‘Lowrie doesn’t count.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘We share everything.’
Really? I don’t think I shared everything with Fran.
‘But he might have spoken to someone else,’ Perez said. ‘His friend Ian, for example. Perhaps he’d think it was his duty to tell his friend that his wife was seeing someone else. Lowrie knew what Eleanor was like, after all. She’d messed him around big-style when he was a student. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to get his revenge.’
The silence stretched, so he thought she might be considering the matter seriously, but when Caroline spoke her voice was dismissive. ‘Lowrie got over being dumped by Eleanor years ago. We were students. That’s how students behave. He’s with me now. I was happy enough when we were just living together, and he was the one who wanted the wedding and the hamefarin’. He wanted to be married to me.’ She tapped the palm of her hand on the windowsill to make her point. ‘Honestly. He’s the one who cares so much about family.’
Perez thought about that. About all these complicated families. About Lowrie, who’d threatened to kill himself over a dark and exotic woman from the south. And about Polly, who had nobody but the man and the friends who’d come with her to Shetland. He was still thinking when he got to his feet and left the house without speaking to Caroline again. He stood outside, just where the track began, and listened. Nothing. He waited for his ears to tune into the tiny sounds all around him. He still had Caroline’s hard English voice in his head, and it took him a while to hear through the silence. The first sound to emerge was water. Always in Shetland there was the background noise of water on the shore or falling as rain. During the day you could usually hear sheep too. And wind, but tonight there was no wind at all.
His phone buzzed, shattering his attempt to listen properly. He moved further up the track. Despite what Caroline had said about despising gossip, he wouldn’t put it past her to eavesdrop through the door.
It was Mary Lomax and her words were tumbling over themselves, so for a minute he couldn’t make out what she was telling him. Then she became more coherent and explained that David Gordon had run away and she didn’t know where he’d gone. Perez thought this was a complication he could do without: all these people wandering around in the dark, all tense and jumpy. But there was no point blaming the police officer, and he cut into her apologies.
‘I’d like you to do something for me, Mary. Make a few phone calls. I know it’s late, but I think these folk will be awake. This is what I’d like to know.’ He spoke carefully and sensed that she was steadying on the other end of the phone. ‘There’s no need to ring me back. Just send me a text with your answer. Is that OK?’
As he switched off his mobile he thought he could hear children singing, but the tune faded away immediately and it could have been his imagination, or a strange echo from the phone.
Then he was still, waiting for his eyes and ears to adjust again, as he tried to put himself in the footsteps of the killer.
He climbed the bank behind the house to the overgrown bones of the farmstead close to the loch where Eleanor’s body had been found. He’d seen George Malcolmson standing here when he and Willow had gone to look inside Utra. From there Perez thought he’d get a sense of the space all around and, when the sun rose, he’d have a view north along the shore. As he watched he saw flames. Someone had lit a bonfire on the beach, probably to celebrate midsummer and the tilting of the year towards winter. Sparks were shooting into the sky like fireworks or an emergency flare. Perhaps people who had been eating in the boat club had decided they would carry on partying. The thought reassured him. If there were other people around, then there was surely less danger of another murder.
His phone buzzed. A text from Mary with the answer to his questions. The words seemed domestic and normal in this wild setting.
Then he heard footsteps. Heavy. Someone wearing boots on the rocky path. Perez moved into the corner formed by two walls so that his silhouette wouldn’t show up against the lightening sky. There were still occasional flagstones on the floor, with cotton grass growing between them. He crouched in the corner and waited, feeling slightly ridiculous, reverting to childhood and hide-and-seek with his cousins. Around him suddenly there was movement. It was as if the wall was alive and shifting. There was a murmuring, the softness of wings against the air. Storm-petrels, bat-like and gentle-eyed, which had nested in cracks in the wall, were flying out towards the sea.
The footsteps got closer and now Perez saw torchlight. Very faint, as if the battery was low. No other sound. No one was shouting out for Polly. If this was a searcher, then perhaps they’d lost heart. Perhaps. Still there wasn’t enough light to make a positive identification.
Standing in the shadow, Perez was thinking about all the people he’d met since he’d come to Unst the week before, and in his head he saw them moving around as if they were actors on a giant stage. But now he’d lost control of their moves. He knew they were scattered around Meoness, on the cliffs and the shore, but didn’t have precise positions for them and that made him nervous. He was a director whose players were taking no notice of him. He’d lost control of the action.
The figure moved on down the path towards the settlement of Meoness and paused briefly to look over the loch, where Eleanor had been lying in her smart silk dress, pointing the torch around the grassy banks as if looking for something specific. It was impossible to tell if the walker was male or female, but they were fit and moved easily down the steep path. Perez waited for a while, indecisive. He still thought Polly might come this way. The fog had cleared above him and, in the last of the darkness, the sky was suddenly filled with stars. He saw the Milky Way as defined points of light and all the space made him feel giddy, made him forget for a moment what he was doing there. Then he came to his senses and followed the figure further down the path.
On the road leading towards the Meoness community hall the torch was switched off. Perez found it more difficult to track the person then. If they stopped in the shadow, he might get too close and he didn’t want to give away the fact that he was following. Utra, the house where Sarah Malcolmson had grown up, appeared as an indistinct silhouette beside the track. Perez stopped and listened. Nothing. Now the footsteps were so far ahead that he could no longer hear them. There was another moment of indecision. Should he run on and try to catch up, or go inside? Polly was the most important person in all this. He still wasn’t sure whom he’d been following. This place was central in the Peerie Lizzie story, and Polly might have been attracted inside for another look. He pushed open the door.
In the old house the darkness felt viscous, like melted tar. Perez imagined that he would have to wade through it to get beyond the lintel. He turned on his torch and walked past the scullery to the bigger room and a smell of damp and decay. He was distracted, remembering his last visit to the house and the feral cat that had shocked Willow, the way her arm had felt under his hand, how the touch had been like an electric shock all the way to his shoulder. Then they’d both been disturbed and he thought they hadn’t searched the place properly. He was torn, aware that the figure he’d been following would soon be lost to him altogether, but curious. Something here had pulled in Polly Gilmour and Charles Hillier. He shone his torch into the corners. The room seemed quite bare. He opened the stove, which stood in one corner. A piece of half-burnt peat. Then as he was leaving he saw, caught on a sharp corner of the metal stove, a scrap of cloth. White. Like the dress worn by Peerie Lizzie every time she’d appeared. The dress, at least, was real and not imagined. In the dust on the floor he saw two long, thin rectangular shapes. Something had been placed here. Or lain here.