Vicki snorted. ‘Have you ever known a man search properly for anything? My husband’s hopeless. A quick look then it’s “Vicki, what have you done with my football kit?” and, like a mug, I find it for him because it’s easier than getting him to do it for himself.’
‘You think they’ll be somewhere here then?’ Willow hadn’t known that Vicki Hewitt had a husband and was distracted for a moment, wondering if there were children too.
‘It’s possible.’ Vicki was already bent double again, feeling among the boulders with gloved hands. Then she was lying flat on her stomach reaching into the holes in the sandy soil close to the cliff edge. But she found nothing and stood up and stretched again.
Willow wondered what her husband did for a living, if he didn’t mind these strange call-outs to crime scenes. She herself had never found a man prepared to put up with the frequent and sudden disappearances.
‘I’d get a search team in to look properly,’ Vicki said, ‘but if the killer had any sense the shoes would be at the bottom of the cliff and swept away by the tide by now.’ She walked to the edge of the cordon and began to take off her paper suit, pushing her mask from her face so that she could talk properly.
‘So the killer didn’t panic,’ Willow said. Out at sea a trawler was pitching and tipping over the waves. She felt slightly nauseous watching it. ‘They didn’t hit Eleanor over the head in a blind rage and run away. They threw the murder weapon, the cloak that she was last seen wearing and the sandals into the sea. And perhaps they tore up a photograph and scattered the pieces in the wind. Then they walked back to the road as if nothing had happened. It would have been early in the morning and already light.’
‘How did the phone get to the hill by the hall?’ Vicki was packing up now and had started walking down the hill with the big silver box in which she kept her equipment.
‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t left there to throw us off track. The murderer wanted the body found. Otherwise why not tip Eleanor over the cliff with everything else? If the body had been discovered on the boulder beach at the bottom of the headland we’d probably have put it down to an accident. She’d been drinking, after all. There were lots of witnesses to that. One head wound wouldn’t show up among the others, and nobody would survive that fall.’ Willow thought it would have been no further to drag the body to the cliff edge than to the loch. And it would have been easier because the grass there was so much shorter.
‘Perhaps Eleanor had dropped the phone earlier in the evening?’ Vicki turned to wait for Willow at the stile.
‘But someone sent that email at two o’clock in the morning. What was Eleanor doing wandering around in the early hours? And why go from the stone enclosure near the hall and then walk in the opposite direction to the loch? Too many questions and nothing that makes sense.’ Again Willow thought that there’d been a meeting here. It had been planned. She tried to imagine the scene. The strange half-light of early morning, Eleanor waiting, shivering perhaps, wrapping her cloak around her party clothes to keep warm. Had she dozed? Been surprised in the end by the visitor for whom she’d been waiting? Or had the murderer moved silently over the grass like one of Eleanor’s ghosts and killed the woman without warning?
Later, on her way into the grand entrance hall of Springfield House, Willow bumped into Perez. ‘How did you get on with the Malcolmsons?’
‘It was interesting…’ He paused, shot a glance behind him and only then did she see Ian Longstaff waiting for them in the shadows of the hall. ‘But I’ll explain later.’
They sat in the yellow room with its flashes of sunshine. Willow asked Perez to lead the interview; he’d already formed a relationship with the man and she could tell that Longstaff viewed her with distrust. Most of the women he knew worked in the media and were fashionable, well groomed and neurotic. They didn’t have unmanageable hair or charity-shop clothes. She settled carefully on a low spindly chair out of his line of view.
‘I understand that this must be difficult for you,’ Perez said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You understand nothing!’ Longstaff leaned forward. ‘I loved Eleanor from the moment I saw her. I might as well be dead myself.’
There was a silence. Willow became aware of sounds outside the room. Curlews on the hill. The inevitable sheep. Inside, the tension became so uncomfortable that she wondered if she should intervene. Perez was an intensely private man and wouldn’t explain that the love of his life had been murdered too. She couldn’t do that, but she might ask a harmless question while Perez recovered his composure. In the end she waited. It wasn’t her place to interfere.
‘Of course,’ Perez said at last, ‘it’s the guilt that’s the hardest thing. The idea that you might have done something different. The rerunning of various scenarios in your head.’
Another silence before Longstaff nodded. ‘I should have gone outside to fetch her in, that night after the party. I should have protected her.’
‘Did she need protecting? Were you aware that she might be in danger? She worked in the media, and high-profile people can attract unwanted notice.’ Perez’s voice was so low that Willow had to listen carefully to make out the words. ‘You’re a sound engineer and you work in the same business. You’ll understand that.’
‘You think she had a stalker?’ Longstaff looked up at him sharply. ‘No, there was nothing of that sort. She never appeared on television herself. And she would have told me if she was getting any hassle.’
‘This project she was working on – the project that seemed to trigger the…’ Perez hesitated and seemed to be searching for the right word, ‘disagreement between you, when you were drinking with your friends after the wedding party. Can you tell me a little about that? Were you working on it too, on the sound?’
‘There wouldn’t have been a role for me yet,’ Longstaff said. ‘The show was still in pre-production. Eleanor had decided on a scriptwriter, but she wasn’t sure exactly what form the broadcast should take yet. She was researching stories. Intelligent, rational people who were convinced they’d seen a ghost. She said she didn’t want an hour full of weirdos and loonies.’
‘And she’d heard the story of Peerie Lizzie.’ Perez was looking down at the water from the small window by his side, as if he expected to see the ghost of the child rising up from the sea. ‘A girl who grew up in this house in the 1920s, who was drowned in a high tide and who comes back to haunt the childless.’ And drunk young men.
Longstaff waited a beat before replying. ‘Is that the story? That only the childless see her? Eleanor didn’t tell me that.’ Another beat. ‘Or perhaps she did, but I wasn’t listening. I’d begun to lose patience with her. That seems cruel now – cruel and wasteful. I’d give anything to have her back and prattling about her favourite projects.’
‘There are lots of stories.’ Perez gave a smile and turned slightly to include Willow. ‘That’s the way of ghosts.’
‘I’ve never believed in the supernatural,’ Longstaff said.
‘And now?’
‘Now I can see why people might want to believe. We’re grateful for anything that might maintain that contact.’
‘Had Eleanor been in touch with anyone here in Unst about Peerie Lizzie? Had she arranged to meet someone who claimed to have seen the ghost?’
Longstaff shrugged. ‘She probably talked to Lowrie about it. They’re old friends from her uni days. He’d be a good local contact.’
‘Had she met Lowrie to discuss it? In London perhaps, when the project was still in its initial phase?’
Willow wondered where Perez was going with this. Perhaps he thought Lowrie was the man with whom Eleanor had been seen in the restaurant. But surely Caroline would have recognized her lover, even from the back in a crowded bar?