‘Perhaps Charles met her on a different occasion?’ Perez again, tentative, almost apologetic. ‘If he liked her paintings…’
Willow wasn’t sure where Perez was going with this. She couldn’t make a connection between an artist in Yell, a hotelier in Unst and a film-maker from London.
For a moment David didn’t answer. Willow even wondered if he’d heard. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘And Charles was something of a philistine when it came to art. Leaze’s stuff wasn’t really his sort of thing.’
‘But he might have met her in a different context?’ Perez moved to the table and sat between them. His elbows were on the table and his hands cupped his face. He didn’t look at David, but had obviously picked up some uncertainty in his response.
There was another moment of silence. Willow saw Sandy’s car drive into the courtyard. She hoped he wouldn’t come barging in. She sensed that this conversation between Gordon and Perez was important. ‘Charlie was a good actor,’ David said, ‘but I knew him very well.’
‘And you thought he might be pretending that he’d never heard of Monica Leaze?’ Perez tipped his head slightly to the side to put the question.
‘Not exactly that, but I’m not convinced that our calling into the gallery was entirely by chance. I wanted to come straight back. We’d had a long day and had bags of shopping in the boot. Charlie was insistent. “Let’s give ourselves a bit of a treat. A real tea.” He knew I’d never deny him anything that he really wanted. And then he looked at the paintings. I could tell immediately that they weren’t his style, but he looked at them very carefully. Usually he would have been bored. He had a butterfly mind, in turn passionate and dismissive. But he took a sort of proprietary interest in them. As if they’d been painted by a protégée. Or someone that he knew.’
‘Did you ask him if he knew Monica? If he’d met her perhaps in London?’ Now Perez sounded like an elderly teacher, precise but encouraging. Willow wondered how he did it, how he seemed to know exactly what approach would work with a witness. He’d told her once, in a moment of weakness at the end of a case, that his ex-wife had called him ‘emotionally incontinent’ – too empathetic for his own good. Perhaps that was his secret.
Another silence. Sandy looked in through the window and Willow shook her head slightly. He walked away and round to the front of the house. At last David answered. ‘I didn’t ask him. I think we’d become so used to deceiving ourselves, about the business and our life here, that we’d stopped talking about anything important at all. And I was so afraid of prying, you see. We have a right to our own secrets, don’t you think – our own privacy – even in a relationship? I thought if he wanted me to know what scheme he might be dreaming up, then he would tell me.’
Sandy must have gone to his room first and then waited until David Gordon had left the kitchen before coming in.
‘Is that tea in the pot?’
He sounded cheerful, normal, and Willow thought that by comparison the rest of them were being affected by the nature of this case, becoming introspective and frustrated by ideas that seemed to dance away from them like shadows in the fog. ‘How did you get on with your teacher?’
He seemed to blush slightly.
‘Sandy Wilson, have you fallen for her? Do tell.’ Teasing him as if he were a kid, because that was what they needed now. A bit of harmless fun.
‘It’s nothing like that.’ He paused. ‘We went out a few times when we were at school. I don’t think I treated her so well.’
‘Is she holding a grudge?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t think she is. She has a tough time at the moment. Her mother has dementia and Louisa is caring for her at home.’ He paused. Willow decided he’d been thinking of this since he’d left Yell. ‘Louisa was adopted. I’m not sure I could do all that intimate stuff for someone who wasn’t my flesh and blood.’ He looked up at them, realized they were both waiting for relevant information, and turned his attention to the case. ‘She couldn’t tell me anything useful, though. She didn’t think her bairns had learned the song, but there’s a specialist teacher comes in to teach music. A guy called Joey Rickard. She gave me his phone number. I’ve just phoned him and he said he hadn’t done the song with the Meoness kids, though it’s the sort of tune they’d more likely get from parents and grandparents.’ He poured himself tea and sat between them. ‘How did you get on with David Gordon?’
‘We might have found our Monica,’ Perez said.
Willow was surprised by this. ‘Really, Jimmy? There are lots of Monicas in the world. Probably a few in Shetland. It could just be a coincidence, don’t you think? An artist, originally from London, with an exhibition in a gallery in Yell. There was no link with Eleanor, as far as I could see. And only a tentative one to Charles Hillier.’
She looked at him and wondered what she’d missed. What had Jimmy Perez picked up from the conversation?
‘I went to the opening of the exhibition with Fran,’ he said. ‘It was held last summer, a few months before she died. The artist was a Londoner, who’d moved north for a while. There were a number of reasons, I think. A recent divorce, a sense that she wanted her work to move in a new direction and that Shetland might inspire her. Perhaps she was friends with one of the guys at Shetland Arts. We met her and talked for a bit. If I’d known her name I’d already forgotten it. Fran dragged me along to a lot of those occasions…’
He paused. Willow could see that he was remembering Fran Hunter, the love of his life. She had the uncharitable thought that no woman would ever compete with Fran in Perez’s life. Fran would remain saintly and beautiful in his mind. She’d died before the couple had fallen into a boring rhythm of domestic chores and petty irritation, while the relationship was still fresh and exciting. Before Fran had developed wrinkles or middle-age spread.
‘So tell me, Jimmy,’ Willow said, pulling his attention back. ‘Why do you think this Monica is the one mentioned in Eleanor’s notebook?’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Perez tried to re-create the evening of Monica Leaze’s exhibition in his head. He hadn’t particularly wanted to be there; the discussion about the trip to the Yell gallery was the nearest he and Fran had come to a real row. He’d faced up to her in the small house in Ravenswick: ‘I never know what to say to that arty lot, and I’m working an early shift tomorrow. You don’t need me there.’ He often felt awkward with her friends – shadowy, not a person in his own right. Sometimes they patronized him. But in the end he’d agreed to go with her. In the end he always did what he knew would make her happy.
‘I’ll drive,’ she’d said. ‘Then you can have a few glasses of wine, and anyway there’ll probably be somebody there that you know.’ And she’d run her finger down his neck, the promise of future compensations.
The gallery was new and seemed to rise organically from the pebble beach. One side was tucked into the hill, the other had a big window that enclosed the exhibition space and let in the clear northern light. The building had won an architectural award for its eco-design. They’d seen the artist outside on the way in. She’d been nervous and sneaking a quick cigarette before the public arrived. Fifty-something with wiry dark hair and button-eyes. Her nervousness had endeared her to Perez.
And so had her art. They were domestic pieces. Mostly interiors of ordinary rooms. Sometimes with a fragment of a person: a leg with a thick, wrinkled stocking and a slipper in front of an old-fashioned gas fire; a hand pouring milk from a plastic container in an untidy kitchen. In the paintings there was often an object that shocked. In an old-fashioned parlour set for afternoon tea – sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a tiered plate of iced fancies – a line of cocaine on an octagonal mirror. In an elderly woman’s bedroom, on a dusty dressing table, a gun.