by Ann Cleeves
‘Her friend said she often fell asleep on the bus into school.’ Perez tried not to sound judgemental.
‘I wouldn’t know about that. Why would I? I’m sorry, Inspector, but the court case happened ten years ago, and what had gone on in that family surprised us all.’ She had tight grey curls, so similar to the dog’s hair that Perez found himself staring.
Before he could ask another question, she started talking again: ‘Emma was thirteen at the time of the court case. She completed her education when she was seventeen. Really, I don’t know what her school life in Orkney can have to do with her murder in a different place so much later. It must be a tragic coincidence.’
Perez said nothing. He thought the woman was probably right. What connection could there be between Emma’s dysfunctional family and her murder in Shetland? Her parents were dead and he’d checked flights and ferries: her brothers hadn’t left home on the weekend that Emma had died. Perez stood up, thanked the teacher for her time and left. He felt suddenly heartbroken for the teenage girl who’d survived such stress and responsibility, only to be killed when she was still a young woman, with the possibility of a happier life ahead of her.
The social worker reminded Perez of some middle-aged police officers he’d known: cynical, worn-out, but still secretly passionate about the job. Uninterested in promotion away from what he considered real work. He had yellow smoker’s fingers and a creased grey jacket, a beer belly, and he carried with him the smell of cigarettes and fried food. His name was Billy Samson.
‘Of course I remember the Shearer family. It was a bloody disgrace that we weren’t called in earlier.’ They were in a cramped office, with mounds of files on the desk. Samson, it seemed, preferred paper to the computer. The light was on because it was so grey outside. ‘She was a weird little thing. Very tight and closed. I’m not sure she confided in anybody.’
‘You worked with the family after the father was arrested?’
‘Aye, that was the first time we had any idea there was a problem. The mother had been to A&E lots of times, complaining of strange symptoms, but everyone put it down to the fact that she was neurotic, and when there was a real injury – a broken elbow, bruising – they thought she was a piss-head and had fallen over.’ He looked up. ‘The GP started that rumour. No proof.’ He paused. ‘She was bloody neurotic, mind. She drove me crazy. I’m not sure how Emma coped with her.’
‘So you thought it was a good idea when Emma got the job in Shetland?’ Perez was pleased there had been somebody at least who’d been engaged with the family.
Samson looked up. His eyes were sleet-grey. ‘I thought it suited some people to get her away from Orkney.’
‘Why?’
‘I said Emma was very tight and closed in, but there were a couple of incidents just before she went away. She lost it. Lashed out at some kid who’d been mocking her mother. Was caught with some older guy she’d met in a bar. Now, maybe, I’d say it was PTSD. All that time watching her father inflict violence on her mother must have screwed her up, big-style.’
‘She didn’t get any support? Counselling?’
Samson shrugged. ‘She was offered it immediately after the father got sent down, but for some reason it never happened. Later, according to the other professionals, all was well. The father was out of the picture and the family seemed to be coping fine. It didn’t quite fit the narrative when she started getting into fights and picking up strange older men. If she’d stayed, who knows, someone might have noticed and insisted on an inquiry into the events leading up to Kenneth Shearer’s arrest.’
Perez wondered if Samson had been pushing for that inquiry. There was something personal in his description of events. Perez understood that. He took his work personally too. ‘Did you keep in touch with her when she moved to Shetland?’
‘Sure. Not as much as I should have done – even in a place like this, we’re stretched – but I phoned every so often. I met her when she came back for her mother’s funeral.’
‘How did she seem?’
Samson stared out of the window into the gloom. ‘Controlled. There were no tears at the funeral. She said she was happy with the family in Shetland. There was no reason for her to come back to Orkney. Adam was at university and David was old enough to manage without her.’
‘But you didn’t believe her? That she was happy?’
Samson shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what to believe. But there was nothing I could do. She was an adult and I had to respect her decision.’ He paused again. ‘But it was a case that haunted me. You know how some of them get under your skin? You know you shouldn’t get too involved, but you can’t help it. Emma Shearer is one of the kids who keep me awake at night.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Christopher was disturbed by the fog. He couldn’t see the beach from the window to the east, and the view to the west was limited to a line of darker shadow that was the hill. He felt that his room was no longer anchored to the rest of the house. It was as if he was floating in a grey bubble. Of course he could go downstairs and sit with his mother and sister in the kitchen. They were baking together and soon there would be good things to eat. But there was a tension in the house that was all about Emma. He couldn’t see why her dying should make his mother and father so awkward with each other. Ellie was too young to notice the strange atmosphere, but he could feel it, just as he’d felt the dampness of the fog on his skin when they’d walked back from school.
He wondered if his mother and father planned to separate. In the old school in London lots of the kids had parents who lived apart. They’d boasted sometimes about the treats they’d got when they were staying with the absent father. It usually was the father who moved out. Christopher pondered that. If his parents separated, where would Dad go? His father had seemed happier in London, but if he moved back to the city, how would Ellie and Christopher see him? Would they fly south or go on the boat? How would they manage if their father didn’t come to collect them? In his mind he saw himself and his sister, holding each other’s hand, wandering around a big airport. Lost. Ellie crying. The idea troubled him and he pushed it out of his mind.
Although he usually kept his bedroom door shut tight, today he’d left it open. There was something about the fog making him feel trapped. Because it wasn’t closed, he heard a knock on the front door and then the murmur of voices in the hall. He hadn’t heard the sound of a car and that was odd, because he still had his window wide open. Christopher wondered if the detectives were back. He didn’t mind the detectives. Talking to them made him feel important. He walked out into the corridor until he could see down the stairs to the adults still talking just below him.
His mother was there with Margaret Riddell. Christopher recognized Mrs Riddell. He knew she was Magnie’s mother and that she worked in Brae. He hesitated for a moment to work out how he knew those things, then remembered that she’d been at the Deltaness community hall when there’d been a craft fair. She’d had a stall next to his mother’s and had been selling her knitting. Not classy stuff like his mother made, but old ladies’ jerseys, hats and mittens. He couldn’t imagine many people wearing them because the wool would be very itchy. Christopher hated the feeling of wool next to his skin. He’d pointed out how uncomfortable that would be, and his mother had got upset and told him not to be rude. She’d said that she made clothes out of wool too. Mrs Riddell had pretended not to hear the comment, but later he’d heard her talking about him to her friend. She’d been much ruder about Christopher than he’d been about her knitting.
Now he wasn’t quite close enough to hear what they were saying. He could see his mother’s wild hair, looking from this distance like one of the wire scourers used for scrubbing burnt stuff from pans. Mrs Riddell was wearing an anorak and he thought it was as if winter had come back again, with everyone wrapped up in coats and hoods. He hadn’t been able to tell it was her until she’d taken off her hat, a knitted bonnet shaped like a mushroom. His mother seemed agitated, angry
even. He could tell by the tone of her voice and the fact that she hadn’t invited the woman into the kitchen for tea or coffee. Everyone in Shetland expected to be offered tea or coffee, and usually homemade biscuits or cakes as well. His mother had been baking with Ellie, so there would have been something to give the woman, but Mum seemed determined to stop her coming further into the house. Christopher moved closer to the top of the stairs.
‘I’m not sure why you’ve come to tell me this.’ His mother’s voice was shrill and loud enough now for him to hear every word. ‘It’s just malicious gossip.’
‘I thought you would want to know what folk are saying.’
‘I have no interest at all in what people are saying.’ His mother’s voice clear and loud again. Christopher wasn’t sure that was true; even if it was, he was certainly interested. He liked grown-ups’ conversations much better than the chat of people his own age. That he found largely inane. ‘Inane’ was a new word for him and he was proud to have found a use for it.
‘Maybe I should go then,’ Mrs Riddell said. It sounded like a challenge. Or a threat. Christopher wondered where his father was. He should be there, helping Mum deal with the batty old woman.
‘I think that would be for the best.’ His mother walked out of his sight-line and he heard the front door being opened.
Then Margaret Riddell disappeared from view, and Christopher was left with the sound of his mother muttering swear words under her breath.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
During the day, there were a few responses to Willow’s radio broadcast. Mostly nutters, Willow decided. An older woman claiming to have the gift of second sight and promising to give the police information about the sender of the messages to Hesti, but only if Willow showed them to her. An excitable young man, more interested in gaining knowledge about the investigation than in passing it on. Then, just as Willow was thinking she’d call it a day, go out for food before heading back to the B&B, an officer on the desk buzzed up with a name that she recognized. Magnie Riddell.
She went to collect him and saw him before he saw her. He was sitting in the one plastic chair in the front office, hunched into a big leather biker’s jacket. He had soft blond hair that reached his collar, blue eyes, big hands. Hands big enough to strangle a slight young woman like Emma Shearer. He turned his head slowly and Willow thought he wasn’t a man for quick movement. Everything about him would work at half-speed, as if he thought slowly too.
He seemed surprised to see her. ‘I thought it might be the other one. Jimmy Perez.’
‘He’s not here,’ she said. There was still a stab of excitement at the sound of his name. ‘I can find a local officer, if you’d rather.’
‘You were the woman who spoke on the radio.’ Not a question.
She nodded. ‘Do you want to come through? We’ll find somewhere to chat. Maybe some tea.’
He hesitated, and for a moment she thought he’d say it was all a mistake and that he’d slide back into the fog. But he got to his feet and followed her. She took him to a meeting room, not the interview room next to the cell. She didn’t want him to feel he was any kind of suspect. He was, of course, because he’d been close to the victim: a man with a temper, infatuated with the woman, liable to lash out if he sensed rejection. But now Willow wanted Magnie relaxed. She made him tea, without asking again if he wanted it, giving him time to settle.
‘You wanted to know about messages sent to the folk at Hesti.’ Magnie looked at her. He was holding the cardboard cup in his fist and she thought the tension would make him squeeze it and spill the tea all over the table.
‘You have some idea who sent them?’ She paused. ‘Was it you?’
‘No!’ It came out as a shout and, as he looked around him, he reminded her of a large caged animal. Any minute, she thought, he’d start pacing.
‘So not you. But someone you know?’
‘Were they small?’ he asked. ‘Little scraps of paper with squares? The graph paper that women use for plotting out their knitting patterns.’
She nodded. Now he’d started talking she didn’t want to interrupt him. He didn’t speak for a moment and she heard the sounds outside the room: the wheezing of an old printer, someone laughing.
‘I think it could have been my mother,’ he said. ‘Margaret, my mother.’ There was another pause, more noises off. ‘She got strange ideas about those folks at Hesti. Got kind of obsessed about them, after Dennis Gear killed himself.’ He looked up at Willow. ‘But she wouldn’t have murdered anyone. Really. She might not have been over the moon that I was seeing Emma, but she didn’t hate her.’
‘Not like she hated the Flemings?’ Willow said. Magnie’s silence was an answer of sorts and she continued: ‘What sort of strange ideas did she have about them?’
‘She had all sorts of strange ideas after my father left us.’ A flush of embarrassment rose from his neck and spread across his face. ‘She got it into her head that Dennis Gear was the love of her life. He’d been a childhood sweetheart, she said, and they were meant to be together. She kind of pestered him for a while. He was still at Hesti then.’
‘What did Mr Gear make of that?’
‘They saw each other a few times, I think, but when Dennis realized my mother didn’t have enough cash to bail him out of the financial mess, he dropped her. It would never have worked anyway. He was pretty screwed up by then. Drinking too much. You’d catch him in the bar in Brae most days, crying into his beer. Soon afterwards, he lost the house and it was sold to that family from London.’ Magnie looked up. ‘My mother got it into her head that it was all their fault that he hanged himself. That, somehow, they’d ripped him off to buy the house. But he’d lost the house way before they came on the scene. She was just telling herself stories to make herself feel better.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I thought it was a mean thing to do: to kill himself there, where a bairn might have found him.’
A bairn did find Emma Shearer. But surely Margaret Riddell wouldn’t have killed to get her own back for the death of an imagined lover.
‘What makes you think your mother sent those messages?’
‘I saw one. I got in earlier than I expected from work and she was in the lounge, making dots in the tiny squares of the paper to make a picture like a hanged man. At first I thought she was planning a new piece of knitting, but she always uses traditional designs.’ He looked up and for the first time gave a little smile. ‘I don’t think a gallows features in most Fair Isle knitting.’
Willow smiled back. ‘Maybe not. But then I’m no knitter.’
‘I asked her what she was doing,’ Magnie said. ‘At first she wouldn’t answer, then she said: “That family needs to know they’re not welcome here.” Nothing I said would make her see reason. It wasn’t just about Dennis. It was Helena Fleming having such success with her business. Mother ranted about that too. There was nothing rational about it. It was as if the obsession about Dennis Gear and the jealousy were burning her up inside, making her ill.’
‘What did you do?’ Willow ached for the man. Crazy parents were always a nightmare. In a small community like this, where there was little else to do but gossip, having a mother like Margaret would seem horrendous.
‘Nothing.’ Magnie looked straight at her. ‘I didn’t know that she’d actually sent the messages. I hoped I’d made her see sense.’ He paused again. ‘I should have asked my mother if she’d got rid of them, or warned the family up at Hesti. But I couldn’t face another row.’
‘Is there anything else I should know?’
He paused. ‘I think she watched folk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She parked her car where she thought nobody would see and watched what they were doing. She told me things about Emma that she could only have known if she’d been snooping. It was the same with the family at Hesti. Sometimes she followed them. It gave her a buzz. Knowing secrets always gave her a buzz.’
‘Maybe you should move out,’ Willow said. ‘
Get a place of your own.’
‘Aye.’ She thought that he’d already considered the idea and dismissed it as impossible. ‘But then how would she be, rattling around in that place with no company? That’s not going to help her get back to normal.’
‘Doesn’t she have a sister?’
‘Lottie,’ Magnie said. ‘She lives next door, but she just agrees with everything my mother says. Humours her.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s me my mother needs. No one else will do.’
Willow showed Magnie out and stood at the police-station entrance, staring out at the blurred outline of the town hall. Her phone buzzed. A text from Perez: No planes today because of the weather. Booked on tonight’s ferry. See you in the morning. Hope all’s going well. The message seemed conciliatory, almost friendly. She was tempted to phone him to tell him the latest news, had scrolled down to find his number, then stopped herself at the last minute. She couldn’t push him. Instead, she went inside to seek out Sandy. He was in the ops room in the middle of a phone conversation and the interruption seemed to throw him. He made embarrassed apologies to the person on the other end of the line and ended the call.
‘When do I get to meet her?’
He seemed confused.
‘That was Louisa you were talking to?’
He gave a sheepish smile. ‘Her mother’s not been too good. I wanted to check that everything was OK.’
‘Talking of mothers . . . I’ve just had Magnie Riddell in to shop his.’
‘For the murder of Emma Shearer?’ Sandy’s face was a picture.
‘No,’ Willow said, ‘for sending those strange little anonymous notes to the Flemings. Magnie says she’s been stalking them too. And Emma. He reckons his mum’s a bit of a nut job.’
Sandy seemed to think about that. ‘I don’t know her well, but I would say she’s sane enough. Full of malice and gossip – one of those people who can’t speak a good word about anyone – but if that makes the woman a nut job, then I’ve met a fair few who could do with being locked away.’ He slipped his phone into his pocket. ‘Is it relevant to Emma Shearer’s murder, do you think?’
