Wild Fire

by Ann Cleeves

  Ellie ran ahead; they could see her ploughing up the track towards the house, the incline hardly slowing her pace. Helena watched with envy and thought that once she’d had that much energy. She’d been able to dance all night and still be ready for work in the morning, still creative and fizzing with ideas. When had she lost all that? Not with marriage. Daniel had inspired some of her best work. They’d met at art school and married far too young, according to all her friends and her liberal parents: ‘Why marriage, darling? Why tie yourself down when you’re both still students?’ But she’d loved the idea. The dramatic gesture. Perhaps they’d waited too long to have children. She’d been in her mid-thirties when Christopher had been born, nearly forty when Ellie had arrived.

  She still hadn’t reached any conclusion when they reached the house. Christopher was still marching with the relentless pace of an automaton, but she was slightly out of breath and paused for a moment and looked out at the wide valley that had been sculpted centuries ago by ice. She told herself that London might have cool bars and exhibitions and theatre, but it didn’t have this.

  By the time she went inside, Christopher had already disappeared into his bedroom. He would have shed most of his outer clothes and be sitting in his underwear in front of the computer screen. He’d be watching a totally unsuitable American cop show. Mesmerized, it seemed. He was obsessed with forensic details, and often he would need to be prised away from the screen for meals. That could result in silent sulking at best, and at worst a violent tantrum. Screams that once in London had resulted in the neighbours calling the police. Occasionally she relented and let him eat a sandwich alone in his room, knowing that this would set a dangerous precedent and the next day it would be even more difficult to persuade him to spend some time with the family, but feeling too exhausted to face the fuss.

  Ellie was in the kitchen, foraging for food. She’d already peeled a satsuma and its skin lay discarded on the bench. She wandered past Helena and curled up on the sofa in the living room, calm at last, to watch CBBC. There was no sign of Daniel, though his car was parked in its usual spot behind the house. Perhaps he’d gone for a walk; it was a lovely day, after all, and he’d seemed very much brighter this morning. Helena was relieved. His depression came in waves and, like the sea, sometimes swamped him, washed away the man she knew and loved, leaving her with a bitter and angry stranger. It would be good to be in the house without him for a while.

  The Shetland Times lay on the table. Daniel must have picked it up from the Deltaness community shop earlier in the day while she was working. Helena opened it, thought again how different it was from the local newspaper in the London borough where they’d previously lived. That front page had been Gothic in nature, with lurid tales of knife crime, assault, arson and shooting. This held details of a record haul of fish landed at Shetland Catch, sheep sales and a bairns’ music festival. Her panic attack in the playground seemed ridiculous now. These were good people. She began to feel the stress drain from her body, got up to switch on the kettle and made a mug of tea, before returning to the paper.

  Between the second and third pages there was a piece of paper. It was small, precisely four inches square, neatly cut, possibly by guillotine. Graph paper. A design had been marked: dots in the tiny squares to form a stick person. It could have been the remnant of a child’s game, because beside the person, the dots formed a crude gallows and the figure was already hanging. Hangman. Game over. But there were no letters, no lines where the letters were missing. And Helena had received images like this before.

  Chapter Four

  It was Saturday morning and Jimmy Perez was sitting outside his house – Fran’s house – watching Cassie play in the small burn that separated their home from the croft where Magnus Tait had once lived. There was talk that it had been sold and that a man from Lerwick had bought it. He wondered if the man had a family; it would be splendid if a child moved in, someone to be company for Cassie and to boost the numbers in Ravenswick school. The sun was warm and he let his mind wander. Cassie was a self-contained girl of nine. He couldn’t believe how the time had passed. She’d been four when he’d first met her, just starting school, and six when Fran had died. She turned occasionally to check he was there and then went back to her game. This was a piece of serious engineering; she was building dams and reservoirs to slow the course of the water. There’d been a lot of talk locally about experimenting with similar schemes to prevent another landslide. A huge slip had caused chaos in the islands three months before. Cassie was working on her own experiment. Her mother would have been proud of her efforts.

  Below him ran the main road from Lerwick to Sumburgh Airport, but today the traffic seemed very far away, the noise a distant hum like summer insects. He watched as a red van he didn’t recognize turned off the main road and climbed the narrow track towards the houses. He thought perhaps this was the new owner of Hillhead, the Tait croft, and that it might be a grand opportunity to meet him. But the van stopped outside his house and a woman got out. Perez struggled to guess her age. Late forties maybe: her hair was starting to grey. It was wiry, very curly. Unmanageable. She wore jeans and red leather boots, a hand-knitted cardigan in red and blue. Something about her style reminded him of Fran.

  ‘Inspector Perez?’ She was English. Rather intense.

  ‘Yes.’ He could tell that the visit would be work-related – it wasn’t so unusual to be disturbed at home – and he continued quickly. Years of practice had got the words off pat. ‘But I’m off-duty now, you know. If it’s a police matter, you should go to the station in Lerwick.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no argument. ‘Of course. I shouldn’t have come, and perhaps it’s not so important. Probably not a police matter at all.’ She waved at Cassie, who was still at work building her dam, and turned back towards the van.

  Perhaps it was the wave to the bairn that did it. The wave and the fact that the woman seemed so sad. Sarah, his ex-wife, had called Perez ‘emotionally incontinent’, and Willow, his boss and occasional lover, said the description was just about right: ‘You spread your sympathy and kindness too thin, Jimmy. Sometimes there’s nothing left for the people who care for you.’

  He called after the woman, ‘I was just going to make more coffee. Do you fancy one? We could talk informally. While you’re here . . .’

  ‘If you’re sure. It does seem a terrible impertinence.’ But she gave a quick, shy smile and he sensed her relief.

  When he came back with the coffee she was playing with Cassie, helping to build a sandbank with a plastic spade, as serious in the task as the girl was. When she saw Perez, she put down the spade and walked back to join him. They sat together on the white plank that acted as a bench, their feet stretched in front of them.

  ‘So why don’t you tell me your name?’ He sipped his coffee and looked out at Raven’s Head. ‘And what it is that’s worrying you.’

  ‘I’m Helena,’ she said. ‘Helena Fleming.’

  ‘I’ve heard of you!’ She’d arrived in the islands recently, nearly three years after Fran’s death, but a few of Fran’s arty friends invited him out occasionally to dinners and parties and he listened to their gossip. He’d been engaged to Fran Hunter, artist and mother to Cassie, but Fran had been murdered and he still knew it was his fault. He carried the guilt wherever he went.

  Besides, he knew the woman’s name because she’d featured in The Shetland Times and The Shetlander and had become something of a local celebrity. Helena was a designer; she used Shetland wool to create garments that were shown at London Fashion Week. People came from all over the world to commission her work. Rumour had it that the Duchess of Cambridge had bought one of her cardigans from a smart London store.

  ‘We live at Deltaness.’

  He nodded. He knew that too, in the way that information about islanders soaked into his consciousness. They’d bought Dennis Gear’s house, and Dennis had killed himself soon after they finally moved in, shocking the community and somehow tainting
the family. His sympathy for the woman increased.

  ‘You’ll have heard that a man hanged himself in our barn?’

  Perez nodded and the woman continued.

  ‘It was suicide. Your people investigated. There was a post-mortem. But somehow, it seems, we’re to blame. According to the people in the community.’ Her voice was bitter. ‘They’re making our life hell.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Perez said. ‘That must be tough.’ He knew all about the power of rumour and gossip. ‘But I’m not sure it’s a police matter. If you can stick it out, folk will soon find something else to chatter about.’

  Helena Fleming continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘It’s affecting us all. I have two children, a girl and a boy. Ellie’s a bit young to notice what people are saying, though I’m sure she hears things at school. But my son, Christopher, is autistic. High-functioning, but still needing support. Sometimes his behaviour is a little strange, but he’s not stupid. He’s picked up on the hostility. He wants to know why they hate us.’

  ‘Do they really hate you?’ Perez thought that must be an exaggeration. Shetlanders weren’t given to hate.

  ‘Not all of them, obviously. We have friends. But we’re considered odd, a bit dangerous. Christopher doesn’t make things any easier.’ She paused for a moment. ‘He has obsessions. At the moment, he’s obsessed with fire. He took matches into school and set fire to some waste paper in the playground. And Daniel, my husband, isn’t the most sociable of people.’ There was a moment of silence. He was about to prompt her to continue when she started speaking again. ‘Daniel found the dead man. He still has nightmares about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Perez said again, ‘but I still don’t see how I can help.’

  She was staring out towards Raven’s Head. ‘Someone’s been coming onto our property. That must be a police matter.’

  ‘You’ve had stuff stolen?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing’s been stolen, but things have been left behind.’

  She’d been carrying a green leather satchel and opened it to take out a plastic file. She unclipped the file and lifted out three small squares of graph paper, which she set carefully on the bench between them.

  The first showed the frame of a gallows, the second had the gallows with a noose and the third included the hanged man. She pointed to the last image. ‘That came yesterday, tucked inside The Shetland Times.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘The first came a month ago, a few days after Daniel found Dennis Gear. The second came last week. It was in my son’s homework bag. Luckily I found it before he did.’

  ‘Your son couldn’t have drawn them?’ Perez was feeling his way. He knew how he’d feel if anyone accused Cassie of creating bizarre pictures of hanged men, and he didn’t want to upset his visitor. But this could be part of a game. Harmless. Perhaps the woman was overreacting.

  ‘I thought it must have been him at first. I use graph paper to plot out my designs. There are piles of the stuff in my studio and he could have taken a few sheets. But Christopher said he hadn’t made them, and Christopher doesn’t lie.’

  Perez said nothing. He’d never met anyone who hadn’t told a lie. Even Fran, who’d been the most honest woman in the world, could lie when it suited her.

  ‘Besides,’ Helena went on, ‘my son didn’t have a chance to put this into The Shetland Times. My husband bought it while he was at school, and Christopher went straight upstairs when we got home. Really, I’ve been thinking about it and it couldn’t have been him.’ She looked at Perez, willing him to believe her.

  There was a silence. Perhaps Cassie sensed a tension between them, because she turned away from her play and looked back at them.

  ‘Do you have any idea who’s behind this?’ Perez thought this was a cowardly way to behave. He felt personal shame that a Shetlander could be so underhand and cruel. He knew the story of Dennis Gear well. The man had been forced from his home through a combination of bad luck and his own responsibility. His family had owned the croft for generations, but he’d never been much of a farmer and had sold off most of the land bit by bit, so there was only the house, the outhouses and some in-bye land left. When Gear’s wife had died, he’d let things slide, got the sack from the waste-to-power plant in Lerwick. He’d owed money all over the islands and in the end the house had been repossessed. That had nothing to do with the Flemings from London, who’d bought it up and made it their home. Gear’s final gesture – to kill himself on a property where children had lived, where a child might have found his body – had seemed selfish and mean to Perez, when he’d looked into the case.

  ‘We didn’t know Gear’s history when we bought the place,’ Helena said. ‘And besides, we weren’t responsible in any way for his problems. The house would have been taken away from him, whether we wanted it or not.’

  ‘He was a popular man.’ Perez could picture Gear at some fund-raiser in the Deltaness Community Hall. He’d been onstage playing accordion in one of the best dance bands in the islands, and Fran had dragged Perez onto the floor. Gear had been jolly, with a red face that suggested either a boozer or someone waiting for a heart attack. ‘Member of the lifeboat crew; he liked a party.’

  ‘And then we came along,’ Helena said. ‘Incomers. Different voices, different attitudes. With a strange, fire-obsessed son.’

  Perez thought she was going to add more, but she stopped and he filled the silence with a question. ‘How long has Christopher been obsessed with fire?’

  Helena set her coffee mug on the grass. ‘I think it started with Up Helly Aa. All that drama and the flaming torches. One night last week he wandered off and joined a group of teenage kids who’d lit a bonfire on the beach. They brought him back in a dreadful state.’ There was a silence. Then the sound of a small inter-island plane overhead. ‘I want to belong. I try.’

  ‘You really think they’re sending this stuff . . .’ Perez nodded down to the scraps of paper, ‘in the hope that you’ll be scared away?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of any other reason. They’re wary of Christopher, they think I’m an arrogant cow from the south and that Daniel’s just stuck-up.’ There was a pause, and when she continued she was close to losing control. ‘It’s getting worse. As if someone’s stirring up trouble, making up new stories about us. In the playground yesterday I could tell that things were different.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Sorry, I know that sounds crazy.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you’d like me to do. I’m not sure if any crime has been committed. If your doors were open, there’s no question of breaking and entering . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I should start locking up. But that was one of the reasons we came to Shetland. So we wouldn’t have to live in some kind of fortress.’ She was staring into the far distance, out to sea. ‘I suppose I was hoping you might find out who was doing this stuff, talk to them, make them see that we just want to be a part of the community. I wouldn’t want them charged. That would only make things worse. You’re right, of course. It’s not a police matter at all and I’m probably being paranoid. It could simply be kids.’

  Perez wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he fell back into the role of detective.

  ‘Have you seen anyone hanging around the house?’

  ‘Occasionally I’ve had the sense that someone is out there, watching us. But that was probably just me being hyper-sensitive.’

  Perez thought that a dead man in your byre and strange little notes appearing in your house would make anyone sensitive. ‘What about your husband? Has he seen anything unusual?’

  This time the silence stretched even longer and, when she answered, she turned to face him. ‘I haven’t told Daniel, my husband, about any of this. He doesn’t cope well with stress, and he was thrown by finding Dennis Gear. At the moment he seems a little better. Almost settled. I can’t bear the thought of making him ill.’ Another, shorter pause. ‘Besides, Daniel wouldn’t have seen anything. He
was out yesterday afternoon, away from the house.’

  Perez wondered how that might make a man feel – to have a wife who treated you like a child, who decided what was best for you. ‘You must let me know immediately if you get any more of those notes,’ he said. He was thinking that he would ask around. Deltaness was in the north-east of Shetland in Northmavine. It was a small community and if there were bad feelings – some individual who might want to scare off this incomer family – he could find out about that. He was already thinking of people he could ask. But he didn’t want to raise Helena Fleming’s hopes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Helena said. ‘I shouldn’t have come and disturbed you. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t think it through.’

  ‘Why did you come to me? Why not go to the police station about this poisonous stuff?’

  ‘Because of your connection with Fran.’

  ‘You knew Fran?’ Hearing the name didn’t hurt as it once had, but there was still the guilt and the ridiculous desire to put back the clock, rewrite the story of her death on Fair Isle three years before. Remove the knife that had flashed in the moonlight like blue lightning. If I hadn’t taken you with me to the isle . . .