Red Bones

by Ann Cleeves

  Andrew said nothing. Sandy remembered the sort of man he’d once been, big and loud, easy to rouse to anger. Mima had once said; ‘Andrew Clouston has a tempestuous nature. Like a storm at sea.’ Sometimes she came out with things like that. There was no sign of Andrew’s tempestuousness now. Sandy thought he was more like a boat with a bust engine, becalmed and useless.

  ‘Let’s look at the photos,’ Sandy said, giving up the struggle to force an answer.

  He opened the album and recognized the first picture straight away. It was the one from the wall in Mima’s bedroom with the women who were carrying peat and knitting at the same time.

  ‘Do you know them, Andrew? Who are they?’

  For the first time since he’d come into the room, Andrew seemed aware of what was happening. He pointed to the woman on the left. ‘I know her. That’s your grandmother.’

  ‘Not Mima! She was never a knitter!’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Andrew was frustrated by his lack of fluency. ‘Evie. They called her Evie. She was Evelyn’s mother.’

  And now Sandy could see the likeness. He’d only known his maternal grandmother as an old woman. But the family resemblance was there. He could see Evelyn in the woman’s sturdy build, the determined look on her face. This is where I come from, he thought.

  Andrew had lost interest in the picture and turned the page of the album. He stared at the next photograph, seemed completely lost in his memories.

  ‘Who’s that then, Andrew? Is it someone you recognize?’ Sandy moved closer to the man so he could get a better look at the book.

  The picture was of two men, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning out at the camera. They wore elaborate hand-knitted jerseys, baggy trousers and caps. The sun must have been in their eyes because they were squinting. Sandy thought it had been taken on the shore at Lindby, because he recognized the bit of drystone wall in the background.

  ‘Who is it, Andrew?’ he said again when there was no immediate reply. ‘Is one of them your father?’

  ‘That’s my father.’ The older man stuck a finger on to one of the figures. ‘That must have been taken when I was very young. That’s Jerry Wilson.’

  Sandy could see now that the man on the right was his grandfather. There was the same quirky smile as in the photo that had stood in Mima’s kitchen. He thought now it looked a bit cruel. This was a man who might make fun of you, so it sounded like teasing but was hurtful all the same.

  A picture of two friends who had gone fishing, and only one came back. With his ten-year-old son.

  ‘I should get home,’ Sandy said. ‘My mother will be sending out search parties. Thank you for showing me the pictures.’ Is that all he wanted me to see? Sandy thought. Is this why he dragged me up here? Or was it all Jackie’s idea? Maybe she wanted to do her baking in peace.

  Sandy took his arm and helped Andrew out of the chair. If I ever get like this, I hope they shoot me. Or I have the courage to throw myself over a cliff. But he never thought he would get like that. He was young and the idea was unthinkable. The old man moved slowly to the corner window. From there they could see Setter, and beyond the house the trenches of the dig.

  ‘They never buried that Norwegian man there,’ Andrew said. ‘They took his body out to sea in Jerry Wilson’s boat and they threw him overboard. That’s what my father told me.’

  Chapter Forty

  Thursday morning. Perez shaved carefully. The bathroom was cold and he wiped condensation from the mirror to check it was properly done. This was a special day: Fran would be home. He would meet her and Cassie from the airport and take them back to Ravenswick. He felt nervous and excited, as if there was something illicit in this meeting, as if he already had a wife and Fran was his mistress. He couldn’t understand it, especially as he knew he wouldn’t spend the evening with her. Later, after dropping them home, he’d have to go to Whalsay.

  The Whalsay trip was work and unavoidable. Fran would understand that; work was important to her too. She wouldn’t have a tantrum and make a scene, but she wouldn’t put herself out for him either. She wouldn’t wait up for him with a bottle of champagne and sexy underwear. There was no guarantee he’d be back that evening. She’d learned that when he was working there were nights when he didn’t get home. She’d take herself off to bed and when he joined her, if she was asleep, he wasn’t sure he’d wake her. He wasn’t sure he had that right.

  Perez thought today would mark the end of the investigation, one way or another. He’d woken to fog, so he couldn’t see beyond the Victoria Pier from his living-room window and his first thought was that the planes would be cancelled and there would be no way in for Fran or Gwen James. The star of Evelyn’s show would be absent and Perez would have another day to wait for the woman he adored. Then in a matter of minutes, in the time it took to make a pot of tea, the sun had burned the cloud away and now the weather was perfect – clear and sunny and warm as most days in midsummer. Eating his breakfast he saw a puffin flying low over the water. The first of the season. He thought he should see it as a good omen but he still felt jittery.

  In his office he took a phone call from Val Turner.

  ‘Jimmy, just to let you know that I’m going into Whalsay this morning. I’ll see you in the community hall this evening. It’s all set.’

  He tried to make an appointment to talk to the Fiscal but she’d taken a couple of days’ leave at short notice. There was no explanation and he realized again how little people knew about her. She managed her privacy in a way that nobody else of note in Shetland could. Although he didn’t like her much, Perez felt isolated; he missed Sandy’s blundering presence too. In previous cases he’d had Roy Taylor from Inverness to share responsibility and anxiety with. It hadn’t always been an easy relationship but Perez had valued Taylor’s bluntness, his common sense. I take my work too seriously, he thought. I make everything complicated. I need someone else to set me straight and keep things real.

  Later he phoned Sandy’s mobile and heard Evelyn’s voice giving orders in the background before Sandy even spoke.

  ‘How’re things?’

  ‘It’s a madhouse here. You’d think my mother was hosting the bloody Oscars, not a history lecture in the Lindby Community Hall.’

  Perez was just about to say that he’d see Sandy that evening, but the Whalsay man continued talking.

  ‘I went to see Andrew yesterday. According to him that Norwegian wasn’t buried at Setter at all. After he was killed they took him out in a boat and dropped him over the side.’

  ‘You said “they” took him out in the boat,’ Perez said. ‘Who are “they”?’ And if that’s true, what is the fragment of more recent bone Val Turner says they found at Setter?

  ‘I’m not sure. I think it was Jerry Wilson and Andrew’s father. They were friends. Close friends.’ Sandy paused. ‘Andrew’s father was out with Jerry when he drowned.’ There was a silence. Perez waited for Sandy to continue, could almost hear the strain over the phone as his colleague struggled to find the right words. ‘Andrew was there too,’ Sandy went on. ‘He was ten years old. It sounds as if that was why Jerry didn’t make it. Andrew’s father couldn’t get them both back and chose to save his son.’

  Perez had planned to have a late lunch in the bar of the Sumburgh House Hotel. He would rather wait there than in the airport. It always looked desperate, being in the airport too early, desperate or neurotic. But driving past the runway he took a detour to Grutness, the jetty where the Good Shepherd, the Fair Isle mailboat, put in. To day was boat day and if he were quick he’d have time for a word with his father and some of the other boys in the crew before they set off back to the Isle. The Perez family had run the mailboat for as long as anyone could remember. When Jimmy had been growing up his grandfather had been skipper; now it was his father’s turn. Perez wondered who would take it over when his father came to retire.

  He arrived at the pier just as the men were loading the boat. There was a car to go on. I
t was being winched into position as Perez drove down the road. The boxes of supplies for the shop were already in the hold. A couple of passengers stood waiting to be allowed on board: an elderly birdwatcher with binoculars round his neck and a young woman whom Perez recognized. He thought she worked at the observatory. Although he couldn’t make out her words he could tell she was joking with the crew. She had long black hair, curly and unruly. She threw back her head and laughed.

  When he got out of his car his father jumped ashore. His hair was still dark and he was fit and strong, but his face looked older, as if it didn’t belong to his body.

  ‘Well, Jimmy, are you coming home with us?’ He could never tell what his father was thinking. There always seemed to be an element of recrimination or challenge in his words. Now Perez wondered if he was implying that he didn’t get home often enough. Or that he had an easy sort of job if he could decide on the spur of the moment to spend a few days with the family. He told himself he was being ridiculous and his father had meant neither of those things. He was just asking a question. Perez was always too sensitive where his father was concerned.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m picking someone up from the airport and I’m early.’

  ‘You should get home more often,’ his father said. ‘Bring your new woman to see us.’

  Perez had avoided taking Fran to Fair Isle. His parents had met her, but only when they came to Lerwick on their way south. Perez was worried that she’d be frightened off by their expectations, their desire that he should have a son to carry on the family name. Without a boy, he would be the last Perez in Shetland.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Maybe I will. Not over the summer. Fran will be busy with an exhibition. We’ll come in the autumn.’ It wasn’t something he could put off much longer than that. Looking at the men he’d grown up with, laughing together as they passed the boxes and the mail sacks from the pier to the boat, he had a pang of regret. That could have been him. He’d had the opportunity to take up a life on the island but he’d turned it down. Now it seemed a simple and tempting alternative to the evening ahead of him.

  He stood and watched the boat until it was out of sight. The water was calm but there was a bank of cloud on the horizon and soon that swallowed up the vessel. It became blurred like a ghost ship and then it disappeared. It would take the Shepherd more than three hours to get home. Fair Isle wasn’t like Whalsay. There was no roll-on-roll-off ferry every half hour. It was the most isolated inhabited island in the UK. They’d been taught that at school. He still thought of the place as home.

  When he got to the airport Sandy was already there. Early too. scared of messing up the task of collecting Hattie’s mother. He looked grey and tired, sitting at one of the tables outside the shop clutching a mug of coffee. Perez bought a coffee and a sandwich and joined him.

  ‘I can’t make sense of it all,’ Sandy said. ‘You ken there’s that saying about skeletons in cupboards. A family’s past coming back to haunt it. That’s what it means, right?’

  Perez nodded.

  ‘This is about bones in the land. Old, red bones. But I don’t understand how they matter after all these years.’

  ‘Red?’ Perez had a fanciful picture of bones steeped in blood.

  ‘My mother says that’s the colour they go when they’ve been in the earth for a long time.’

  ‘They’re like the stories you heard as a child and which stay at the back of your mind,’ Perez said. ‘Hard to forget.’

  They went to the big glass window near Arrivals and watched the plane come in, the people walking down the ladder and on to the Tarmac. Fran and Cassie were among the last off and Perez felt the quiver of anxiety in his stomach. Perhaps she wasn’t there. Perhaps at the last minute she’d changed her mind and decided the city suited her better.

  ‘That’s Gwen James,’ Sandy said. And although he couldn’t remember ever seeing her on the television, Perez thought he would have picked her out from the rest of the passengers. She wore a long black coat almost to her ankles, black boots. She carried a leather holdall and it seemed she had no other luggage, because she walked straight past the carousel to Sandy and held out her hand.

  Perez had spoken to her the evening before and wanted to introduce himself, but at that point he was distracted by the sight of Fran and Cassie getting off the plane. Fran was grinning and waving like crazy. He waved back, tried not to beam like a madman. There was something about her not quite as he remembered. A different haircut, a new pair of baseball boots, pink and covered with sequins. He wondered if she’d wear them when he took her to Fair Isle and what his father would make of them.

  ‘This is my boss,’ Sandy was saying. ‘Jimmy Perez.’

  ‘We’ve talked on the phone.’ Gwen James had the same jazz singer’s voice that Perez remembered.

  ‘Are you sure you’re happy with everything we have planned?’ Perez couldn’t understand how she could be so poised, so calm.

  ‘I need to know what happened,’ she said.

  ‘The car’s outside,’ Sandy said awkwardly. ‘I’ll get you back to Whalsay.’

  ‘And I’ll see you again this evening, Inspector Perez?’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ll see me then.’

  Sandy picked up her bag and started walking quickly to the exit. Suddenly Perez realized he was hoping to get the woman out of the terminal before Cassie bounded up to them with her chat and hugs. He didn’t want to distress Gwen James with memories of Hattie as a young girl. Oh Sandy, Perez thought, how you’ve grown up.

  Cassie couldn’t wait for her bag to arrive. She climbed through the barrier and threw her arms around Perez’s waist. As he picked her up and lifted her into the air he saw Gwen and Sandy disappearing through the revolving door and into the car park.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Have you missed me?’

  Then Fran came up to them too, dragging a huge suitcase, laden with carrier bags, and it was she who answered.

  ‘We haven’t, have we, Cass? Hardly at all.’

  ‘Yes we have. Mum told everyone how much she missed you. She was really boring. She kept saying she wanted to come home.’

  ‘Well, we’d better get you back then, to the old house in Ravenswick.’ He set Cassie on the floor and took the handle of Fran’s suitcase. At that moment he thought he’d do anything to look after this family and keep it together. He’d kill for it. ‘Didn’t you have to pay excess baggage on this?’

  ‘Nah, I chatted up that pretty boy on check-in at Dyce.’

  It was then, as they walked together towards the exit, that Perez realized that another person connected with Whalsay had been on the Aberdeen plane. Standing at the car rental counter, filling in a form, frowning slightly, was Paul Berglund.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Anna Clouston walked up the hill towards the hall. She felt oddly liberated without the baby. Lighter and lightheaded. A pool of mist had gathered in the low ground by the loch, so it looked as if the hall was stranded on its own island. Even the landscape seemed different.

  When she opened the door she was surprised that Evelyn was the only person there. The trestle tables had been pushed together to run along the long side of the hall and Evelyn was covering them with white cloths, shaking the material out so they flapped like sails. Smaller tables had been set, cafe-style, in the middle of the hall. The speakers would have the best chairs at one end, with a table for their notes, and there was a screen and data projector. The urn was already hissing for tea. Everything was organized and efficient.

  Evelyn was wearing an apron, but Anna could tell she’d dressed up for the occasion. She had green dangly earrings, little court shoes with heels.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘You can fetch me the cups and saucers from the cupboard,’ Evelyn said. Then: ‘Sandy’s picked Gwen James up from Sumburgh. He gave her a tour of the island – showed her the Bod and the dig at Setter, the place where Hattie died. It seems kind of ghoulish but she wanted to see it. She’s in the
Pier House now getting ready. He’ll give her a lift up just before we start.’

  ‘Right.’ Anna couldn’t understand how Gwen James could bear to be here. If anything had happened to her son, if he had been found in a hole in the ground like that, Anna wouldn’t want to be paraded in the hall in front of staring people, all of them strangers. She wouldn’t want to eat meringues and drink weak tea. What sort of mother could this woman be?

  She set the cups and saucers out close to the urn, wiping each one with a clean tea towel as she brought it out of the cupboard, just as the island women always did.

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve not got more helpers,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I told Jackie I’d manage. Joseph came along earlier to help shift the furniture.’ Evelyn had moved from the tables and was pinning photos of the dig site up on the walls. One showed Hattie and Sophie both crouched at work. Hattie had looked up at the camera and smiled; Anna couldn’t remember ever having seen her appear so happy. It was a good photo. She wondered who’d taken it. Ronald, maybe. He’d spent a lot of time on the dig the summer before. Evelyn went on: ‘Jackie says Andrew’s agitated again today. She’ll be in as soon as she’s settled him. He won’t be coming. Just as well. We don’t want a scene.’

  Anna thought Evelyn preferred it this way: completely in control and in charge. She could understand that.

  The door of the hall opened and Anna saw a silhouette framed by the filtered light of the low sun behind him. Another bank of mist had come in from the sea. The figure moved further into the room and she recognized Jimmy Perez. He seemed surprised to see Anna there. She guessed he’d hoped to catch Evelyn on her own and now he was weighing his options and wondering how best to play the situation. Evelyn had her back to the door and hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Evelyn.’

  The woman turned sharply. ‘Oh, Jimmy. You’re early. We’re not starting until seven.’

  ‘I was hoping to catch you for a word on your own. Perhaps we could go back to Utra for a few minutes.’