by Ann Cleeves
They agreed that Willow would go to Deltaness with Magnie, to talk to Lottie, and Perez would take Sandy’s car, when he arrived, and prepare the ops room in Lerwick for the second murder investigation. The easy camaraderie of earlier investigations was missing, but the crackling tension had gone.
When Perez phoned James Grieve, the pathologist was already at the airport waiting for a flight into Shetland.
Perez filled him in on the little he knew. ‘Our new victim’s a fifty-eight-year-old woman called Margaret Riddell. I think she was strangled too. We’ll arrange for a car to meet you at the airport and take you to the scene. Sandy will be there. We’ll join you later.’
‘That’s fine, Jimmy.’ He paused. ‘Have you seen my post-mortem report on Emma Shearer? I sent it off to Willow late last night.’
‘Not yet,’ Perez said.
‘Are the two of you no longer communicating? What’s going on there?’
Perez ignored the question. ‘I’ve been in Orkney. Digging into the background on the first victim. I only got in on the ferry this morning, and now we have another victim.’ He paused. ‘I doubt Willow’s had the chance to take in all the details of your report herself yet.’
‘Just a minute, Jimmy. This is important. Let me find somewhere I’ll not be overheard.’ Grieve’s phone went dead for a moment, and when he started speaking again, the background chatter had faded. ‘Am I right in thinking that Kenneth Shearer was only charged with abuse against the mother, not the children?’
‘Yes. The children were witnesses, but not victims.’
‘I found a couple of untreated fractures.’ The pathologist kept his voice even, but Perez remembered again that Grieve was a father of four children. ‘It would suggest that Shearer lashed out at Emma as well as the mother.’
‘But nobody noticed. And she never spoke.’
‘Fear, maybe. Or guilt. Abused children often blame themselves.’
Perez thought that would explain the wariness behind the eyes, and Emma’s reluctance to get too close to any of her admirers. He wished now that he hadn’t described her to Willow as a cat playing with a pathetic mouse. That had been cruel, unnecessary. The professor’s findings might also explain the Orkney professionals’ desire to find a new home for her. Perhaps she did confide in them, once her father was safely convicted, but they had no enthusiasm for revisiting the case. He still couldn’t see how the new information was relevant to her murder in Shetland, but it was important to him.
James Grieve, still on the end of the line, was growing impatient. ‘Are you there, Jimmy?’
‘Yes, just trying to work out what that might mean for our investigation.’
‘Ah,’ the pathologist said. ‘That’s a decision for you, not for me. I’ll see you later today.’
Perez sat at his desk, trying to get a handle on Margaret Riddell, digging into her past. Lottie was the older sister, but Margaret had been the achiever, with good exam grades. She’d got a place at teacher-training college in Aberdeen, but hadn’t completed the course and had come back to Shetland and to her parents. She wouldn’t have been the only hopeful student to find life away from the islands harder than she’d expected. On her return to Shetland, she’d started working in the bank in Lerwick and there she’d met Neil, her boss and future husband. Perez gleaned most of this information from online issues of The Shetland Times; a wedding photograph showed her in traditional white, standing beside a tall, rather stern-looking man. The only mention of Margaret in connection with Dennis Gear was in a much earlier report of a music festival in Lerwick. They were standing together in a photograph of young people, but the image was so blurred that it was impossible to pick out any of the individuals.
Magnie’s birth was announced in the newspaper too. He’d been baptized in the church where Neil was lay-reader. Of course there was no mention of the Riddells’ divorce, of Neil setting up home with a Latvian housekeeper, or of Margaret leaving her job in the bank to work part-time in the Co-op in Brae. It would have been talked about, though. There was nothing a gossip liked more than a tale of the mighty fallen, a respectable family breaking apart.
Perez phoned the Deltaness health centre several times and spoke to the receptionist there. He was interested to know if Margaret had visited Ness House on the evening of her death. If Magnie was right, she’d talked about going there as well as Hesti. The only information he received was that Dr Moncrieff was out for the afternoon on home visits, and the receptionist had no idea when he would be back. Nettie was sympathetic – Perez supposed that news of Margaret Riddell’s death would have seeped, like osmosis, into the community – but she said that she couldn’t give out any medical details without the doctor’s permission. The last time Perez called, there was only an automatic answering-machine message. He tried phoning Ness House, hoping to speak to Belle, but that call went unanswered too.
On his own in the ops room, Perez tried to pull together his thoughts. He’d felt at first that Emma Shearer’s death had something to do with a hatred of outsiders. There was a poisonous atmosphere in that community, a horrible mix of gossip and prejudice. A local man had committed suicide and it was if everyone wanted to shift the blame onto the newcomers. But Margaret Riddell had been born and brought up in Deltaness. She seemed to be at the heart of all the muck-spreading and rumour. So perhaps he’d got the whole thing wrong and he needed to start again from the beginning.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Willow left Sandy standing guard over the reclining body of Margaret Riddell and walked back to her car. Perez had already headed back to Lerwick. There were just ribbons of mist now, caught by the sunlight and blown by the breeze back out to sea. As she’d thought he might be, Magnie was asleep in the passenger seat. He didn’t stir, even when she started the engine and the car bumped over the rough track back to the road and Deltaness.
Lottie was waiting for them, still at her post at the window. Willow decided not to disturb Magnie. She’d rather talk to Lottie alone. The front door was ajar and she let herself in, met Lottie in the hall.
‘You didn’t find her then?’ Lottie seemed even more distraught than when they’d left. ‘I’ve had no news, either.’
Willow put her arm round the woman’s bony shoulder to shepherd her back into the living room, and waited until they were both seated before speaking. Lottie made no protest and asked no further questions.
‘We did find Margaret,’ Willow said. ‘She was on the bench that Magnie made for her in memory of Dennis.’
‘Has she been there all night? She’ll have caught her death in all the fog. Where is she now?’
‘She’s dead, Lottie.’ Willow waited for a beat, to make sure the words had sunk in. Sometimes relatives shut out the truth, heard only the words that they wanted to hear. ‘She was strangled. Murdered, like Emma Shearer.’
There was a moment of complete silence. Lottie was still facing the window, as if waiting for her sister to appear at the end of the street.
‘Did you understand, Lottie?’ Willow made sure that her voice was gentle and clear. ‘Somebody has killed Margaret. I need to ask you some questions. It’ll be hard for you, I know, but we have to find out who killed your sister. I need to know why anyone would want to do that.’
Lottie turned her head slowly, so that she was facing Willow. ‘I’m not stupid.’ The words hard and sharp. ‘Margaret sometimes treated me as if I was stupid, but I’m not. I knew something was wrong when she didn’t leave for work this morning. I knew something has been wrong with her for weeks.’
‘Since Dennis Gear killed himself?’
‘No,’ Lottie said. ‘Maybe not that long ago.’
‘Do you have any idea what might have upset her?’
‘She didn’t like me and the Shearer girl becoming friends.’ Lottie sat back in her chair now and shut her eyes for a moment.
‘You were friends with Emma?’ Willow found this astonishing. What could the stylish young woman and Lottie, in her Crimplene s
lacks and ugly sweaters, have in common?
‘I found her once, when I was on my way back from the shop. She was sitting on the bank, looking out to the beach. She was crying. I asked her into the house for some tea. I’d just bought biscuits, so we had those too.’
‘Did she tell you why she was upset?’
Lottie shook her head. ‘And I didn’t ask. Not my business, and she’d tell me in her own time if she wanted to. We talked about Deltaness. She wanted to know what it was like growing up here, all the old stories.’
‘You’ve lived here all your life?’
‘Oh no!’ Lottie seemed shocked by the idea. ‘I was born in the South Mainland. Dunrossness. We moved to this house when it was new, when the oil came. My father found a job at Sullom Voe. My mother never settled. She said it was the back of beyond, but I liked it well enough.’
‘Did Emma come and see you quite often, after you found her crying on the beach?’
‘Every week on a Monday, before she collected the little children from the school.’ A pause. ‘Margaret was always at work on a Monday. She’d never taken to Emma since she started seeing Magnie.’
‘But your sister found out somehow that you and Emma had become friends?’ Willow wasn’t sure where this was going, but she was curious.
‘I let it slip one time. I couldn’t stand Margaret ranting on about what a poor influence Emma was on her son.’ Lottie shut her eyes again. She seemed to be replaying the encounter in her head. ‘I told her I thought Emma was a fine young lassie and Margaret should be pleased that the boy had found someone. Did she want Magnie to be as lonely as we were? And then she wouldn’t let the matter go. That was Margaret all over, prodding and prying until I told her Emma came to tea with me every Monday afternoon.’
‘Did Emma ever confide in you?’ Willow asked. ‘She had a tough time growing up in Orkney. Did she talk about her parents? The things that happened to her family?’ She thought Lottie would be an easy person to talk to. Unthreatening. Unselfish.
‘We didn’t talk about anything important,’ Lottie said. ‘That was why we got on so splendidly. It was just tea and chat. And maybe sometimes a bit of bitching about her bosses. We had that in common, you see. Working for the Moncrieffs.’
‘You used to work for the Moncrieffs?’ Again, Willow was surprised. She hadn’t pictured Lottie as having any paid employment. She’d seen her as a carer to her parents in their later years, but hadn’t considered what she might have done before that became necessary.
‘Not for Robert and Belle,’ Lottie said. ‘I worked at Ness House long before they got together. I wasn’t clever, like Margaret. I never passed any exams. When we lived in the south I got a job in the Sumburgh Hotel, cleaning the rooms and helping in the kitchen. Then my parents moved to Deltaness and I couldn’t do that any more. It was too far to travel and I didn’t want to live in. So I got a job with Robert’s parents, Donald and Lucy. “Housekeeper” they called me, but that was a grand name for it. Skivvy more like. They paid a pittance and treated me like dirt. But it got me out of the house for a while and the money was a bit of independence.’
Willow nodded. She could see how the women might get on, sharing grievances, mocking their employers. ‘And you never did find out why Emma was crying that day you first invited her back?’
Lottie shook her head. ‘I put it down to the Moncrieffs.’ She paused. ‘I cried a fair bit while I was working at Ness House too. Robert and Donald were cut from the same cloth. Robert’s all charm and concern on the outside, but he has a mean way with him. And Donald was a bastard.’
‘Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Margaret?’ Willow thought the past was fascinating, but she couldn’t see how Lottie’s experience of working for Robert Moncrieff’s father had anything to do with what was happening in Deltaness now.
‘My sister wasn’t an easy woman to get on with,’ Lottie said. ‘She could hold on to a grudge longer than anyone else I know. She said the Moncrieff bairns were monsters because they played a trick on her when they came guizing for Hallowe’en. They threw eggs at the house and it took an effort to clean up all the mess. Emma wasn’t with them that time, but she still got into trouble when Margaret went and complained to the parents.’ There was a pause. ‘Margaret only behaved that way because she was hurting. She thought she was settled for life with Neil, in that big house in Voe. She’d sacrificed a lot to get it.’
‘Dennis Gear?’
‘You know about that? Yes, she loved the bones of him when they were younger. By the time she moved back here and tried to get together with him again, he was a different man. Depressed and drunk. She thought she could save him, but it was too late and he didn’t care for her. Besides, by then, Dennis was beyond saving.’
They sat for a moment in silence.
‘You said Margaret was disappointed that you’d made friends with Emma. Had you noticed any other change in her recently?’
‘She’d taken against that new family in Hesti, but you know all about that. She’d made no secret of it.’
Willow said nothing. She had the sense that there was more to come.
After a brief pause, Lottie continued: ‘Margaret said they’d as good as killed Dennis.’ There was another hesitation. ‘She called them the hangmen.’
‘Did you know she’d been sending them anonymous notes? Little drawings of gallows.’
‘No, but I knew she’d become obsessed with that family.’ Lottie turned to stare at Willow. ‘Easier, I suppose, than blaming herself.’
‘Magnie thought she was losing her mind a bit. What do you think?’
Lottie gave a sharp, hard laugh. ‘I think she was as sane as the rest of us, except that maybe she couldn’t let go of a grievance. She let it burn inside her until it gobbled her up. Then she did what she felt she had to – lashing out at people she thought had hurt her – just to survive. But she didn’t survive, did she? All that bad feeling was wasted. Now she’s gone.’
When Willow left Lottie’s house to rouse Magnie, he was already waking up. He stretched awkwardly in the front seat of the car and for a while seemed not to know where he was. Willow opened the passenger door. ‘We’ll go inside, shall we? I need to ask you a few more questions.’
Inside he wandered through to the kitchen and put on the kettle as if he was sleepwalking. Willow thought that would be what he’d do when he came home from a night shift. He’d be working on autodrive. The smell of coffee, which had turned her stomach in the first few weeks of pregnancy, seemed suddenly delicious and when he offered her a mug, she accepted.
‘Where were you last night, Magnie?’ Because he might be acting as if he’d been on the night shift, but he’d told Perez that he’d been with friends.
He shifted awkwardly.
‘Just out with a few pals.’
‘I’ll need their names, Magnie. You do understand that. And you were out all night. I need to know where you were staying.’
‘I stayed with my dad and his new wife in Lerwick.’ He looked up, stubborn now. ‘He’ll tell you I was there.’
Will he? Willow thought. And even if he does, will I believe him? Even a good man, guilty about deserting his wife, might perjure himself to protect his son.
She nodded. ‘I’ll give your father a ring later.’
Magnie stood, leaning against the kitchen bench. ‘What happens now? To my mother, I mean.’
‘The pathologist will want to see her at the locus – where we found her. He hopes to be on a flight this afternoon. Then he’ll need to take her back to Aberdeen to do a post-mortem. We won’t be able to release her body until then.’ Willow paused. ‘Of course you’ll be able to bring her home to bury her.’
He nodded and she saw that he was overwhelmed by the responsibility, the things that would need to be done, rather than by the loss of the woman he’d lived with.
‘Are you sure it was murder?’ he asked. ‘She didn’t kill herself?’
‘No, I don’t think that
she can have done that. Why would someone have moved her body to the side of the loch?’ Willow paused for a moment. ‘Are you saying she was suicidal?’ Lottie hadn’t implied in any way that Margaret had considered taking her own life.
Magnie thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she was. But she was angry and confused.’
‘Have you any idea who might have wanted to kill her?’
He took his time answering, drinking the coffee until only the dregs were left, then setting his mug on the bench. The silence stretched. ‘She wasn’t an easy woman,’ he said at last, repeating almost exactly the words Lottie had used. ‘She stuck her nose into other people’s business and then she gossiped about them. There will be folk in Deltaness who won’t be sorry to see Margaret Riddell dead, but none of them would have killed her.’
‘What about your father and his new wife?’
‘My mother made their life hell when they set up home together in Lerwick. She sent letters to the paper, to the bank’s headquarters, to the minister of the kirk. Complaining that my father’s hypocrisy made him unfit for work and for his office in the church. But that had all calmed down. She must have seen that she was making herself look ridiculous.’ He looked straight up at Willow. ‘I never blamed my father for leaving her. They weren’t content for as long as I can remember. It was time for him to find some happiness.’
‘Emma was your girlfriend, and Margaret your mother.’ Willow was feeling the shock of caffeine after the weeks of abstinence. Her thoughts were racing and she wasn’t quite sure where they were leading. ‘Now the two women in your life are dead. Is there anyone who would want to hurt you so much that they might be prepared to kill the people closest to you?’
Magnie looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘That sounds like a horror movie, not real life.’
‘I suppose it does. I’m just thinking aloud here. I can’t think what else they might have in common.’
