enquiring on her behalf into the sudden death of Hattie James.’
‘Aye, right.’
‘Is there anything you can tell me, Cedric? Anything I need to know about Mima Wilson and Setter? Anything strange been happening there?’
‘Not these days, Jimmy. Not for sixty years at least.’
‘What happened sixty years ago?’
‘These are old men’s tales. You don’t have time for these.’
‘Try me.’
Cedric paused, then he seemed to make up his mind to speak.
‘Three men from Whalsay were involved in the Shetland Bus.’ He looked at Perez to check the inspector knew what he was talking about. ‘You know it was mostly the Scalloway men that kept the boats repaired and in good order to put to sea. But when Howarth, the naval officer in charge, decided the Norwegians needed small boats to be dropped off with the agents, so they could make their own way up the fjords, he came to Whalsay to get them made. It was skilled work; the inshore boats had to pass for Norwegian. Men’s lives depended on it. There was young Jerry Wilson, who was just a schoolboy, too young to get called up into the services but the best sailor of his generation. My father, who was called Cedric Irvine like me. And old Andy Clouston, the father of Andrew.’
‘So Mima’s husband, your father and Ronald’s grandfather?’
‘Exactly that. Though Jerry hadn’t married Mima then. They were walking out together but too young to wed.’
Perez said nothing. Cedric would want to tell the story in his own way and Perez had told him he’d have time to listen. He tried not to think of the nurse’s phone number scribbled on the pad in his room or to speculate about what he might have to say.
Cedric began to talk. ‘There have always been tales about Setter. There were odd kind of bumps in the land where the dead lass started digging. Crops never did well there. The bairns thought it was a trowie place and even the grown-ups believed Mima was something of a witch.’ He paused, closed the flaps of skin over his eyes.
‘What did that have to do with the Shetland Bus?’
‘They say there’s a Norwegian man buried there. That was the story I grew up with, though my father always denied it. An agent who’d passed information to the Germans and got some of his people killed.’
‘And the Whalsay men meted out their own form of justice?’
‘That’s what people say. One of the men that died was a close friend of Jerry Wilson. He was in a Whalsay-built boat when he was captured. My father would never speak of it, but there were rumours when I was growing up.’ Only now Cedric opened his eyes very slowly. He paused a moment before continuing. ‘I did hear they found some bones at Setter. The piece of a skull, I heard, and others besides.’