‘Our volunteer coastguards are out looking,’ Perez said.
Ian nodded, but didn’t move from his place by the door.
‘Let’s walk,’ Perez said. ‘I always find it easier to think when I’m walking.’
Polly thought that he was a sensitive man. He wouldn’t want to tell Ian about the email from Eleanor in front of an audience.
Ian turned and the two men left the house. Polly and Marcus stayed in the living room with Perez’s younger colleague. Marcus got up to make more coffee. He collected the tray from outside and walked with it to the kitchen. Polly wanted to apologize to him. I should never have brought you here. I thought it would be fun and a good way to get to know my friends. Now it’s turned into the worst sort of nightmare. But Wilson, the young sergeant, was watching and listening, and in these circumstances anything she said might be misinterpreted.
She still felt insecure when strangers were in the room, socially awkward, despite her two degrees and her brilliant job at the Sentiman Library. It was to do with her voice and her modest suburban background, a fear of the educated classes learned from her parents. Sometimes she was convinced that Ian suffered in the same way; they were both from the north and they both lacked the confidence that Marcus and Eleanor had inherited along with their clear voices and their savings accounts. Perhaps they’d have been better suited together, leaving Eleanor and Marcus to make a stylish celebrity couple.
‘It’ll have been a fine wedding,’ the police officer said. It was the first time she’d heard him speak and though he spoke slowly she struggled to understand. Lowrie had been in England since university. They laughed at his accent sometimes, but it wasn’t as dense as this. ‘Unst folk always throw a good hamefarin’.’ Polly thought he sounded wistful, as if he wished he’d been invited.
‘I don’t think Eleanor came inside again last night,’ she said. ‘The door was still unlocked. If you’re from London you always lock the door. It’s a habit.’ She’d been thinking about that.
‘These midsummer nights some folk find it hard to sleep,’ Wilson said. ‘And the weather’s so fine your friend might have gone for a walk. You see the stars here in a way you can’t in the city. Lowrie and his family will be back tidying up in the hall at Meoness now. Perhaps she’s there.’
‘But the email?’ Polly cried. ‘Why would she send that?’
‘A kind of sick joke? Or maybe someone else hacked into her account?’
Polly shook her head. Eleanor loved mischief and practical jokes, but she wouldn’t put her friends through this kind of anxiety. If she’d sent the email she’d have been watching through the window and would come bursting in with a Ta-da, that had you fooled grin on her face before they had time to be worried. The email disturbed Polly almost more than anything else. She supposed it was possible that Eleanor’s account had been hacked.
‘Is it OK if I go and check in the hall?’ she said. ‘We never thought that Lowrie and Caroline might be there.’
Sandy Wilson looked confused. She could tell that he didn’t know what to do – he wasn’t a man used to making decisions and he wanted to ask his boss. So she took the responsibility from him by grabbing her jacket and leaving. ‘Thanks. Tell Marcus where I’ve gone.’ And she walked out of the house.
Outside it was clear and the sea was sparkling with reflected sunlight. Polly saw that Ian and Perez were still strolling along the beach, deep in conversation, but she turned in the opposite direction, away from the shore, and neither man noticed her. The road was narrow, with a fence on one side and occasional passing places on the other. A sheep wandered into her path. She could smell the grease on its fleece before it scrambled away, and the scent of crushed grass. A great skua, sitting on the hill, hook-beaked and scary, seemed to be staring at her. Meoness was a sprawling community of croft houses with land attached and an occasional new-build. Between Sletts and the other houses there were skeletons of old buildings, walls and boundary dykes half-hidden by cotton grass and wild iris. Where the track joined a slightly wider road, there stood an old red telephone kiosk and the community hall. A couple of cars were parked outside and there was the noise of a Hoover coming through the open windows. She pushed on the door and went inside. Lowrie stood on a stepladder in the main hall and was taking down the bunting. In London he worked as an accountant for a big retail chain, and was always very respectable in jacket and tie. Now he was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a round Fair Isle hat shaped like a pork pie. He grinned and waved. The sound of the vacuum cleaner came from a smaller room, where they’d eaten supper the night before. It stopped and Caroline came through.
‘So you’ve come to help at last!’ she said. ‘About time too. We’ve nearly finished.’ She was big-boned and blonde. ‘We were just about to have a drink to celebrate clearing up. Apparently that’s traditional too.’
‘Is Eleanor here?’
‘No! Isn’t she sleeping off her hangover?’ Caroline took the string of bunting from her husband and started to wind it into a ball.
‘She didn’t sleep at Sletts last night,’ Polly said. ‘We don’t know where she is. Ian was so worried that he called the police. A couple of officers came from Lerwick and the inspector’s talking to him now. The coastguards are doing a search of the cliffs.’
Lowrie climbed down the ladder. ‘She’ll surely not have gone far.’ He sounded so matter-of-fact that Polly could tell he thought they were overreacting. City people, so sensitized to crime that they saw it everywhere. Perhaps he was embarrassed that they’d caused this fuss, dragging police officers across two islands and two ferries because a woman had wanted to experience the strange Shetland night alone. But now it was lunchtime and there was still no sign of Eleanor. And she’d sent that weird email.
‘She sent me this message,’ Polly tried to keep her voice calm, ‘saying not to bother looking for her. Saying that we’d never see her alive again.’ And at that point she began to cry.
They took her into Lowrie’s parents’ house and sat her in a tall wooden chair in the kitchen and made her tea. After the sunshine it seemed very dark in the house, all shadow and dust. There was a rack over a Rayburn where dozens of tea towels were folded and hanging to dry. Presumably they’d been used the night before and already washed. The room seemed to Polly to be impossibly cluttered. How could they find anything in the chaos of fading magazines, knitting wool and vegetables? There was a faint smell of sheep and mould. She hated disorder and found it physically repellent. Weren’t they embarrassed to bring guests to a house that was so untidy?
There was no sign of Lowrie’s parents.
‘I know’, she said, ‘that it’s ridiculous, and I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. But Eleanor’s been so fragile lately. Losing the baby and all that talk of haunting and ghosts. When the policeman said you’d all be in the hall, I thought, Of course, she’ll be there. I couldn’t stand being in that house any longer. And then, when you hadn’t seen her, I knew something dreadful must have happened.’
The room was very warm and she felt that she might fall asleep in the hard chair, and when she woke up all this would be a dream.
‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Caroline said. ‘There might be some news.’
Her voice sounded hard, detached, as if she didn’t care about Eleanor at all. Why wasn’t she more upset? Polly had the idea that Caroline just wanted her out of the house before her in-laws returned. Perhaps a hysterical friend would reflect badly on her. Caroline was an academic, always measured and precise. It also occurred to Polly that Caroline might not believe her story and that she wanted to check out the facts of Eleanor’s disappearance for herself.