Shetland 05: Dead Water (34 page)

And Perez couldn’t hurry away from him. He understood the man’s desperation.

They sat upstairs in the Peerie Shop cafe. Downstairs there were two young women with toddlers in buggies. The weather had kept everyone else away.

‘I have nothing to tell you,’ Perez said. He wanted to be on the road to Aith and resented this interruption. His first wife had talked about his ‘emotional incontinence’ and his inability to turn away anybody requesting his help. He’d thought he’d become harder, but some habits were hard to give up.

‘But you will find him, Jimmy, won’t you? You will find the person who killed my son?’

‘Yes,’ Perez said. ‘We will find him.’ He paused before continuing. ‘Have you received a postcard recently? A reproduction of a painting. Three fiddle players.’

Peter Markham looked at him as if he were mad. ‘No. Barbara in the office opens all the mail, but if it was personal she’d pass it on to us.’

‘This might not have a message on the back,’ Perez said. ‘Just the picture on one side and the address on the other. Will you check when you get back? Ask Barbara if she’s seen anything like that?’

Markham went off then, pleased that he had something to do, feeling that his trip into town hadn’t been entirely wasted. Perez left with the man’s briefcase. He’d tried to persuade Markham to drop the cuttings into the police station, but he’d refused. ‘You take it, Jimmy. I won’t need the case. And I trust you to make good use of them.’

Now Perez climbed up the narrow lane back to his car. The path was steep and he felt exhausted and unfit.
I’m not sure I can do this.
There had been talk when he was at his most depressed that he might take early retirement on health grounds, but he hadn’t wanted Cassie to see him as an old and broken man. Now he wondered if he had rejected the idea too quickly.

By the time he reached Aith it was raining hard. He was tempted to phone Heather again, to check if the Fiscal had arrived at the office, but thought that might only cause panic. The visibility was so poor that he parked outside Laing’s house without any concern that he might be seen. He couldn’t make out the end of her garden, and the hillside where the Belshaws lived was invisible. Water dripped from the shrubs and small trees. The Fiscal’s car was there, pulled into the drive. It was unlikely then, that she had gone into work. But why hadn’t she answered her telephone? It occurred to him that she might be out on the voe in her boat. She’d have radar, surely. She was a longdistance sailor. The mist wouldn’t bother her.

He knocked at her door. There was no reply. He turned the knob and pushed it open. Unlocked. That surprised him. He’d have thought Rhona would have the habit of locking her house when she left the place. He went inside and shouted her name.

There was mail on the doorstep. He stepped over it and shouted again. No response. He went into her living room and felt that perhaps he should take off his wet shoes. He imagined her wrath if he left marks on her pale carpet. Everything was tidy. No sign that she’d been entertaining visitors. He was reminded of John Henderson’s place at Hvidahus. The clear surfaces and the clean lines. Everything functional. Except that John had his attic, the shrine to his first wife. In the kitchen there was order too. On the draining board a stained coffee mug was the only thing out of place.

Perez stood in the hall and yelled up the stairs. Going up, he wasn’t sure what scared him most. That he’d find Rhona Laing’s body or that he’d find her alive, wrapped in a towel perhaps just coming out of the shower, furious that her privacy had been invaded. But he came to the bathroom first and there was no steam and the shower tray was dry. He felt horribly tense, almost faint. Before Fran’s death he’d never had these physical symptoms of stress. Now the pounding heart and the roaring sound in his ears made him want to flee. Still he continued. A guest bedroom, decorated in yellow and white, a white sheepskin rug on the floor. Did she entertain her smart Edinburgh friends here? Did she have friends? Real friends? He imagined there would just be acquaintances, people who might be useful to her one day. The room looked as if it had never been slept in.

Then Rhona Laing’s bedroom, and for a moment curiosity overcame his anxiety. On the wall there was a huge painting of the sea. Everything in monotone, black and grey. A storm. Clouds and sea and spray. It wasn’t like anything Fran had ever painted, but he knew that Fran would have loved it. He heard her speaking to him.
Look, Jimmy, isn’t this a painting you could just jump into?

Dragging his attention away from the picture he saw a double bed, either not slept in or made up as soon as Rhona had got out of it this morning. The duvet cover and pillowcases were white, made of heavy cotton. There were two large wardrobes and a chest of drawers. The wardrobes were full of clothes and it would have been impossible for him to tell if anything was missing. He moved on.

Now there was just one room left: the office. The door was ajar and he stood in the corridor for a moment and looked in. No body. He felt relief, immediately followed by irritation. Where was she then? Had she run away south, leaving her staff and colleagues to fret about her? Surely that wasn’t Rhona’s style. She might make a dignified retreat, but not a rushed escape on an overnight ferry. He walked into the office. It had a view over the garden. Still it was raining outside, soft and relentless.

He switched on her computer. It had been on standby, so there was no need for a password. Had she been surprised here then? By a visitor or a phone call that had made her hurry off, without coming back to her office. He thought in normal circumstances she would have switched off her computer if she were going out. Though she’d been troubled recently, and perhaps the open door and the live computer were just signs of her anxiety. The idea of prying into the Fiscal’s emails was too much for him. He couldn’t do that yet. Not until there was evidence that she was in real danger or that somehow she was involved in these murders.

He stood, unsure what his next move should be. A plane went overhead on its way to Scatsta and it seemed very low, the engine noise very loud. Visibility must be improving then. He decided to go to the marina and see if her boat was still there. He knew that the water was where she felt safe and happy.

Turning away from the desk he stopped for a moment. On the top of the in-tray was the familiar postcard. He flipped it over with a pencil. Nothing written there, not even an address. There were two possibilities: that the Fiscal had taken the card from Jerry Markham’s briefcase when she’d found his body, or that the killer had delivered it to her. A message, just as the card left at the roadside shrine for John Henderson had been a message.

Chapter Forty-Two

When Willow returned to the police station Perez was back in position in the incident room, sitting at his place at the corner of the conference table. It was as if he’d never left. He was wading through a pile of newspaper cuttings.

‘Did you track down the elusive Ms Laing?’

He shook his head.

‘Anything wrong, do you think?’ There were times, she thought, when she wanted to shake Inspector Jimmy Perez. She didn’t care that the woman he’d loved had been murdered. She wanted him to communicate with her as if she were another human being.

‘I’m not sure.’ Now he looked up from the cuttings and frowned. ‘And I’m not sure what I should do next. The door to her house was unlocked.’

Willow thought of her childhood in Uist. ‘That’s not unusual, is it? In a place like this.’

‘Maybe not.’ A pause. ‘I think she might be out on the water. If she was troubled, that would be what she’d do. And I can’t see her fancy boat in the marina.’

‘So that’s OK then, isn’t it? She’ll just come home when she’s hungry or it gets dark. She’s playing hookie from work, but we’ve all done that at one time or another.’

‘Aye, perhaps. I’d be happier if I could speak to her, though.’

‘You’ve tried her mobile?’ Willow wondered how she’d come to be involved in this conversation. She needed the team to be checking out the consortium of investors in the water-power project. She felt as if Perez was sucking out all her energy.

‘I got her personal number from Heather in the Fiscal’s office. No reply.’ Perez paused again. ‘There was one of those postcards on her desk. Nothing written on the back.’

That caught her off-guard. ‘What do you want to do, Jimmy?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Like you say, we’ll wait until it gets dark. She should be home by then.’

Willow was struck by another thought. ‘This boat of hers, could it travel long distances?’

He looked up at her. ‘Aye. A Contessa 26 was sailed round the world in the Eighties. Single-handed, by a teenage lass.’

‘Has she done a runner then, Jimmy? Should we be alerting the coastguard?’

‘No need for that yet.’

But she thought he didn’t sound very sure.

Willow stood by the whiteboard and led them through the visit to the tidal-energy site. ‘I made Joe Sinclair take us back to his office so that we could get a list of investors from him.’

She’d already printed off enough copies for everyone in the room to have one, and she handed them round. ‘More than 200 people in Shetland put money into the project. They bought shares and contributed anything from £200 to £2,000 each. Investors included Evie Watt, John Henderson and Rhona Laing. Peter and Maria Markham are also on the list, so I think we can assume that Jerry knew all about it. The philosophy was that this should be a community venture, and that everyone who believed in it and could afford to should have a stake in the scheme.’

She paused and looked round the room. ‘Of course this might be coincidence. But I think we can put together a credible theory here. If Jerry discovered some financial malpractice, then we might finally have found the new and exciting story that brought him to Shetland. That would explain why he agreed to go to the Save Hvidahus meeting – he’d want the action group to give him more ammunition. You can imagine the possible headlines –
Green energy not so clean after all –
and the embarrassment that might cause to the people involved. They call the project Power of Water, and it’s considered a flagship scheme for renewable energy. I’ve already got a team of forensic accountants on the case, but if we discover that a substantial percentage of the invested cash disappeared into one individual’s pocket, I’d say we have a motive for murder.’ She paused for breath. ‘Markham’s decision to attend the meeting of the opposition group fits in with the theory.’

Across the table Sandy raised his hand, frowning.

‘Yes, Sandy?’

‘So you think Markham was killed to stop the story getting out?’

‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it? He was murdered on his way to a meeting where he might have shared the information he’d gained.’ She was starting to lose patience. She’d expected them all to be as excited as she was by the idea. Perez hardly seemed to be listening. His attention was still focused on the newspaper cuttings spread on the table in front of him. ‘Jimmy, what do you think?’

He looked up slowly. ‘You’ll find Fran’s name on the list,’ he said. ‘Fran Hunter. She invested £500 in Power of Water. Her contribution to saving the planet, she said.’ He paused and seemed to choose his words carefully. ‘Just because all our witnesses and suspects invested in the scheme, we can’t assume that’s what led to the killing. That many investors and a population this small, most households in the islands are probably linked to the project.’

Well, thanks very much for your contribution, Inspector Perez.

‘All the same,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s worth following up, don’t you think?’

‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘It’s worth following up.’ But his attention had wandered back to the newspaper articles in front of him.

When the rest of the team had dispersed she stood behind him. ‘What are all those things?’ There was something strangely obsessive in the way he pored over the newsprint. She saw that his fingers were stained grey from the ink.

‘Peter Markham brought them in this morning.’ Perez didn’t take his eyes off the table. ‘Maria kept the cuttings. All Jerry’s stories. Peter wondered if they might be helpful.’

‘And are they?’

Before he could answer, his phone went. He looked at the number. ‘It’s Peter Markham,’ he said.

‘Then you should take it!’ Again she felt impatient, with the desire to scream at him.

He nodded and pressed the button. She couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation and had no idea from the inspector’s expression whether Markham had anything useful to contribute.

‘Well, thank you, Peter. It was good of you to get in touch.’ Perez switched off the phone and sat for a moment in silence.

‘Well?’

‘I’d asked him to check if one of those postcards of the three fiddlers had been sent to the Ravenswick Hotel.’ Perez frowned.

‘And had it?’

‘No.’ He paused for a moment and turned to her with a sudden and brilliant smile. ‘But still relevant maybe, eh? Like the curious incident of the dog in the night. The Sherlock Holmes story. The dog that didn’t bark.’

‘So because the Markhams didn’t receive a postcard, one of the people at the Ravenswick Hotel could be sending them?’ She wanted to yell at him not to speak in riddles, but was so relieved that he was talking to her again, and so seduced by the smile, that she held her tongue.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That would be one interpretation.’

‘And the other?’

He seemed surprised that she hadn’t grasped the logic of his thinking. ‘That the Markhams aren’t involved in this at all, except as grieving parents.’

‘Is that what you believe?’ She waited and realized how much she valued his opinion.

There was another long silence. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. ‘I need to speak to Rhona. I’ll be glad when she sails back into the marina at Aith.’

If
, Willow wanted to say.
If she sails back.
But there was no need. He was thinking the same thing too.

She nodded back to the newspaper clippings. ‘You didn’t say what’s so interesting here.’