‘Evie’s boyfriend was the second murder victim,’ Perez said. ‘So you do see how this is relevant.’
‘You think Evie Watt killed them both?’ The question came from Richard Grey. He’d been leaning against the harbour wall, apparently just enjoying the air, but Willow saw that he’d been following the conversation closely.
‘No!’ Perez said. ‘There’s no evidence for that at all. But it’s a connection. A link that we have to explore.’
In the voe one of the dinghies tipped on its side and a young boy with bright-red hair climbed onto the hull, spluttering and laughing.
‘Jerry talked about betrayal,’ Annabel said. ‘Late one night. We’d been out for a meal and he was walking me home. It was early January, before I went back to St Hilda’s, a sharp frost, and he had his arm around me. We’d shared a bottle of wine. I asked about Shetland. Would he ever go back to live? He said it wasn’t the paradise that people from outside believed it to be. When you trusted people and they let you down, that was the worst sort of betrayal.’
‘Did he say who’d betrayed him?’ Willow asked the question and felt that she was intruding into a private conversation. But this was her case, her chance to make a mark.
Annabel shook her head. ‘That was all he said.’
Chapter Thirty
All evening Perez had the images of the women in his mind. He drove south to Ravenswick and collected Cassie from his neighbour’s house. He ran her bath and listened to her chatting about her friends and her day at school, and still the images were with him. Two women, both attached to Jerry Markham. One a student, pale and fair, at home in the city. One small and dark, living in the islands. Opposites. Shadows of each other. Yet sharing a faith. A passion for God and for Markham. A belief that they could save him from himself.
When Cassie was asleep he made a fire with scraps of driftwood that he’d collected earlier from the beach. There was one dense piece of pitch pine that would last most of the night. Then he prepared for his visitors. This time he’d invited Willow and Sandy to come to his house to discuss the case; he hadn’t waited for Willow to invite herself. A week ago he would never have imagined doing that. He would never have considered opening up his house, Fran’s house, to visitors. He’d have slammed the door in their faces.
There’d still been soup in the freezer; it had been made by a neighbour at some time over the winter. And a home-made cake. All the women in Ravenswick had decided that he needed feeding in the months following Fran’s death. He wiped down the patterned oilcloth on the table, laid it with cutlery and glasses and put the soup on to heat through. There were oatcakes from the Walls Bakery and he’d stopped in the community shop in Aith for bread and beer. He didn’t see Willow as a woman who would drink wine. Not with veggie soup, at least. Then there was a sudden desire to run away, not sure after all that he could face the intrusion.
It was a still night and he heard their car stop at the bottom of the bank. He took a deep breath and had the door open to welcome them by the time they’d walked up the path. It was almost dark now and he could only see them as silhouettes, Willow taller than the Whalsay man. On the hill at the back of the house there were sheep like small white ghosts in the gloom. And in Perez’s head more ghosts: of the woman who had allowed him to share this place with her, and of two dead men. Markham and Henderson. Like the women who had loved them, as different as it was possible to be.
The detectives followed Perez quietly into the house, not wanting to wake the child sleeping in the next room. They ate like old friends. No need for conversation at first. Perez hoped that meant the awkwardness between him and Willow was forgotten. Later, when he had made coffee and brought out the cake, they talked through the investigation.
‘So do we really believe in Markham’s conversion?’ Willow said. ‘Can people change like that? Suddenly. A clap of thunder. Saul on the road to Damascus.’
‘I can kind of believe it.’ Perez felt warm and easy and wondered if that was some sort of betrayal, here in Fran’s house. The idea of betrayal had become central to the investigation. Betrayal and transformation. But Fran had loved parties, people eating and drinking and talking, so he decided he could enjoy the conversation in tribute to her. ‘In this case at least. Markham had a stressful job. Not many friends, from what we can gather. A small rented flat on his own in the big city. Homesick, maybe, though he’d never have admitted it. He was successful enough, but it must have been hard being a small fish in a big pool. Here in Shetland he was a star reporter, and everyone knows the Markhams of Ravenswick Hotel.’ Perez paused for a moment and collected his thoughts. ‘Jerry might have been quite low, don’t you think, alone in London? That was the impression his editor gave. So he went into that church one lunchtime. Just to shelter from the rain, as Annabel said. Or in search of something. And he found friendship. A welcome. A way of belonging. To the church, but also to the Grey family. They even invited him home for Christmas’
‘And he found a beautiful woman,’ Willow said. ‘Don’t forget that. We know how Markham liked the ladies. Especially if they were young.’
‘And money.’ This was Sandy, joining in too. ‘A flash house in London. He was always impressed by stuff like that. Class.’
‘So perhaps he wanted to believe.’ Perez hoped he was making sense. He felt he was groping towards some sort of answer. ‘Perhaps he wanted the whole conversion experience. To please Annabel and the rest of them. To become the centre of attention again.’
‘Then why did he come back to Shetland?’ Willow was sitting on the floor, though there were chairs enough for the three of them. She was stretched on a couple of sheepskins in front of the fire and her face was red with the heat. She’d taken off her sweater and was wearing a striped T-shirt, frayed at the neck. ‘Why did he run away from his new girlfriend and all his new friends and bring himself back here?’
‘To tell his parents that he was going to be married?’ Perez remembered Maria’s insistence that Jerry had something important to tell her. ‘But not just that. He’d have told them straight away, if that was the sole reason for the visit.’
‘Could it be that he was here to write a story, like he told everyone?’ Sandy had been following the conversation, frowning with concentration. ‘When he was working on the Shetland Times perhaps he’d come across something in the islands that wasn’t right. I don’t know – corruption. People on the fiddle. And this was his chance to prove to his new friends that he was a good man. A good Christian.’
‘Or perhaps the conversion thing was all bollocks,’ Willow said. ‘He went along with it to get inside Annabel’s knickers. And he was here to make a bit of money to impress his new woman. Perhaps the blackmail theory still holds.’
There was a silence. Perez got to his feet to pour more coffee. He had ideas about the case – he always believed more in the personal than the political – but it was Willow’s place to move the investigation forward. In the end she threw the responsibility back to him.
‘What do you think, Jimmy? Where do we go next?’
‘I’d like to talk to Evie again,’ he said. ‘If Markham’s change of heart was genuine, then Evie would be the person he’d feel the need to meet. He’d want her forgiveness, wouldn’t he? He’d want to set things straight between them, before going back to start his new life with Annabel Grey.’ Perez drained his mug and ran again in his head the conversations he’d had with Evie Watt. ‘She told me Markham had tried to phone her, but she claims that she hadn’t met him. Perhaps we need to check that. Evie looks young, right enough, but perhaps Sue Walsh was mistaken, and Evie was the woman Markham met at the Bonhoga.’