She saw a line of his footprints in the sand. He was wearing rubber clogs and the prints were quite distinctive. He’d obviously come from further along the shore and now he set off back in that direction quickly, like a dog following a scent. She followed, stopping briefly when the sand was very wet, to take off her own shoes.
Charles Hillier was lying on his back, staring up at the sky, close to the tideline. It was not long after high water. His hair and his clothes were dripping. He was fully dressed in the trousers and shirt he’d been wearing the evening before. There was no immediate sign of injury, but he was clearly dead.
‘You see!’ David cried. ‘I was coming to tell you, and then suddenly it hit me that I’d be alone for the rest of my life and I broke down. So selfish. So dreadfully selfish. Not to be crying for Charles, but for myself.’
Willow took in the scene. There was no chance they’d get Vicki Hewitt or James Grieve to Unst before the next high water, so they would need to move the body – Vicki was fastidious about maintaining the integrity of the crime scene, but even she would accept the need for action if the alternative was the corpse being sucked away into the North Sea by a particularly big tide. She pulled out her phone. Miraculously there was a signal. She phoned first Perez and then Sandy. She told Sandy to ask the remaining two guests to find alternative accommodation and to suggest that they leave Springfield House as soon as possible. They were an elderly couple from Bedfordshire; she already had their contact details and they were too frail to walk as far as the beach. Certainly they’d have been incapable of killing Charles Hillier, if this turned out to be murder. She asked Perez to join her on the shore. Sandy was full of questions, which she ignored. Perez asked none.
So she and David Hillier stood on the sand waiting. She didn’t want to send him back to the house alone, and she couldn’t leave Charles’s body to the mercy of gulls, rats or dogs. He stood staring out at the water. ‘I should never have forced Charles to come here,’ he said.
‘He seemed perfectly content, happy even.’ She supposed this was what the man wanted to hear, but she thought it was true too.
‘He was an actor,’ David said. ‘That was why he made such a good stage magician. He could make people believe whatever he wanted them to. He wanted me to believe that he was pleased with the move. But I knew he was bored. He needed more drama in his life than Shetland could give him.’
‘Perhaps it was enough for him to know that you loved it here.’
There was a silence. David didn’t respond to that. ‘How did he die?’
She thought he must realize that she could have no more idea than him. ‘Was he ill?’
‘No. Horribly fit. I was the one who did all the exercise and was careful about what I ate, but he’d never had a day’s illness.’
‘Then we’ll need to wait for the post-mortem.’ In the far distance Willow saw Perez appear from the front door of the house and lope down the stone steps. She felt like the sheriff in an old cowboy movie, waiting for the cavalry to appear on the horizon. ‘When did you last see Charles?’
‘Last night. I went to bed early. There was live music in the bar, but our manager deals with that. He’s local and he’s very good at running the Thursday events. I assumed that perhaps Charles had popped in to see how things were going. I’d been working in the garden all day and I was exhausted. I went straight to sleep. When I woke early this morning I realized Charles hadn’t come to bed and I came looking for him. I searched the house first. Then I came out into the garden and saw something on the shore. It was that blue shirt. I recognized the colour, but I couldn’t believe it was him until I got here.’
‘Was it unusual for him to be up all night?’ Willow knew all this should wait until she had another officer with her and could talk properly to David as a witness, but it would be unbearable to stand here in silence, and all information was valuable. A small fishing boat came round the headland followed by screaming gulls.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t unheard of. He loved popular old television – it probably reminded him of his glory days – and if there were repeats of obscure sitcoms on BBC4 he’d sit up and watch until the early hours. Sometimes he’d fall asleep in the armchair and still be there in the morning…’ David’s voice tailed off.
‘And last night?’
‘Last night he went out after dinner. Sometimes he was restless. Perhaps he felt trapped here and just needed a sense of movement. He took the car and came back about an hour later.’
‘Did he say where he’d been?’ Willow tried to understand this relationship. Had these men discussed what they wanted from the partnership, or had each been so careful about his partner’s privacy that they’d simply tried to guess what had made the other happy?
‘He said he’d been for a drive. The fog had made him feel trapped and he needed to get out for a while. When I went to bed early I hoped he might follow me up and that we might talk.’ At last David turned away from the sea and faced her. He’d stopped crying. ‘For a while I’ve had the feeling that he’s been keeping secrets from me. Making plans. When I woke and he wasn’t there, I wasn’t surprised. I thought he’d run away.’
Like Eleanor, Willow thought. Caroline thought that she was planning to run away from her partner too. She couldn’t think what else the two dead people might have had in common.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Perez walked back to Springfield House with David Gordon and wondered what he might say to provide comfort. Certainly nothing about his own experience of bereavement. When Fran had died and people had shared their own stories of grieving he’d wanted to hit them, to scream, I don’t care if someone close to you died. Don’t use my tragedy to wallow in your own. You cannot come close to knowing how I feel. But he had wanted to talk about Fran and to say her name.
‘Where did you and Charles meet?’
David spoke without looking at him, to a background sound of waves breaking on the sand. ‘Quite by chance in a cafe in York. It was the summer and the place was busy with tourists. I was living there, and Charles was performing at the theatre. His television career was already finished by then, but he was still able to pull in the crowds in provincial venues. There was a seat at his table and I asked if I could join him. “Excuse me,” I said. “Don’t I know you?” He was thrilled to be recognized, though honestly I don’t think I’d ever seen him on TV. Later I realized that he looked very like a colleague from Leeds, and that was who he reminded me of. But we talked and there was an attraction even then. He offered to leave a complimentary ticket for me at the theatre for his performance. I thanked him, never really intending to go. Not my thing. Charles always said I was a snob. But I was at the box office an hour beforehand and I knew I’d be devastated if the ticket wasn’t waiting for me.
‘After the show we went for a meal. And I suppose that was it. We’ve been together as a couple ever since. I carried on living and working in York, but Charles stayed with me whenever he wasn’t working. Then he was offered fewer tours and I found teaching increasingly less attractive, so we decided on early retirement and a move north. Charles loved the drama of the grand gesture. And for a man used to life in the city, running off to Unst was pretty dramatic. He was passionate about the house and enjoyed supervising the refurbishment. But when that was complete there was just the everyday tedium of running and maintaining a place the size of Springfield. He was starting to be bored. We’d always planned to leave Shetland in the winters and do some travelling, but the house soaked up all our spare cash and I’m sure he felt trapped here.’