He put on gloves and reached over the wall to retrieve the phone. It came to him suddenly that he was treating this as a potential murder scene and that he had no expectation of Eleanor being found alive. If the phone had lain here for most of the night in a heavy dew there’d be little chance of fingerprints, though, and any of her friends could have touched it over the previous few days. The battery was low, but there was sufficient signal to see the email to Polly in the Sent box and the record of missed calls from Ian. There’d been no other calls or emails sent or received since.
He looked at the woman, who stood watching him impassively. ‘I suppose you don’t have any idea what might have happened to her?’
Caroline stared at him, considering the words before saying them. He thought that was how she would always be and, before she had a chance to answer, another question came into his head.
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m an academic. Human geography. UCL.’
‘So are we all part of your study?’
She gave a little laugh. ‘It would be interesting research. The effect of isolation on island communities under stress. Though I’m sure it’s been done before.’
‘And perhaps you’re too close to the subject to be objective.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Objectivity – that’s a whole new area of research in its own right.’
‘Are you sufficiently objective to tell me what happened to your friend in the early hours of this morning?’
There was another brief pause and then she did reply. ‘I think Eleanor might have been trying to run away from her husband.’
Chapter Six
Caroline Lawson took Perez back to her parents-in-law’s house. She, it seemed, had not changed her name with marriage. The name-change business wasn’t something he and Fran had ever spoken about, but he supposed that if his fiancée had lived and they’d had the wedding they’d been planning, she would have kept her own name. She was an artist with a growing reputation and it would have been crazy to lose that. Except that Hunter wasn’t the name she’d been born with, but the name of her ex-husband Duncan, who was Cassie’s father. They were part of a complicated modern family. Perez wasn’t sure what he would have made of Fran using Duncan’s name when she was married to him, then thought that he would have gone along with it for Cassie’s sake.
The door was unlocked, but the house was empty. There was a note on the table in the kitchen: We’ve joined the search party to look for Eleanor. Caroline moved the kettle to the hot plate of the Rayburn to make tea.
‘You seem very at home here in Shetland,’ Perez said.
‘I love it.’ A pause. ‘Lowrie wants to move back. I might be persuaded.’
‘Could you find work?’
‘Not in my field. But I’ve always wanted to make time to write my research up into a book.’
‘So,’ Perez said. ‘Tell me about Eleanor.’
The kettle whistled and Caroline made the tea, then sat down at the table opposite him, shifting a pile of Shetland Times to make room for the mug. Perez had grown up in such a kitchen as this. A working space with a wax cloth on the table, a place for baking and knitting and filling in subsidy forms. Not for showing off to the neighbours. A cat wandered through and sat on the windowsill in the sun.
‘Four of us met at Durham University,’ she said. ‘Lowrie was in a different college at Durham, but Polly, Eleanor and I were freshers together and in the same hall of residence. On the same corridor, sharing a kitchen, excited and scared shitless, all at the same time. You know…’
Perez nodded, but what could he know of life in a smart English university? The nearest he could come to it was being sent from Fair Isle at the age of eleven to board at the Anderson High in Lerwick. Then Duncan Hunter had been his ally and protector, but he couldn’t imagine being friends with the man now. They rubbed along together because of their responsibility for Cassie.
Caroline continued to speak. ‘We shared a flat in the second year and a house in the third. One night at a party Eleanor named us the Three MsKeteers – she was going through a feminist phase – and that stuck. I was going out with Lowrie then, but I carried on living with the girls and he was a kind of permanent fixture. We were all very close.’
‘And you kept in touch even after you left university?’ Perez had never made those sorts of close friendships. He wasn’t the kind of policeman who used colleagues as a surrogate family.
‘When we graduated the three of us were based in London. Polly started her postgrad training – she’s a librarian – and I was doing my PhD. Eleanor found work as a runner with ITV. So we just went on living together, sharing a grotty flat. Lowrie got a job in Edinburgh, but he came down when he could. We were poor as church mice. It wasn’t very different from being students.’ She gave a little smile. ‘Though Nell was subsidized big-style by her mother and, when she got fed up with slumming it, she’d go home for a weekend of comfort. Lowrie was earning, so I got treated to nights out when he came to stay. I suppose it was really only Polly who found it tough going financially. Not that it stopped the rest of us moaning.’
Perez listened and tried to picture these three young women in their flat in London at the beginning of their careers. He said nothing to hurry on the story. He was more use here than he would be out helping the search team.
‘We did well in our own fields,’ Caroline continued. ‘Moved out of the slummy flat. Lowrie got a promotion to London and he and I set up home together. Eleanor was a rising star in ITV. Polly qualified and got a job first in a local-authority library, then in the Sentiman, where she still works. That’s a weird place in Hampstead. It keeps the records of the UK Folklore Society, tales of morris men and legends of the Green Man. You know the sort of thing.’
Perez thought he had no idea. ‘And ghosts?’
Caroline looked at him sharply. ‘I don’t know anything about that. You’d have to ask Polly.’ She paused before continuing her story. ‘For a while she and Nell shared an apartment, but then Ian Longstaff swept Eleanor off her feet and into his house in South London and Polly found a nice little flat of her own not far away.’ She paused. ‘I suppose we grew up.’
‘But you were still friends?’
‘Yeah, when we moved out of our shared home we made a pact that we’d meet up at least once a month. We kept to it at first and then it became more difficult to find a time when we were all free. I have students to supervise and, since she set up in her own business, Eleanor is abroad a lot. Even when she’s home Ian seems to demand all her time. I suppose only Polly has the diligence and determination to make the commitment work. She’s the one to email the rest of us, negotiating times and places to meet. And since Marcus came on the scene even she’s been less organized.’ Caroline paused. ‘That’s why I was pleased that everyone agreed to make the trek north for the hamefarin’. It was a chance for the three of us to spend some time together away from London.’
‘Why do you think Eleanor would want to run away from her husband?’ It was where the conversation had started. Perez wasn’t frustrated by the time it had taken to get back to the question. He had a much better sense now of these women as successful, professional friends.
For the first time Caroline seemed unsure of herself. ‘I have no evidence.’
‘Sometimes I have to pursue an investigation without evidence,’ Perez said. ‘The purpose of my work is to obtain it, but it’s not where we start from.’
‘It seems disloyal speculating like this.’ She frowned.
Perez said nothing.
‘For the past six months Eleanor has been very low. More unhappy than I’ve ever known her.’