Cold Earth

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Tell him to bring some cans of Coke with him,’ Vicki said. ‘I think better when I’m rattling with caffeine. I can picture the scenario more clearly.’

  ‘Will do.’ But Perez thought Vicki hadn’t heard him. Her attention was already on the ruin below her. She started to slide down the bank towards it, leaving him alone with Willow Reeves.

  Chapter Ten

  Craig Henderson’s parents lived in a modern bungalow in a settlement north of Ravenswick, right on the coast. The Hendersons ran a complex of holiday chalets on the same site. The chalets were very smart, upmarket, of Scandinavian design and, according to rumour, cost a fortune to rent. The crazy tourists must be mad enough to pay, because in the season they always seemed to be fully booked. Sandy had been shown round them once by a girlfriend who cleaned there and he had marvelled at the granite worktops and individual saunas, the hot tubs and polished wooden floors.

  The bungalow was more traditional, with pebbledash render and decking at the top of the garden, though there was a hot tub there too. Sandy thought it would make a fine place to sit on a summer’s day. He imagined a barbecue, wine straight from the fridge and expensive foreign lager. Stuart and Angie Henderson struck him as the sort of people who’d enjoy a party. Now the decking was slippery and rain dripped from the eaves.

  The parents were looking out for Craig and came into the porch to greet him as soon as they saw the car. There were screams of delight from Angie about how brown the man was, and then she started on about it being time he found himself a nice Shetland girl and stayed at home. She’d missed him so much. Her hair was too black to be natural and she wore thick mascara and big earrings. Stuart had thrust a can of beer into his son’s hand before they’d had a chance to get into the kitchen. Sandy could understand why Craig had felt he needed a place of his own.

  They sat in the open-plan downstairs room. Angie had offered coffee and was fidgeting with a fancy machine. Sandy felt he was in the way, but Jimmy Perez had asked him to talk to Craig’s parents: If they’re as protective as he makes out, they might have found out more about the owner of Tain.

  Sandy found it hard to squeeze into the conversation at first, but once he brought up the subject of the dead woman at Tain, the Hendersons were eager to talk about her.

  ‘I was just glad that Craig had moved out.’ Angie brought Sandy a cappuccino and set it on a coaster on the glass coffee table. ‘Imagine if he’d still been living there; it could have been him in the mortuary in Aberdeen, not some strange woman.’ The implication was that the only safe place for Craig to be was at home with her.

  ‘Did you know Minnie Laurenson?’

  ‘We all knew Minnie. She taught us in Sunday school and terrified the life out of us, didn’t she, Stuart?’

  Stuart nodded and took another swig from his can.

  ‘So you’d have heard that she’d left the house to a relative in America when she died?’

  ‘We all wondered what would happen to the house when she passed away,’ Angie said. ‘As far as we knew, there were no living relatives. Then nothing happened and I suppose we forgot all about it. The house was hidden from the road, and really it was none of our business. It was only when Magnus put Craig in touch with Minnie’s niece that we found out about the woman in America.’

  ‘You didn’t get in touch with her yourselves? With Craig travelling so much, it might have made sense if you were the first point of contact.’

  There was no immediate reply and then Angie looked at her son. ‘I did try and get in touch once. Just a few weeks ago. I thought I’d go in and tidy the place up a bit, before Craig moved back in, and I wanted to find out who had the keys. I couldn’t find them in Craig’s room.’

  ‘That had been arranged, had it?’ Sandy directed his question to Craig. ‘You were going to rent Tain again?’

  ‘The plan was that I’d spend the first couple of weeks here at home and then move into Tain. No chance of that now.’ Craig turned to his mother. ‘You had no right to contact the American woman. How did you find her number anyway?’

  ‘I must have made a note of it when you first decided to leave us.’ The words were defiant. Sandy thought Angie had taken the number from her son’s phone when he wasn’t looking.

  Craig shrugged. He’d obviously decided there was no point pursuing the argument. She would always win.

  ‘Did you get hold of the keys?’ Sandy asked.

  ‘I didn’t speak to the woman. All I got was her voicemail message.’ Angie paused. ‘I did go up to the house, though. If it had been empty for a few months, it would be damp and I couldn’t bear the thought of Craig coming back to a place like that. I thought I might be able to get in, air it for him and push the Hoover over it. It might not even have been locked.’

  ‘When exactly was this?’ Sandy thought Perez had been right about chatting to the parents. There were no boundaries for Angie – no idea of privacy. But then, Jimmy Perez was usually right.

  ‘About a fortnight ago.’

  ‘Could you be more precise, Mrs Henderson? I’d be very grateful.’

  ‘It was the same day as we went up to town for the country-music night at Mareel. When was that, Stuart? It should still be marked on the calendar. Go and have a look.’

  Stuart did as he was told. ‘It was February the first.’

  Sandy made a note of the date. ‘So you went to Tain. You drove up?’

  ‘Of course I drove.’ There was a big 4×4 and a new VW Golf parked outside the bungalow. It was hard to imagine Angie walking anywhere.

  ‘What time of day did you go up to Tain?’ Sandy knew that Jimmy liked detail.

  ‘Mid-morning. Stuart was doing a bit of maintenance on a couple of the chalets and I thought I’d just go on spec. I stuck the Hoover in the back of the car, just in case I could get in.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘The door was locked. The front door and the door at the back of the house that led into the lean-to.’

  Sandy had a sudden thought and turned to Craig. ‘What had you done with your set of keys at the end of your stay?’

  ‘I gave them in to a solicitors’ office in Lerwick. Rogerson and Taylor. They dealt with Minnie Laurenson’s estate.’

  ‘You never said!’ Angie sounded hurt. ‘That would have saved me a lot of bother. I could have got the keys from them.’

  ‘You don’t need to know everything about my life!’ There was a sudden flash of anger and Sandy was reminded of the young man who’d started a fight in the bar in Lerwick, about something so trivial that he couldn’t remember the next day what had set him off. But the man probably had jetlag, and Angie Henderson would try the patience of a saint.

  ‘What did you do when you couldn’t get into Tain? Did you drive straight home?’ But Sandy thought that wasn’t Angie’s style at all.

  ‘I had a quick look through the windows,’ she said. ‘I had given the place a good clean the day before Craig left it. I wanted to see what sort of state it was in. I thought I’d have heard if there’d been another tenant in, but you can never tell.’

  ‘And what state was it in?’

  ‘Someone was staying there!’ She seemed as affronted as if the place had been taken over by squatters.

  ‘You saw somebody inside the house?’

  ‘No.’ Angie was obviously disappointed. ‘I knocked at the door, but there was no reply. There were signs that the place was lived in, though. I walked round the house while I was trying the doors and I looked through the windows.’

  ‘Could you tell me what you saw?’

  ‘It was tidy enough.’ There was a pause and she shut her eyes as if she was trying to picture the rooms she’d seen through the small windows. ‘The bed had been made up. We took bedding down from here for Craig when he first moved in, and brought it all home the day before he flew out. He spent his last night here with us. We had a bit of a party to see him off. The new stuff looked expensive. I’m not sure where you’d get it locally. It must
have been bought online. Some of Minnie Laurenson’s furniture was still there – it had been there when Craig had the place too. He wanted to keep it. I’d have got in new.’ Another pause. ‘I suppose there’s not much left of it now.’

  Sandy thought of the house, wrecked by the landslide and flooded with mud. He shook his head. ‘Not much. What did you do then?’

  ‘I came home,’ she said. ‘What else could I do?’

  Sandy phoned Jimmy Perez from his car. He’d stopped at a community shop on the way through to buy Coke and chocolate for Vicki and made the call before setting off again. He was eager to tell Jimmy that Tom Rogerson’s firm had managed Minnie Laurenson’s estate, but there was no answer and he had to leave a message. Back at Tain, he found Vicki Hewitt in the garden, sifting through the debris close to the wall. It was midday, but there was hardly any light and in her scene-suit she looked like a small, white ghost in the gloom. He pulled on a scene-suit of his own. Vicki heard his footsteps and turned.

  ‘There’s enough stuff here to take a whole team a month to sort through properly.’ But she sounded cheerful enough and he could tell that she wasn’t daunted. She wasn’t the sort to complain.

  ‘You’ll have to make do with me,’ Sandy said. ‘Sorry.’

  She grinned. ‘I thought it was best to start out here. The material still inside the house is relatively stable – it survived the landslide, after all. A bad gale and all this could disappear. I’m bagging as much as I can and pegging the plot, taking lots of photos. If you follow behind me and mark up the bags, that would speed us up.’

  So Sandy squatted beside her and followed her instructions. He was always happiest when he had clear instructions to follow, and the crime-scene investigator was very precise about what she wanted him to do. Vicki seemed not to notice the drizzle or cold. Occasionally she stood up to stretch or take a drink, but her focus was always on the small patch of ground just in front of her. Close to the ruins of the house, tucked out of the worst of the weather, a pile of plastic bags showed how much progress she’d already made.

  Now she was sorting through a small pile of kitchen implements: a corkscrew, a cheese grater and a sieve; they were all intact, and all had been trapped by the wall. The tide of mud must have swept them out through the kitchen door. The random nature of the items reminded Sandy of the bric-a-brac stalls that appeared occasionally at the fund-raising Sunday teas run in community halls throughout the summer. Vicki was like one of the elderly women who scrabbled through the junk hoping to find treasure. He couldn’t see how the objects might be of interest, but each item was bagged and he scribbled on the labels. There was a single woman’s shoe, size five, suede, with leather trimmings, an ankle strap and small heel.

  ‘Was she wearing shoes when they found the body?’ Vicki sat on her heels and stretched her back and arms.

  ‘No.’ Sandy wondered if that was significant, but Vicki didn’t say anything and he couldn’t work out how it might be.

  She turned her attention back to some sodden scraps of paper, sliding them carefully into a bag.

  ‘This isn’t newsprint. It could provide corroboration of identity, if the techies can dry it out.’

  Or it could be some junk mail, trying to sell the occupant a credit card or double glazing. Sandy was starving. He’d missed out on lunch, but he knew Vikki hadn’t eaten, either. She seemed to keep going with the bottle of Coke, which she drained in one go and then returned carefully to her rucksack. He wasn’t going to be the one to call it a day, but he was thinking ahead to his night out with Louisa. He’d told Jimmy Perez that he was happy to work if he was needed, but Jimmy had only laughed and told him that nobody was indispensable. So Sandy had booked a table for dinner in the Scalloway Hotel. And a room for afterwards. He’d blinked when he’d heard the price of the overnight stay, but Louisa was worth every penny. Anyway, it would save him the bother of tidying his flat, if they weren’t going back there for the night.

  The light was fading now and the cars crawling along the road above them were already using their headlights. Soon it would be too dark to continue working and then even Vikki would have to give up. The firefighters had taken away their generator and lights and there was no colour left in the landscape.

  ‘Ten more minutes.’ She stood upright. ‘Then it’s back to civilization for a bath and a meal.’

  He nodded. And Louisa.

  Vicki crouched again, began sifting through another square foot of debris and then froze.

  ‘Didn’t Prof. Grieve say the ligature that killed the woman could be a belt?’

  ‘I think so.’ Sandy never liked to be too definite. ‘Narrow. No sign of the buckle piercing the skin, but some marks, which might have come from indentations in the leather.’

  ‘Best get a photo of this, then.’ There was a flash that blinded him for a moment. Vikki shifted position and took another photograph, then she pulled out a thin leather belt embossed with flowers.

  ‘A woman’s.’ Sandy was disappointed. ‘It could have belonged to the victim and been swept out of the house with all the other junk.’

  ‘Maybe. If it matches the marks on the neck, it could tell us something about the crime, though.’ She curled the belt so that it looked like a snake and dropped it into a bag.

  ‘Yeah?’ Sandy thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it would make this the crime scene. Tain, I mean. Unlikely that she was killed elsewhere, if the murder weapon is here.’

  ‘And it would suggest that the murder was opportunistic. If the killer was a man, that is. He didn’t bring the murder weapon with him. It belonged to the victim, and the killer picked up what was to hand.’ Hours on her hands and knees in the damp soil didn’t seem to have dulled Vicki’s enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s all kind of negative, though, isn’t it? And uncertain.’ He felt almost disloyal, as if he was questioning her expertise.

  ‘It’s a start,’ she said. ‘It’s more than we had this morning.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Willow Reeves thought this Shetland – the Shetland of winter gloom and dark shadows – was quite different from the midsummer Shetland of her memory. That had been all pink and silver, sparkling light on water, flowers on the headlands. This was her third time in the islands, but it was as if she was making her first visit, seeing the place as a stranger. Perhaps she needed a reality check, she thought. She couldn’t go through life like a teenager, dreaming for the tall, dark man who brooded about the perfect woman who’d died. Her parents had been dreamers. They’d thrown away their comfortable life as academics to set up a commune on the Hebridean island of North Uist. In the end, the other settlers had lost enthusiasm and drifted away, but Willow’s parents were still there, scraping a living from the sandy soil, unwilling to admit that the experiment had been a huge mistake.

  She sat in Jimmy Perez’s office and listened while he made the phone call to New York. They’d decided that Americans probably started work early, and first thing in the working day might be a good time to reach Ms Sechrest’s employer. Perez spoke slowly and moderated his voice so that the accent almost disappeared.

  What do I know about him, after all? Who is this man, who can be whatever is needed to get his work done?

  ‘I’m a police officer from the UK,’ Perez was saying.

  Willow couldn’t hear what was said on the other end of the line, but she could guess when Perez said, without a trace of impatience, ‘Well, no, not English, but Scottish. Yes, almost the same thing. I’m based in the Shetland Islands.’ He gave a little laugh and pulled a face at Willow. ‘I need information about someone who I believe works for your company. Her name is Alissandra Sechrest. Yes, of course I’ll hold.’

  There was a click on the other end of the line and Perez pressed a button so that the phone was on speaker, and suddenly the room was filled with an American voice: ‘Yes, Sandy Sechrest speaking. How may I help you?’

  For a moment Willow was tempted to laugh, because Perez seemed so incredulous. T
hey’d been convinced they’d tracked down the identity of the dead woman, and now it seemed she was alive and well and working in New York. It took him a little while to answer.

  ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, but I’d be grateful if you could answer a few questions, before I explain. Did you have relatives from Shetland?’

  ‘One distant relative. An aunt.’ She sounded older than the dead woman. Willow guessed she must be close to retirement. But she was sharp and fiercely intelligent.

  ‘And she left you property in her will?’

  ‘She did. A small house in the village of Ravenswick. And I still intend to visit it one day, when things aren’t quite so busy here.’ A pause. ‘What is this about, Officer?’

  ‘I’m afraid your house was damaged in a landslide this week.’

  ‘Well, it’s very good of you to notify me. I’ll inform my insurers. If you could email me the details, I won’t need to trouble you further.’ She was about to replace the receiver.

  ‘Someone died,’ Perez said. ‘A woman. We think she was staying in your house. Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘No!’ The response was immediate. ‘I gave permission for a man to stay there. He was the friend of an elderly guy who knew my aunt. But he left six months ago. He’d asked if he might use the house again, in return for general maintenance and repairs, and I agreed. He’d have been moving in again in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘The dead woman was calling herself Alissandra Sechrest,’ Perez said. ‘At least she travelled into the islands using your name and made at least one appointment under it.’

  ‘And you thought I was dead?’ Sandy Sechrest gave a sharp, barking laugh.

  ‘It was rather a shock when you came on the phone.’

  ‘Are you thinking fraud? Identity theft? Just so she had somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m not quite sure what I think just now. If I email you a likeness of the dead woman, perhaps you could let me know if you recognize her.’ Perez paused for a moment. ‘Are you aware of any fraud? Money missing from your bank account? Your credit card used without your knowledge? She might even have been using a false passport in your name.’