by Ann Cleeves
‘You were there when Christopher found the shoes on the beach.’ Willow leaned back in her chair, felt a flutter in her stomach and for a moment she forgot where she was. It’s probably wind. Hunger. It was a long time since breakfast. But knowing it was the baby’s first movement. A spark of joy.
Martha nodded and stared down at her black Converse sneakers.
‘What did you make of it?’
‘When he screamed, I just thought it was Christopher doing his thing. I know he can’t help it, but he’s weird. He makes odd noises, gets freaked out by small stuff.’
‘But the shoes,’ Willow said gently. ‘What did you make of those?’
‘They looked like the sort of shoes Emma might wear.’ Martha shrugged. ‘Yeah, they might have been hers.’
‘And how do you think they got to the beach? You must have thought about it.’
Martha shrugged again and said nothing. Willow thought of herself at that age; her reluctance to communicate, in a family that talked everything through in the tiniest and most emotional detail, must have driven her parents crazy. It still felt like surrender to tell them anything important about her life. She wondered when she’d build up the courage to pass on the news that they were about to be grandparents. They wouldn’t be dismayed by her becoming a single parent. They’d never bothered about convention. But they would be astonished that she’d decided to allow a child into her life. They’d always considered her entirely selfish. Willow dragged her attention back to the overheated room and continued the one-sided conversation.
‘Because the shoes didn’t just float there on the tide. They were there as a sign. A message. Or a joke.’
At the last word, Martha raised her head and looked Willow in the eye for the first time. But she allowed Willow to go on talking.
‘Not a very good joke, maybe, but sometimes when things are stressful we look for ways to release the tension a bit. And I can see that a pair of posh yellow shoes belonging to a dead woman, on a beach, might do that. In a kind of surreal way.’
Still Martha held her gaze without speaking.
‘Or at least it might stir things up.’ Willow leaned back in her chair again and allowed the silence to stretch. ‘Make things happen.’
‘Why would I want to stir things up? The last week has been a fucking nightmare. It’s been disturbed enough as it is. All I want is to stick out school, pass my exams and escape.’
The solicitor didn’t wince, but Willow could sense his distaste at the language. She thought if he wasn’t here, he’d be at church.
‘So, you didn’t find the shoes somewhere at home and put them on the beach as a kind of joke? Because that’s our most likely scenario at the moment.’
‘No!’ The word came out as a howl. Willow hoped it couldn’t be heard in the room where Perez was talking to Charlie. The last thing she needed was Robert Moncrieff appearing, demanding to know what was going on.
‘What about Charlie? Is it the kind of thing he might do?’
‘Maybe. With his mates after a few drinks. He’s easily led. But not with Mum and Dad around.’ She rolled her eyes to show her disdain for her brother’s cowardice.
‘But you don’t care what your mother and father think?’
There was a moment’s pause. ‘I think parents have to earn your respect.’
‘And you don’t think Robert and Belle have done that?’
The question made the solicitor shift uncomfortably in his seat. Willow ignored him and waited for Martha to answer.
‘Actually no. I think they’re pretty crap parents. Now Emma’s not around, I hope they’ll spend more time with Sam and Kate than they did with Charlie and me when we were growing up. But I wouldn’t bank on it.’ She paused. The solicitor seemed inclined to speak, but Willow glared at him and he changed his mind. Martha continued. It seemed as if years of rancour were finally spilling out. ‘Mum likes the drama of being pregnant and having babies – the attention – but she can’t really do the boring bit of looking after her kids. It’s probably not her fault. She was spoiled rotten as a child. She never learned to be bored. Whereas we’ve had lots of practice.’
‘And your father?’ Willow didn’t have to pretend to be interested.
‘Ah, his parents were quite different. Cold and hard. I remember them, you know, though they’re both dead now. My grandparents. There was nothing kind about them. They were like characters in a fairy story. Evil. Dad was an only child too. Perhaps that’s why he wanted so many kids. He didn’t want us to be lonely.’
‘When was the last time you saw Emma wearing the shoes Christopher found on the beach?’ Because this analysis of the family was fascinating, but Willow thought it wasn’t getting them anywhere.
‘I can’t remember. Probably the last time she went out with Magnie. Or went up to Hesti to see Daniel. Emma liked dressing up for her men.’
‘Were there any other men in her life?’ Willow wasn’t sure where the question had come from, except that she could tell Martha was holding back information. The girl might be prepared to bad-mouth her parents about their parenting abilities, but there was certainly something she was reluctant to pass on.
The question shocked Martha too. ‘What are you saying?’
‘That you mixed socially with Emma once you got older, and you probably knew her as well as anyone else. If she was seeing another man, you would know. You spent time with her, didn’t you, in the youth club at the community hall?’
‘Oh, that!’ Martha was dismissive. ‘Yeah, sometimes she’d hang out with the kids there.’
‘And she was there when Christopher got upset at the bonfire. His mother told me about that.’
Martha was more wary now. ‘Yeah, I think she was there that night.’ A pause. ‘Christopher really lost it.’
There was a moment of silence. The sun flowed through the window and suddenly Willow felt unbearably hot. She heard a door open, then Robert Moncrieff’s voice outside. Perez must have finished the interview with Charlie.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Martha? Anything that might help clear this up, so you can all get back to normal.’
For a second, Willow thought Martha would confide in her. But she glanced across at the solicitor, caught his eye and shook her head. Willow wrote her mobile number on a scrap of paper and slid it across the coffee table. ‘If anything comes to you, please give me a ring.’
Martha stared at the paper as if it might be too hot to touch, then she scooped it into her pocket, stood up and walked out of the room.
Chapter Forty-Four
Perez wished Willow had chosen Moncrieff to be present at her interview with Martha and that she’d left John Munro, the solicitor, for him. He could sense the doctor’s hostility as they walked through the door into the small, hot room and thought this would be a complete waste of time. Charlie was clearly intimidated by his father and would give nothing away in his presence.
Perez had put a jug and three glasses on the low tables and now he poured out water.
‘Tell me what happened yesterday. I want to know all about it.’
‘Really, Jimmy.’ Moncrieff jumped in immediately. ‘What is this all about? I’ve already explained that we had a day at the beach. We needed a bit of time away. What more is there to say?’
Perez ignored him and turned to the boy. ‘Take me through your movements.’
‘Mostly I was chilling out with Martha.’
‘You get on well, the two of you?’ Perez asked.
‘Yeah, I mean she’s really cool. For a big sister.’
‘So, you confide in each other?’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Has she got a boyfriend?’ Perez was feeling his way. Didn’t most sixteen-year-old girls have boyfriends?
Charlie looked at his father and shook his head. ‘She’s got mates at school and I know there are people who fancy her, but I don’t think there’s anyone special.’ A pause. ‘She’s a bit of a loner.’
> ‘And you would know, wouldn’t you? Because you’re very close.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So, you were chilling out on the beach. Did you see anyone there you knew? Anyone other than the Flemings and your own family, I mean.’
Charlie thought for a moment. ‘I saw a lad from school. He was there with his folks, but they left not long after we got there.’
‘Did you notice anyone after the bonfire was lit?’
This time Charlie responded immediately. ‘No. By then it was just us on the beach. Everyone else had gone.’
‘Had you noticed the shoes before?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘They definitely weren’t there when we were looking for driftwood for the fire. I went that way and I would have noticed.’
‘It seems to me,’ Perez spoke very slowly, ‘that you’re telling me one of your group must have placed the shoes where Christopher found them. If they weren’t there when you built the fire and nobody else was on the beach, I can’t see any other explanation.’
The wariness on Charlie’s face was replaced by panic. He glanced again towards his father.
‘Look here, Jimmy.’ Moncrieff’s face was red. It was the heat and a restrained fury. ‘What are you implying?’
‘I’m trying to understand what happened yesterday. I’m not implying anything.’ Perez paused and looked across at father and son. ‘Did either of you see someone put Emma’s shoes on the beach, just below the tideline? I understand it was getting dark, but you were all there together. It seems odd that the shoes suddenly appeared. As if by magic.’
‘We don’t even know they were Emma’s shoes!’ Moncrieff said.
‘Are you saying you didn’t recognize them?’
There was a moment of silence.
‘All this fuss about a pair of bloody shoes!’ It seemed that Moncrieff could contain his anger no longer.
Perez ignored the outburst and turned back to Charlie. It pleased him to see Moncrieff so rattled, and he thought that perhaps Willow had been right after all to put them together. ‘We thought it might have been some kind of joke. That you and Martha might have thought it funny to bring the shoes out like that. It would be a silly thing to do, but not criminal, you understand. Not something you’d get into major trouble for. Not if you tell me now. We’ve been looking for the shoes that Emma was wearing when she was killed, and if you or Martha found them somewhere in the house, it would be really helpful to know.’
The sun was shining on Charlie’s face, lighting him up, as if he was caught in a spotlight. A reluctant star of a reality-TV show. He was sufficiently good-looking to be the member of a boy band.
‘Sorry,’ the boy said at last. ‘I don’t know anything about them.’
Perez asked more questions, but got nothing useful at all out of the interview.
They sent the Moncrieffs back to Deltaness and sat in the ops room eating the sandwiches Sandy had bought in the Co-op on his way in. They were made with soft white bread and there was a very limited veggie option for Willow, but the food disappeared quickly enough. Lack of any positive information had made them hungry. For a while there was no sound but the opening of plastic wrappers and the crunching of crisps.
Perez was imagining himself on the beach at Burra. No light but that coming from the moon and the bonfire. Would it have been possible for one of the party to slip away and put out the shoes without being seen? Maybe. The smaller kids would never be still, and the parents would be wandering off to check on them. It wouldn’t take long to pull the shoes from a beach bag when nobody was looking. The alternative was some elaborate conspiracy, and he didn’t believe in conspiracy theories.
‘Martha’s hiding something,’ Willow said. ‘Maybe protecting someone.’
‘Her parents?’
‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t exactly complimentary about them.’
‘Her brother?’ Perez thought of the boy, his face lit by the sun. Good-looking, amenable, adoring. He could imagine that Martha might feel the need to protect him. He would be her validation.
‘Perhaps,’ Willow said. ‘But from whom? Do we really think that lad killed Emma and Margaret Riddell? Because I don’t see it.’
Nobody had an answer.
‘So, what now?’ Sandy was impatient. He always struggled with the detail of an investigation. The boring checking of facts that inevitably came in the middle of a case.
Perez waited for Willow to answer. In the past they would have joked about that. The fact that she was his boss. Today she was businesslike.
‘The shoes are already on the plane south to go to the lab in Aberdeen. They’ll look for DNA on the insole, fingerprints, and I’ve asked Lorna Dawson at the Hutton Institute to take a sample from the sole too. We know we’ll find sand, but there might be soil or pollen trapped below that. It could give some indication of where Emma was walking before she died – though if she was killed in her car, as we suspect, that won’t help much.’ She paused. ‘Sandy, why don’t you have the afternoon off? Go and spend a bit of time with Louisa. We’ll see you back here first thing tomorrow morning.’
Sandy almost ran from the room. Perez looked after him. ‘I never knew he could move that fast.’
‘What about you, Jimmy? What are your plans for the rest of the day? I expect you could do with some quality time with Cassie.’
He looked up sharply, not sure whether that was some kind of dig; did she resent his preoccupation with Fran’s daughter? But it was hard to tell from her face what she was thinking.
‘Cassie’s been with her father this weekend. He’s keeping her until the middle of the week. After that, he’s away on another of his business trips and we’re not sure when he’ll get to see her again.’
She nodded to show she understood. He expected something more, a question or a comment about joint parenting. They were on their own now and this would be the time to discuss her pregnancy, but still the subject was wedged between them, a barrier. Solid and apparently impenetrable. He thought the longer the silence on the subject continued, the harder it would be to break, but he couldn’t find the words to start the conversation.
‘I thought I’d head up to Deltaness,’ she said. ‘Since Christopher Fleming found the shoes we’ve been concentrating on Emma Shearer, but I’d like to talk to Magnie and Lottie again. Margaret Riddell might have been a screwed-up old gossip, but she was a victim too.’
‘Would you mind if I tagged along?’ He wasn’t sure where those words had come from. He didn’t need an afternoon of awkward silences. It was habit maybe. He’d become used to seeking out her company. And still he loved being with her.
‘Sure, Jimmy. If you want to see how this policing business is done, I’d be happy to show you.’ Then she gave that grin that made his stomach flip, before leading him out of the room.
There was no answer when they knocked at Lottie’s door, but when they moved on to Magnie’s house, both aunt and nephew were there, standing in the narrow hallway, apparently on their way out. Magnie, Vikingbig, seemed to take up all the space. Lottie looked even thinner, even less substantial. A strange couple: opposite but somehow complementary.
‘We were planning a trip to Suksetter,’ Magnie said. ‘To where my mother died. To pay our respects.’
Perez saw that he was holding a bunch of flowers. The boy would have bought them from the supermarket in town. They were ready-wrapped with a giant bow formed with gold ribbon. Celebratory and inappropriate.
Magnie added, ‘My auntie wanted to see where it happened.’
‘Maybe we could come along?’ Willow’s voice was sympathetic, but she allowed Magnie no choice in the matter. ‘We’ll bring our own car. Then we can leave you to spend some time on your own there.’ A pause. ‘We’d like to pay our respects too, wouldn’t we, Jimmy?’
‘Of course.’
Perez thought they made a strange procession, walking from the car park inland from the shore, past the chain of lochans to the spot where Margaret
Riddell’s body had been found. The sun shone into his eyes and he felt too hot, uncomfortable. In Shetland, they weren’t used to dry weather lasting as long as this; to this warmth. He felt for a moment that the world had gone crazy: elderly women shouldn’t be so full of hate that they ended up dead; a bonny young woman shouldn’t be found swinging in a dusty old byre. And the sun shouldn’t still be shining.
When they reached Dennis Gear’s bench, they stood in an awkward group. Magnie laid the flowers on the wooden plank. Lottie was the first to speak.
‘Is this where Margaret was killed? All the way out here?’
‘We think maybe she was killed somewhere else and dragged here,’ Willow said. ‘But we don’t know yet.’
‘She was a heavy woman.’ Lottie paused. ‘And she didn’t walk much, either. She was never terribly active, but since she had the arthritis in her knees . . . You’re right, I can’t see that she would have made it over the hill from Deltaness.’
‘We think perhaps someone brought her body to the end of the path and pulled it from there. That’s not so far.’
There was a moment of silence. ‘I used to come here with Dennis too.’ Lottie sat on the bench. ‘Maybe it was where he brought all his lady friends.’ She gave a dry chuckle. ‘He didn’t have much imagination, it seems. I was probably better off without him.’
‘It’s a shame Margaret didn’t feel that way.’ Willow sat beside her, moving the flowers carefully to make room. The men stood watching, but they might not have been there, for all the notice the women took of them. ‘She’d have saved herself a lot of grief.’
‘She couldn’t help herself,’ Lottie said. ‘Even when she was a girl, it was as if she was the centre of the world, and if she was unhappy it was never her fault.’
‘Do you know what made her like that?’
