by Ann Cleeves
‘I think somebody has been interfering with my work.’
‘I went in to check the bookings on the computer. Roger phoned to see if we could fit in a group next June and for some reason the machine in the flat wasn’t working.’
‘This wasn’t on the computer. It was a draft for a paper. Handwritten.’ Angela directed the answer at Maurice, but her voice was pitched loudly enough for them all to hear the words. Listening, Jane was surprised by the image of Angela writing by hand. She never did, except perhaps her field notes when no other form of taking a record was possible. The warden was beguiled by technology. She even completed the evening log of birds seen with the aid of a laptop. ‘It’s missing,’ Angela went on. ‘Someone must have taken it.’ She looked around the room, took in the four visitors sitting at their own table and her voice was even louder. ‘Someone must have taken it.’
Chapter Three
Perez had told Fran exactly what to expect of his parents’ house. He’d described the kitchen with its view down to the South Harbour, the Rayburn with the rack above for drying clothes in the winter, the oilskin tablecloth, green with a pattern of small grey leaves, his mother’s watercolours hanging on the wall. He’d talked about his childhood there, then listened to her tales of growing up in London; the intimate conversations part of the ritual of a developing relationship, absolutely tedious to any outsider.
‘Mother will probably hide all her pictures away,’ Perez had said. ‘She’ll be embarrassed for a professional artist to see them.’
And Fran supposed that she was a professional artist now. People commissioned her paintings and they were shown in galleries. She was glad that Mary had left her own work on the walls. The pictures were very small and delicate, not Fran’s style at all, but interesting because they showed the small details of everyday Fair Isle life that it would be easy to miss. There was a piece of broken wall, with a few wisps of sheep’s wool snagged on one corner, a sketch of one grave in the cemetery. Fran looked at that more closely, but the headstone had been drawn from the side so even if the model had had an inscription it would have been impossible to read from this angle. Alongside Mary’s paintings of the Isle there were vibrant prints and posters reflecting the Perez family’s Spanish heritage. Legend had it that Jimmy’s ancestor had been washed ashore from a shipwrecked Armada ship, El Gran Grifon. It was probably true. The sixteenth-century shipwreck was certainly there, under the water for divers to explore, and how else was it possible to explain the strange name and the Mediterranean colouring of James Perez and his son?
Because the reality of the croft was so close to what she’d imagined, but not exactly the same – it was smaller somehow, more cramped – Fran felt rather that she’d wandered into a parallel universe. She sat at the table listening to Mary and James and it was as if she was an extra on a film set, disconnected, not involved in the main action.
Is this how it’ll always be here? I’ll never quite belong.
It hadn’t been discussed recently, but Fran thought Perez might want to move back here one day. She loved the idea of that, the drama of being in one of the most remote places in the UK, of continuing the tradition of a family that went back to the sixteenth century. Now she wasn’t sure how that would work out in reality.
Mary was talking about the wedding plans. Her son and this Englishwoman would be married the following May and she assumed Fran would be excited, eager to share her ideas for the day. But Fran had been married before. She had a daughter, Cassie, who was spending this week with her father in his big house in Brae. Fran wanted to be married to Jimmy Perez but she couldn’t get worked up about the details of the show. She hadn’t expected Mary to be the sort of woman to fuss over flowers, invitations and whether she would need a hat. Mary had come to Fair Isle as the community nurse and since her marriage had shared all the work on the croft. She was a tough and practical woman. But Jimmy was her only son and perhaps she thought it would please Fran if she showed she was interested in their big day. It seemed to Fran that the older woman very much wanted to be friends with her new daughter-in-law.
‘We thought we’d be married in Lerwick,’ Fran said. ‘A quiet civil ceremony. It’s the second time for both of us, after all. Then a party after for family and friends.’
James had looked up at that. ‘You’ll need something here too. For the folks who can’t get out to the mainland. And your family will want to see the Isle. You’ll need a hame-farin’. This is Jimmy’s home.’
‘Of course,’ Fran said, though it had never crossed her mind that they would have to bring the circus into Fair Isle. She imagined her parents having to endure the plane ride or the boat. And could she really allow Cassie to face that danger too? And if there were to be a celebration here she’d have to invite some of her close London friends. They wouldn’t want to be left out. What would they make of it? Where would they stay?
‘We were thinking we’d have a bit of a party this week to celebrate your engagement,’ Mary said.
‘That’ll be fun. But I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.’ Fran looked at Perez for support. He had been completely silent throughout this exchange. He gave a little shrug and Fran understood that the arrangements would already have been completed. Nothing they said would change things now.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t have it here.’ Mary smiled. ‘There’s no room in the house. You couldn’t have a proper Fair Isle party without some music, a bit of a dance. I thought we’d book the field centre. There’s a good space in the dining room for dancing and Jane would do the food for us.’
‘Jane?’ Fran thought it was safest to focus on the detail.
‘She works in the centre kitchen. She’s a grand cook.’
‘Fine,’ Fran said. What else was there to say? Oh, Jimmy, she thought. I’m really not sure I could live here, not even with you. She turned to his mother. ‘When were you thinking of holding the party?’
‘I’ve booked the field centre for tomorrow.’ Then in a rush: ‘Only tentatively, of course. I wanted to ask you first.’
‘Fine,’ Fran said again. Mentally gritting her teeth.
After lunch she felt as if she’d go crazy if she stayed inside any longer. She’d helped Mary to wash up and afterwards they’d taken coffee into the living room, where a big window looked south over low fields to the water. Jimmy’s father was a lay preacher for the kirk and had disappeared into the small bedroom they used as an office to prepare Sunday’s sermon. The three of them sat for a moment in silence, mesmerized by the huge waves that rolled across the south harbour and smashed into the rocks. It had stopped raining, but Fran thought the gale was even stronger. The noise of it penetrated the thick walls of the house, a constant whining that stretched her nerves, made her even more tense than she would have been anyway. Just outside the window a herring gull was struggling to make headway against the wind; Fran was reminded of the plane and felt a little sick. She reached out to take her cup and drink the last of her coffee, thinking: What’s wrong with Jimmy? He’s hardly said anything since we arrived. Does he regret his decision not to come back when he had that chance? We’d just met then. Does he blame me? Does he want to come home?
Perez got to his feet and stretched out his hand to pull Fran up too. ‘Come on. Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the island.’
‘Are you mad?’ Mary said. ‘Why would you go out in this weather?’
‘We’ll go up to the North Light, talk to Jane about the catering for tomorrow.’ A grin to show he knew there was no need, his mother would have done that already. ‘Besides, the forecast is even worse from tonight. If we don’t get out today we might not have the chance.’
They stood by the kitchen door to put on boots and waterproof jackets. It was sheltered there but she could still feel the taste of salt on her lips; when they moved away from the house a gust of wind took her breath away and almost blew her off her feet. Perez laughed and put his arm around her.
They walked north and Perez p
ointed out the places that meant the most to him: ‘That’s where Ingrid and Jerry used to live. I babysat their three lasses occasionally though I wasn’t much older than they were. What a dance they led me! The wind turbine provides all the power for the island now. In my day every croft had its own generator. You could hear the sound of them starting when dusk fell. That place over on the bank is Myers Jimmy’s house. There’s Margo on her way back from the post office.’
They called in to the shop to buy chocolate and a pile of postcards for Fran to send to her family in the south – when the weather allowed for post to go. The talk there was all about the storm. The middle-aged woman in her hand-knitted cardigan leaned across the till. ‘Any news on the boat, Jimmy?’ And when he shook his head: ‘I can’t see it going tomorrow and the last of the bread’s gone now. Just as well I bought in lots of dried yeast. The beer’s on the low side too. Let’s hope folks have stocked up for themselves.’
Further north again the settlements petered out. There was a rise in the land and Fran could see the road winding away, the hill and the airstrip on one side and an area of flat grassland on the other. To the right the sloping bulk of Sheep Rock, jutting into the sea, which gave Fair Isle its instantly recognizable shape from Shetland mainland and from the Northlink ferry.
‘What’s that?’ Fran had stopped and turned her back to the wind. She’d thought she was fit but this was hard going and she was glad of the excuse to rest. She pointed to a wire-mesh cage built over the wall. It was shaped like a funnel with a wooden box at the narrow end.
‘A Heligoland trap. It’s where the wardens from the field centre catch the birds for ringing. There have been naturalists here since the fifties; they started off in some wooden huts near the North Haven. The place was set up by a couple of guys who were prisoners of war. Apparently they dreamed of coming back and founding a centre for studying birds and plants. When the North Light went automatic there was a huge fund-raising effort to convert it to a state-of-the-art field centre. In the spring there are organized courses for botanists. This time of year it’s taken over by birdwatchers. Sometimes the Isle seems full of people with binoculars and telescopes chasing rare birds.’ Perez paused. ‘They’re kind of obsessed.’
‘How does it work, the people in the field centre and the islanders? Does everyone get on?’
‘Generally. We all grew up with a centre on the island and everyone agreed with the lighthouse conversion – it’s so far from the rest of the houses that you can’t imagine ordinary folk wanting to live there. It provides business for the shop and the boat and the post office. There’ve been a few complaints in the past about visitors breaking down walls and flattening crops when they get onto folks’ land, but one storm like this could do just as much damage as a horde of birdwatchers. Maurice and Angela have been there for about five years. Folk seem to like them OK.’
‘I thought your mother said the place was run by someone called Jane.’
‘Jane’s the cook. Very good and scarily efficient. The island’s started to have its parties there because the food’s so good.’
He began walking again. Ahead of them was an isthmus with a sandy beach on one side, rocks and shingle on the other.
‘That’s the North Haven where the Good Shepherd puts in,’ Perez said. ‘In good weather she would be moored there, but they’ve pulled her up onto the slipway. Come on. Keep walking. There’s still a long way to go.’
They came on to the lighthouse suddenly, rounding a bend in the single-track road. A row of whitewashed cottages with the tower beyond and the whole complex surrounded by a low stone wall that had been whitewashed too, enclosing a paved yard, crossed at one end with washing lines.
Fran was tired after the walk in the wind. The sky was overcast now and there were welcoming lights in the small windows. She imagined tea, a fire, and an escape from the relentless noise of the storm. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to make the walk back to the south of the island.
Perez pulled open a door into a porch with hooks for outdoor clothes, a bench holding odd boots and shoes. There was a smell of damp wellingtons and old socks, waxed jackets. In the distance they heard raised voices.
‘I’m really sorry but that’s impossible.’ A clear, female voice, the voice of someone who expected to be taken seriously. Someone English and well educated. ‘You had the opportunity to fly out on the plane this morning. We did explain that the boat was unlikely to go. The crew won’t put their lives, and those of their passengers, into danger just because you’ve decided you’re bored.’
Fran decided this must be Jane, the cook. Certainly the speaker sounded scarily efficient.
‘Nobody told me about the plane!’ This was another woman. Younger. The voice had the complaining whine of a spoilt teenager.
‘An announcement was made at breakfast.’
‘You know I never eat breakfast. You should have found me and told me. Why didn’t my father tell me?’
‘There was no point by then. The available spare places had already been taken.’
‘Oh, God!’ The words came out as a high-pitched wail, but Fran thought she sensed real panic behind it, the sort of panic she’d felt when she thought the plane was going to crash. ‘I hate this bloody place. I’ll die if I have to stay here for another day.’
Chapter Four
Perez lay awake in his parents’ guest bedroom, the room that had been his when he was a child. Beside him Fran was sleeping. Their sleeping arrangements had probably caused his parents some anxiety. One of the bedrooms in the house was tiny; now it housed the PC and a desk and a huge metal filing cabinet that Mary had taken when it was being thrown out by the school. There was no room for a camp bed. Perez had thought he might be expected to spend the nights on the living room sofa. His father had fixed ideas about sexual morality. But if there had been any argument over the propriety of their sharing a bed, Mary had won. She’d shown them into the room in the roof with an air of triumph.
‘This is a bit different, eh, Jimmy? It’s not like when you stayed here.’
And he saw that it had been transformed in their honour. There was a new double bed, fresh curtains with big blue flowers on them, and matching linen. A pair of blue towels folded on the old chest of drawers. He thought his mother must have been watching makeover programmes on daytime television when the bad weather made outside work impossible.
Lying there, listening to the wind tear at the roof tiles, Perez remembered the first woman with whom he’d had sex. The image came into his head, quite unbidden and remarkably vivid. She’d been a woman while he was still a boy. Beata. A German student, member of a National Trust for Scotland work camp; the camp had taken over the Puffin, an old stone fish store at the south end, for a month in the summer. He was sixteen, home for the long holiday. She was twenty-one.
It was the year all the construction work was done at the North Haven and the students acted as labourers, the year Kenneth Williamson had come to Springfield as a kind of lodger. One night there’d been a barbecue at the Puffin and Perez had been invited along. He remembered bottles of German beer in a row in the shadow of the hut, the smell of singeing meat. He was sitting on the grass talking to the woman and suddenly became aware that she was looking at him oddly. She half-closed her eyes and swayed slightly, lost it seemed to him now, in some erotic fantasy of her own.
‘I want to swim,’ she’d said, opening her eyes wide again. ‘Where can I swim?’
By then the other students were rowdily drunk, singing songs in languages he couldn’t understand. He’d taken her to Gunglesund, a natural pool formed in the rocks on the west of the island. It filled up on the very high tides and the sun warmed it, so it wasn’t so cold there as swimming in the sea. But still cold enough to make the children who came there squeal when they first jumped in.
Beata hadn’t squealed. Without any sort of fuss, she’d taken off all her clothes and slipped into the water. She had small breasts, a flat brown stomach, a white triangle
where bikini bottoms had been. Her pubic hair was darker than he’d expected. She’d swum away from him with a languid crawl.
The sun had reflected from the water into his eyes and he’d felt faint. There was a weird shady light as if the sun had been eclipsed for a moment and would soon come out again.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she’d demanded, turning back to him. Impatient. A little imperious.
He’d hesitated for a moment. What if someone should come? And he’d known even then that what was expected was more than a shared swim. She’d been looking at him greedily since he’d first arrived at the Puffin. He began to undress.
They’d lain on a pile of clothes on a large flat rock, in shadow now that the sun was so low. The woman’s hunger for his body had scared and flattered him at the same time. And excited him. Of course he’d been excited. It had been like every adolescent’s dream.
When he’d returned home that night, everyone was in bed. He’d half-expected his father to appear, to stand at his bedroom door ranting about sin. This had been such a momentous occasion for Jimmy Perez; how could the whole world not guess what had happened? But everyone had continued sleeping and in the morning his mother had given him breakfast just as usual.
Thoughts of Beata had consumed him for months. While the work camp was still in the Puffin he’d haunted the place, but she’d taken no more notice of him than of any of the other island kids. The eyes that had been so predatory were now amused. ‘It was nothing, Jimmy,’ she’d said at last, irritated by his attentions. ‘A little fun thing on a summer’s night.’ Her absence had allowed his dreams to become wilder. But they’d never been purely physical: in every scenario his imagination created they’d become a real couple, setting up home together in a bohemian city bedsit or walking across a moonlit beach hand in hand.
The storm must have lifted a tile from its place because there was the crash of it shattering in the yard; the noise was blurred by the sound of the wind but it brought him back to the present with a start. Even then, he thought, I was an emotion junkie. I needed to be loved. Fran stirred beside him.
