Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (9 page)

A young girl came onto the beach. The girl carried a bucket and a spade; she took off her socks and shoes, squatted on the sand and began to dig. Very tidily and with concentration. She seemed old enough to be at school and Polly wondered what she was doing there. Perhaps she was on holiday with her parents, though there was no adult with her. In London it would be a matter of concern to see a child alone, but here perhaps it would be less unusual. It was only when the girl stood up and ran towards the sea that Polly recognized her as the child who’d been dancing on the sand on the night of the hamefarin’. There was the same long hair and skinny limbs. But this time, instead of the white dress, she wore a red pinafore printed with blue butterflies over a blue blouse. It still looked a little old-fashioned and formal for the beach. For a moment Polly couldn’t believe her eyes. It was almost as if she’d started to believe in Eleanor’s notion of the girl as Peerie Lizzie.

She ran into the house to get her jacket. Away from the shelter of the building there was a breeze that felt cold to her, though the child seemed oblivious to the chill. When she reached the shore the girl was still there, but walking away from her towards the Meoness community hall. Perhaps an adult was waiting for her there. She seemed to have covered a considerable distance, though she stopped occasionally to pick up a shell or a piece of driftwood, before dropping it into the bucket. Polly hurried after her without any real idea what she would do if she caught up with her. What would she say to the girl’s parents if they were waiting for her?
My dead friend thought your daughter was a ghost.

The girl turned away from the water and took the path from the beach. Polly thought she would catch up with the child when she got to the road. She would surely stop to put on her socks and sandals, and then Polly could pass her and make a friendly comment that might lead to a conversation. Perhaps she lived in one of the houses along the street between Sletts and the hall. Polly realized that she wanted to confirm Eleanor’s account of what had happened on the afternoon before she died. Suddenly it seemed overwhelmingly important to prove that her friend hadn’t imagined the girl on the beach and her apparent disappearance into the sea.

A sandy path ran beside the Meoness hall and joined the street by the telephone kiosk. Polly came to the corner of the hall and had a view of the road in both directions. She’d expected to find the child there, sitting on the verge, cleaning her feet, but there was no sign either of the child or of any waiting adults. Polly hadn’t heard a car. The girl had completely disappeared from view.

There were two houses on the road that led back to Sletts. Polly walked fast, peering into each building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl inside. Lack of sleep and confusion about Eleanor’s death were making her question her own judgement. It was as if the silver light of the simmer dim was seeping into her brain, drowning her reason. Had she imagined the girl with the bucket and spade, the dancing child at the wedding party? The first building was single-storeyed, modern, but built to the same pattern as the older homes on the island: a storm porch in the front, with rooms to either side. On the grass to the back of the house there was a climbing frame with a swing attached to it. A rotary washing line had a pair of men’s jeans hanging from it. This was a family home. The obvious explanation was that the girl had hurried along the road and gone inside. Polly thought that she’d overreacted, running out of Sletts and chasing down the beach. The girl must have noticed her and might even have thought she posed some kind of danger. News of Eleanor’s death would have got out by now and children might have been told to be wary of strangers. Perhaps that was why the girl had disappeared so quickly. What could she do now? Eleanor would have knocked at the door and charmed the residents so that they’d have invited her in, made tea for her and laughed when she explained that she’d thought the child might be a spirit. But Polly was more timid.

Her phone rang. She’d checked it occasionally, but there’d been no signal. It was Marcus, apparently frantic.

‘Where are you?’ Anxiety made him sound almost angry.

‘I’ve just come out for a walk.’ She turned her back on the house where the child might live. ‘I felt locked up in that house. Like it’s a prison.’

‘There’s a murderer out there.’ He was almost stuttering. She was surprised. She’d thought that she suited him because she was so undemanding and had made an effort to be kind to the mother he so obviously worshipped. She hadn’t thought he cared for her so much. Why would he, when everyone adored him. He could choose from anyone She loved
him
with a passion that took her breath away and shocked her, but had never imagined that the emotion might be reciprocated. ‘You could have put yourself in danger. Where are you? I’ll come and meet you. The detectives want to take your statement.’

She wondered briefly if that was why Marcus was so disturbed: she’d inconvenienced the detectives. But he wasn’t the sort of person to be concerned about that sort of thing. He didn’t usually care what people thought of him.

She told him she would meet him on the road and continued her walk. The next house was much older, dilapidated. The roof was made from turf and she thought nobody could live there. There was an outhouse attached, with broken windows, and the garden was overgrown with long weeds. But as she walked past she thought she saw a white face staring out at her. The glass was so grubby she couldn’t make out any other details, and as soon as she saw it, it vanished. Then she saw Marcus’s car approaching.

Polly didn’t mention her chase across the shore. She would have looked foolish. When she climbed into the passenger seat beside him he took her hand and gripped it tight. ‘You made me so worried,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

He dropped her at Springfield House and said he would wait for her in the car outside; he had a book. Polly thought that he too was finding the atmosphere at Sletts, Ian’s grief and his fury unbearable. It seemed to her that this tall, symmetrical house, so out of place on the bare island, was very similar to the place where Marcus had grown up. He’d taken her there about a month before. She’d expected him to have been brought up somewhere grander than her own parents’ home, of course. She’d imagined a detached house in a leafy suburban street – stockbroker belt, with a local golf course and perhaps a view of the Thames. But his family home was even more distinguished: a small manor house set in a couple of acres of its own grounds, a mini-version of the National Trust properties she’d been dragged to as a child. As Marcus had opened the door to let her in she’d heard her own mother’s voice in her head, the same words that had been spoken at every visit to a new stately home:
Mind, lass, this would take a bit of cleaning.
Instead there had been
his
mother, very gracious, offering tea in the drawing room. And as she’d found herself flattening out her accent and taking care not to use dialect words, it had felt like a betrayal, though her parents had always wanted her to get on and would have been as proud as punch to see her there as a guest.

The two police officers – the tall, scruffy woman and the dark, still man – were waiting for her in a sunny room at the front of the house. They offered her coffee from a Thermos jug and home-made biscuits. It felt a bit like the interview she’d had for the job at the Sentiman Library, although then the people asking the questions had been elderly trustees, eccentric and wanting her to do well.

‘Sorry to take you through all these details again.’

Polly hadn’t caught the woman’s name when they’d first been introduced and felt too embarrassed to ask now. She loved her work in the library because there she avoided the small humiliations that had seemed to make up her life before she was appointed to the post. She wondered how other people faced them. Marcus was so confident that he sailed through life convinced that everybody loved him. Now she smiled and said that it was perfectly fine and she realized why they had to ask.

‘You and Eleanor have been friends for a long time,’ the detective said.

‘Since our first day at college. I’m not quite sure how we got on so well. We were very different. I was so scared – the first one of my family ever to have gone to university. And she took it all in her stride, a star in the University Dramatic Society from the first audition, universally popular. I’m not sure how I would have survived that first year without Eleanor and Caroline.’

‘She confided in you?’

Polly thought about that. ‘Certainly she used to. Boys and affairs, and worries about work. I was never any competition, you see. Once she married Ian, of course we didn’t see quite as much of each other.’

‘And she had him to confide in then.’ The detective smiled. It hadn’t been quite a question, but still Polly felt compelled to answer.

‘Yes, I suppose she did.’

‘Or perhaps you don’t think Ian was as sympathetic about Eleanor’s problems as you would have been?’ The female detective smiled again. And waited.

Polly felt herself blushing. ‘A miscarriage is sometimes difficult for a man to understand,’ she said. ‘Eleanor had a horrible experience, especially the second time.’

‘And she talked to you about it?’

‘I went round to her house as soon as I heard.’ Polly remembered the evening. It had been raining. The sort of monsoon rain that got her drenched as soon as she left the car, and bounced off the pavements and spilled over the gutters. Ian had opened the door to her and at first she’d thought he wouldn’t let her in, that he’d keep her waiting, soaking, on the doorstep, but he’d stood aside eventually. Eleanor had been in her dressing gown on the sofa. No make-up and looking old, so in the first instant Polly had thought that Cilla, Eleanor’s mother, had been sitting there. She looked up and Polly saw that she’d been crying.

‘Oh, Pol, it was
horrible.
I had to give birth to it. The pain of labour and nothing to show at the end.’

‘She was upset,’ the detective said. Another almost-question interrupting the memory.

‘Of course she was upset.’ Polly knew she was being waspish. ‘She’d carried the baby through the difficult, dangerous time. She’d allowed herself to believe that everything would be fine. She’d had a scan and knew that it would be a girl, and had started designing a fancy nursery. She was enjoying being pregnant. Then suddenly, without any warning, there was no child. At least there was a child, but it was dead.’

‘So no wonder she fantasized about seeing little girls disappearing into the sea.’

‘No!’ Polly was becoming outraged on her friend’s behalf. She paused for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, what’s your name?’

The woman seemed unfazed. ‘Reeves. Chief Inspector Willow Reeves.’

‘Then let me explain, Chief Inspector Reeves. Eleanor was depressed after the miscarriages, but she wasn’t psychotic. She wasn’t seeing strange images or hearing voices. There
was
a girl on the beach. She didn’t disappear into the sea, but she was dancing on the beach. I saw her at the party in the last of the light, just as Eleanor had described her. And again this afternoon, playing on the sand. So she was no figment of Eleanor’s imagination.’

There was a silence. Motes of dust floated in a shaft of sunlight. In the corner Inspector Perez was writing notes. After her outburst the room seemed very peaceful. Polly fought back the desire to apologize for overreacting.

‘Last night,’ Willow said, ‘did you leave the house for any reason?’

Polly shook her head.

‘You were the last person to see her alive, and she was still sitting outside?’

‘Yes.’ Polly looked at him and wondered if she should mention the figure she’d seen in the mist on the tideline. But then the detectives might think she was psychotic too. ‘I expected Eleanor to follow me into the house.’

‘But you didn’t hear her? You don’t know if that happened?’

‘No,’ Polly said. ‘I didn’t hear anything until I woke up the next morning.’ She paused because she was embarrassed by the admission. ‘I don’t sleep well. Occasionally I take sleeping tablets.’

‘And Mr Wentworth?’ Willow seemed to be staring out of the window. ‘Was he still there when you woke up?’

‘Of course he was! He went to bed with me.’

‘In the same bed?’

‘No, there were two singles. One room was a double and the other a twin. We tossed a coin for the double, and the Longstaffs won.’ Polly thought that seemed like an eternity ago. Their arrival at Sletts, bursting into the house and checking out the space. Laughing as they fought over who would get the double bed.

‘So he might have left the room without you hearing. To get a glass of water perhaps, or to see the sun coming up.’ The detective gave a gentle smile, the sort Polly might have given to encourage a timid reader to ask more detailed questions about the background to a story.

‘I’m really not sure where you’re going with this.’ Polly felt a mounting anger. The trivial questions seemed to have nothing to do with Eleanor.

‘I’m saying that you’re assuming Mr Wentworth was in bed all night, but really we can’t be certain, can we?’ Willow paused. ‘Any one of you could have left Sletts that night without the others knowing.’

Chapter Twelve

The room was hot because it was in full sunlight. Perez sat in the corner listening to Willow and Polly talking and for a moment he struggled to concentrate. He was thinking about Cassie and hoping that Duncan had seen her all the way into school. Then he told himself he was being ridiculous: Cassie would be perfectly safe and he should stop being over-protective; she’d end up resenting him. He returned his focus to the woman who was being interviewed. Polly puzzled him. She was timid, so much the stereotypical librarian that it was hard to believe in a friendship between her and the exuberant film-maker. Had she felt frustrated at always being in the shadow of Eleanor, with her beauty and her powerful personality?

Perez was just about to ask the woman about her work when Willow put the question for him, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘What do you do for a living, Ms Gilmour?’