Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (20 page)

‘But you’d be glad of some media exposure for the hotel. David was telling me how difficult it is to make a decent living up here. And I understood that Eleanor was offering a performance fee.’

Charles lifted the hands, a gesture of incomprehension, and looked at David. ‘Really, I don’t remember anything of that sort.’ The explanation more for his partner than for the detectives.

‘So what exactly did Eleanor want from you?’ Perez asked.

‘Information, Jimmy. Nothing more than that. She wanted me to tell her the story of poor Peerie Lizzie. David had done the research. We’d put it all into a little brochure for any of the guests who might be interested. There was a child called Elizabeth, only child of Gilbert and Roberta Geldard. She was born in 1920 and died just ten years later. She was playing out in the garden under the care of a local woman, one of the Malcolmsons. Elizabeth slipped away from her minder to go to the voe and she must have wandered out onto the sand. Then the fog came down and the tide came in and she was drowned. They found her body the following day, washed up onto the shore. She was lying on her back with her hands by her side and she seemed quite perfect, although the story is that she’d been in the water all night.’

‘There was no possibility that it was foul play?’ Perez directed the question to David, who seemed a more reliable source of information.

‘I found no suggestion of that at the time,’ David said. ‘I looked up the report of the death in
The Shetland Times
. The implication was that the young nursemaid should have been more careful, but nobody was ever charged. I tried to trace her – the nursemaid, I mean – but she died in 1993. I hadn’t really expected to find her alive.’

‘This was quite a project for you,’ Willow said. ‘Time-consuming when you have so much other work in the hotel.’

‘History’s always been a passion. I loved doing it. And, as you said, I thought the ghost story might bring in punters. We charge more than the other B&Bs on the island. We need to give our guests something extra.’

Willow turned to Charles. ‘How did you leave things with Mrs Longstaff? You passed on David’s research. Anything else?’

‘She said that she’d be in Unst in a few weeks’ time and might get in touch then.’

‘And did she?’

‘Of course not.’ His voice had become shrill and high-pitched and he turned towards Perez as though he considered him to be more sympathetic. ‘I would have told you, Jimmy. I would have realized how important that would be.’

Willow left it at that, but Perez didn’t quite believe him. The hoteliers disappeared from the room, Charles seeming relieved to be let off the hook.

‘Well?’ Willow had finished her tea and had her elbows on the table. ‘What now?’

‘I think I could do with a bit of a walk to clear my head after all my travels.’

Willow looked at him quizzically and he thought she didn’t quite believe
him
either.

He left her sitting in the kitchen and walked out of the main gate and down towards the voe, imagining a ten-year-old child escaping down this path many years before. This was a precious child conceived in middle age. Spoilt perhaps, doted on, used to getting her own way. The nursemaid would have had problems containing her. Lizzie must have played here before surely, and she would know the shore and the tides. This wasn’t a stranger from the south come to visit relatives in the big house. But if the fog came down suddenly, as it could in the islands, it wasn’t impossible that she lost all sense of direction. Even if the nursemaid followed her down to the beach and shouted for her, sound could be distorted by the mist. Then voices seemed to swirl in all directions, just like the fog itself. It wasn’t the death of the girl that had sparked questions in Perez’s mind, though, but the condition in which she’d been found.
She was lying on her back with her hands by her side and she seemed quite perfect.
Almost posed, he thought. Just like Eleanor. And a body that had been in the water, even for one night, wouldn’t look like that. Sea creatures would have nibbled at it; she’d be bloated and covered in weed and sand. Of course it could just be a story. Like the story of the ghost. The idea of a perfect body might have been a fiction created to provide comfort for the grieving parents. Besides, he wasn’t here to solve a case that was nearly a hundred years old.

He walked back to the house and found himself sitting in his car. Here he paused for a moment. He should find Willow and tell her what he was doing. She’d be angry if he just drove off without telling her what was in his mind. That would be bad manners. But he started the car anyway and drove up the single-track road to Meoness. Outside George Malcolmson’s croft he paused again and thought that he was being distracted and should concentrate on the present investigation. Then he opened the car door and went to the house. Grusche was in the kitchen ironing. In the laundry basket were clothes that obviously belonged to her son and daughter-in-law.

‘Are you looking for Lowrie and Caroline, Jimmy? They’re away south to Vidlin. They’ve put in an offer on a house there and want to measure up some of the rooms.’ Her eyes were shining.

‘So they’re coming home?’

‘Isn’t it exciting? I couldn’t let myself believe that they might come back here.’

‘It was George I was after.’

She looked up sharply, but didn’t ask what he might want with her husband. ‘He’s out on the croft somewhere. This time of year he can’t bear to be inside. It’s like a disease for him. A sort of claustrophobia. Maybe it was all that time he spent in the lighthouse. On a rock station you’d be cooped inside for most of your shift. Having to get on with the other men. Sometimes I think it’s given him strange notions about things, made him almost compulsive.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, nothing harmful, Jimmy. Nothing that would lead to murder. He always sits in the same chair, uses the same knife and fork and gets put out if I give someone his mug. If we go into town he has to check three times that the hens have been shut away. In the lighthouse everything was routine. Perhaps there’s a thin line between that and ritual. Superstition. It gets worse as he gets older. Sometimes I think I should get him to see a doctor.’

Perez didn’t know what to say and Grusche seemed not to expect an answer. He just nodded at her and went outside.

George was working in his vegetable garden just like David. Like everyone in the islands with a bit of land at this time of year. He was hoeing between lines of plants, his movements easy and regular and seeming to take no effort.

‘Aye-aye.’ He stopped and rested the hoe against the fence.

‘I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘You’re not doing that, Jimmy. I was ready for a rest.’

‘These stories of Peerie Lizzie. It was your niece who was supposed to have seen her.’

‘Vaila,’ he said. ‘She was last in the line when they were handing out the common sense. Not a bit of malice in her, but she was always kind of daft, even as a bairn.’

‘You don’t believe in the ghost then.’

He didn’t answer for a moment. ‘I was brought up to go to the kirk every Sunday,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure I believe in miracles, either. Only in what I can see with my own eyes.’ But he turned away as he was speaking. Perez remembered what Grusche had said about his superstition and wasn’t sure that he was telling the truth.

‘You’ll have been brought up with stories of Peerie Lizzie too,’ Perez said. ‘Was it one of your relatives who was supposed to have been minding the girl when she wandered off to the shore? I was told she was a Malcolmson.’

‘She was my Aunt Sarah, my father’s older sister.’ He paused. ‘She was only a girl herself when Elizabeth Geldard was drowned. Fifteen years old, taken into the big house to mind the child.’

‘Did she talk about what had happened?’

‘She left the islands soon after the accident,’ George said. ‘When she came back she was an old woman, very frail, and that part of her life was forgotten. There’d always been folk who claimed to see Peerie Lizzie, but by the time she came home nobody realized that she’d been involved.’

‘Why did she leave?’ Perez thought that sudden accidental death couldn’t have been so uncommon in those days in the islands. Not sufficiently rare to force a young girl to flee.

‘The Geldards blamed her,’ George said. ‘And they had money and influence. It would have been hard for her to stay. She went to work for a family in Inverness and married a boy down there. The relationship didn’t last very long, but it seems that she had a child nobody had known about. A woman turned up to her funeral, claiming that my Aunt Sarah was her mother. You can imagine the gossip it caused here.’ He gave a sudden grin. ‘Every woman in the family wanted to invite her into their home to get the full story, but she was very dignified. She drove straight back to Lerwick and got the last plane south. We never heard from her again.’

He took up his hoe and began to push it between the seedlings.

But Perez followed him along the strip of grass left between the beds. ‘Did Eleanor Longstaff contact you about all this? She’d been doing some research into Peerie Lizzie.’

‘She never talked to me about it.’

‘Lowrie then? She might have asked him. As they were such old friends.’

‘If she did, he never mentioned it. You’d need to talk to him about it.’ And George walked away to show that the subject was closed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The fog came and went all afternoon. There was no wind later in the day, but the mist seemed to thin occasionally as if by magic and then, for no apparent reason, returned and was as thick as ever. Polly and Marcus took a trip into Lerwick as Willow had suggested. At first Marcus hadn’t been keen.

‘We don’t have a lot of time. By the time we get there we’ll have to come back. Why don’t we wait until we have a full day to explore?’

But Polly thought she’d go completely mad if she didn’t leave the island. ‘I’d like to look at the museum,’ she said, ‘have a dig around in the archives. We have time enough for that.’

He’d smiled then. ‘Isn’t that a sort of busman’s holiday?’ But he’d gone online to look at timetables and book ferries very quickly and they left almost at once. She thought that he was always happier when he was moving. He talked about settling down and finding a job that would keep him in the country for more than a month at a time, but she thought he’d soon get restless. They’d asked Ian if he’d like to join them, but he refused and Polly sensed that he was pleased to see them drive away. In the house on the beach they were like rats crammed together in a cage.

Lerwick felt like a big town after Unst. The boat to Aberdeen was moored at the ferry terminal. It looked huge, a reminder of the mainland, real-scale cities and real-scale transport. Polly looked at Marcus, wondering if he’d had the same thought as she’d had: they could just drive aboard and escape completely. But he seemed not even to notice it and had his eyes on streets and road signs, and was triumphant when he brought her straight to the new buildings of the arts centre and the museum looking out over the water.

‘What will you do?’ She knew that the museum would bore him. He was only interested in the exotic present.

‘I’ll explore the town. Meet you in the cafe back here for tea? Then I suppose we’ll have to get back.’

‘We could book into a hotel for a night.’ The thought of returning to Unst and the house by the shore already made her feel panicky. She imagined a solid town house in Lerwick, a meal in a good restaurant, then frivolous television in their room. Something to banish thoughts of Eleanor.

He looked at her and she could see that he found the idea appealing too. For a moment she thought he might agree to the plan. ‘Perhaps we’d better not,’ he said at last. ‘We don’t want the police to think we’re being difficult.’

In the main body of the museum there was a small display about Elizabeth Geldard and an oil painting of the girl, sitting at a window, with her hands on her lap looking very demure. She wore winter clothes, a knitted cardigan and a hat, and it was only the long hair that made Polly think of the girl she’d seen on the beach. This child looked rather staid and dull, and Polly couldn’t imagine her twirling on her toes or skipping across the sand. There was no mention of the acquisition of the work, whether it had been a donation or been purchased. A small display board explained the legend of Peerie Lizzie, but Polly learned nothing new from it, except that a song about the girl had been written by Marty Thomson, a local musician.

From the car she’d phoned the archivist, Simon Barr. He’d heard of the Sentiman Library, shared her fascination with folk tales and agreed to see her at once. She found him upstairs in a big, open-plan office, with a view of the Hay’s Dock. She decided this constant presence of water was adding to her unease. She’d never learned to swim and as a child she’d had nightmares about drowning. She hadn’t thought about the dream for years, but since Eleanor’s death it had recurred, just as she was waking, so it stayed with her all day. Now she pictured the sea eating away at the islands, nibbling them piece by piece until there was no land left and the water overwhelmed her. She sat with her back to the window facing Barr’s desk.

‘So you want to know about our Peerie Lizzie,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s quite a recent legend, as these things go. My grandmother worked at Springfield House when she was a girl, though she’s been dead for many years now.’

‘Did she tell you what happened the day Elizabeth was drowned?’

‘She told me her version of the story, but I couldn’t say how much was true and how much she’d made up over the years. She was full of tales and, like a lot of old people, she mixed up the fact and the fiction in her mind, I think.’

‘Did she believe in the ghost?’ Polly found that she was holding her breath.

‘Oh, she claimed to have seen her. She spent all her life in Unst. Before its present owners took it on, Springfield House was empty for years and local folk treated the land as their own, taking their children to picnic in the gardens. According to my grandmother, Lizzie appeared to her when she was picking raspberries there one summer. It was late in the evening and she was on her own. The child was dressed in white and seemed to walk towards her in the walled garden; then she disappeared although the gate was shut.’ He paused and grinned. ‘But don’t believe a word of it. As I told you, my grandmother loved making up stories.’