They’d reached the steps that led through the terraced garden. David paused for a moment, not to catch his breath – he was obviously very fit – but to remember. ‘I’ve never told anyone else that story.’ Another pause. ‘But then nobody has ever asked.’ They stopped at the front door. ‘What will happen now?’
‘Willow has already contacted the funeral director in Lerwick,’ Perez said. ‘Charles will go south for post-mortem. You met James Grieve, the pathologist. He’s great at what he does.’ He hesitated. ‘Very respectful.’
‘What do think killed him?’ It came out as a strangled cry of pain.
‘Dr Grieve will help us to know that.’ Perez remembered a conversation with the pathologist, late one night. Another case. They’d had dinner together and shared a bottle of wine. My patients aren’t the dead, Jimmy, but the living relatives. My responsibility is to them. At least there was no mystery about what happened to Fran, he thought. I was there. He had a sudden flashback: the lightning glint of a knife in moonlight. A scream. He thought not knowing how she’d died would have been the worst kind of torture.
Sandy was waiting for them inside. ‘I found rooms for the other guests in a B &B in Yell and booked them onto the ferry. They left five minutes ago.’ His voice was almost a whisper, but David wouldn’t have heard if Sandy had shouted. He was lost in memories of his lover.
‘What should I do?’ David asked. It was as if he was a stranger in his own home. Perez thought the roles had reversed now. The police officers were in charge of the place and David was more like a guest. ‘I want to help.’
‘We’d be really glad of some coffee, if you’re up to making it.’
David looked grateful to have something specific to do and disappeared towards the kitchen. Perez sent Sandy to the beach to relieve Willow. Hillier’s death must be linked to Eleanor Longstaff’s, and he wanted to speak to the group at Sletts before news of the tragedy leaked out. But he knew better than to go without speaking to Willow first. The only time they’d really fallen out on an earlier case was when he followed his own line of investigation. And the previous evening he’d pushed his luck by talking to George without her permission. He stood by the front door and watched Sandy’s progress across the beach, then waited as Willow walked towards him. He saw her as if for the first time, the long, tangled hair and the easy stride, and thought she looked more like a Viking than most Shetlanders. He could imagine her rowing a longboat with the strength of a man. The thought made him smile and the image stayed with him until she reached him.
‘Jimmy, do tell me there’s a reason why you’re looking so happy, because I don’t have a clue where we should go from here.’
He shook his head and could feel himself blushing. ‘I was thinking we should go and talk to the folk at Sletts before the news of Hillier’s death is generally known. I’d like to see their reaction when they hear of it.’
‘Could we get Lowrie and Caroline there too, do you think? They seem to have avoided our questions until now, and we can’t rule them out of Eleanor’s murder just because they were celebrating their marriage on the night of her death.’
‘I could phone them,’ he said. ‘And it might be worth contacting the English people too to warn them that we’re on the way. We don’t want them deciding this is their day for a trip into Lerwick.’
‘You do that, Jimmy. But tell them we’ll be there in an hour. I haven’t had breakfast yet and I don’t work well on an empty stomach.’
When they arrived at the holiday house all the friends were there, taking up the chairs in the living room, so Perez had to drag two garden seats in from the deck. Caroline was sitting on the arm of Lowrie’s chair.
‘This is very mysterious, Inspector.’
He wondered if anything would penetrate her skin of efficient good humour. He couldn’t imagine her ever crying, for example. Had something in her past led to her forming this protective shell or was it a feature of her age and class?
‘There’s been another death.’ They’d all been looking to Perez for an explanation and when Willow spoke they stared at her, surprised. He watched them, but the shock seemed real.
‘Who?’ It was Polly Gilmour, as pale as a ghost herself, Perez thought.
‘A hotelier called Charles Hillier.’
Perez thought he saw the woman flash a glance at Longstaff. ‘You knew him?’ he said.
There was a pause before Polly answered. ‘We had a…’ Another pause. ‘An encounter yesterday.’
‘What happened?’ Willow leaned forward. They were similar in age and she could have been an old friend from university, encouraging gossip.
‘I’d wandered into that derelict house on the way to the hall. Just nosy, I suppose, to see what it looked like inside. And Mr Hillier turned up to ask what I was doing there.’
‘As if it was any business of his!’ Longstaff seemed to have aged since Perez had first met him; to have turned into one of those angry, red-faced middle-aged men with a short fuse and a tendency to fall victim to a heart attack.
‘You were there too, Mr Longstaff?’ Willow again, keeping it calm and cool.
‘I was driving past and I saw them in the house, just shadows in my headlights. A woman’s been murdered here, and it looked as if Hillier was keeping her there against her will. Of course I was going to check that Polly was OK. She should never have been wandering around on her own.’ He looked at Marcus. Accusing: You should be taking better care of your woman.
‘And was Mr Hillier being unreasonable?’ Willow again.
Polly shook her head. ‘He was just being weird. I probably shouldn’t have been there, but I wasn’t doing any harm and he seemed to overreact big-style. Then Ian turned up and things started getting a bit fraught, so we just left.’ She hesitated. ‘Hillier said there was some connection between the house and the ghost that Eleanor claimed to have seen.’ She turned to Lowrie. ‘Did you know anything about that?’
Lowrie shrugged. ‘The croft house was in our family,’ he said. ‘The lass looking after Lizzie Geldard lived there. Then my grandfather built our house on a bit of the land, and later Vaila and her man built their new place next door, and the old house was just left to ruin. It was a shame. I thought Vaila’s husband might renovate and extend the old place, but I suppose it would have cost more in the end than starting from scratch.’ He hesitated. ‘And there’s always been a kind of superstition about the building. Maybe they thought it would be bad luck to tear it down.’
‘Is it ever used?’ Willow asked.
‘Maybe for storage, but probably not even for that now, it’s such a damp old place.’
Perez thought Polly was about to speak again, but she turned towards the window and said nothing.
‘What did you do last night when you got back here?’ Willow asked.
‘I cooked supper,’ Polly said. ‘There was heaps, so we phoned Lowrie and Caroline and asked them to join us. It was good to get together to remember Eleanor. Somehow she seems to have got lost in all this.’
‘And then?’
‘Then the others wanted to go out. I stayed here.’ She paused and smiled at Ian. ‘Ian was worried about me, but I felt quite safe. There are locks on the doors and my mobile has reception. I promised I’d phone if anything worried me. We’ve all been shut in together since Eleanor died and I longed for some time on my own.’
‘Where did the rest of you go?’
‘To the bar at Springfield House.’ Lowrie took up the story. ‘Ian had been round to our place in the afternoon and we’d had a few beers. I thought it might be good for him to have some company. Then after dinner I could see that he wanted to carry on drinking, so I suggested going to the bar. I didn’t like the idea of him being in his room on his own with a bottle of whisky. I mean Polly and Marcus have been fantastic, but being here in Sletts must just remind Ian of Eleanor. There’s sometimes music at Springfield House on a Thursday night, and I thought the noise and the people might help release the tension for a while.’