White Nights (28 page)

The young people had been ignoring the exchange and preparing for their climb. The woman was already at the edge of the cliff, leaning out, held by the nylon rope. Kenny turned away; if he had his back to them, perhaps he could pretend that none of this was happening.

He ran to catch up with the line of people walking slowly across the hill. The dogs chased between them, filling in the gaps. The men had their arms outstretched and whooped and called to move the sheep ahead of them. The ones at the end seemed a long way off, their voices lost in the thin air. Kenny stood beside Edith, who was waving the stick and yelling like the rest of them.

‘What’s going on up there?’ She had to shout to be
heard above the noise of the men, the dogs and the sheep.

‘Some sort of search. I don’t know. I hate it. I hate all this happening so close to home.’

She seemed to be shouting back some words of comfort, but he couldn’t make them out because of the noise.

They had the sheep gathered up in a circle of drystone with a rough wooden gate held across the gap and let them out one at a time for clipping. The old men sat with an animal each, turned on its back, the front legs held firm, and hand-clipped with sure firm bites until the fleece was free. Then the poor bald beast was let loose to run away. The men’s hands were brown and soiled and calloused. Kenny looked at his own and saw that they were going much the same way. Edith’s hands were soft and he thought she’d have a few blisters by the end of the day, but she was just as accurate as the men, and as strong as most of them too. She had a fine deft way with the clippers and she could keep her sheep calm. But she wasn’t as quick as they were. Sometimes they looked over and teased her about how slow she was and she laughed back at them, not minding at all.

At midday she brought out flasks of tea and thick sandwiches made with cheese and a ham which she’d cooked herself. They ate, although their hands were still greasy with lanolin, just rubbing them on the cropped grass to get rid of the worst of the muck. Peter Wilding sat with them, but didn’t join in much. He tried to clip one but held it away from him as if he was scared of it. Edith took it from him and finished it in the end. Kenny thought he was just listening to all the
conversation. It was as if he was making notes in his head. Later he lay back in the grass with his eyes shut. He probably wasn’t used to working in such a physical way.

Then the gate was opened and another animal released. When Edith had finished doing a dainty black ewe, she held the fleece up to show Kenny. ‘I might have a go at spinning this,’ she said, ‘knit something for the baby, a soft toy. What do you think?’ She was always thinking of what she could make for the children, things to remind them of home. In the shed at Skoles there was a skin she’d been preparing for the baby’s bedroom. She’d rubbed it with alum to preserve it; later she’d comb out the wool until it was soft. On the floor of their living room they had three rugs she’d made in the same way.

They finished late in the afternoon. From where they’d been working there had been no view of the Pit o’ Biddista and the climbers. Walking back to the house, Kenny expected Perez and the people to be gone. How long could it take? He hadn’t taken seriously Perez’s offer to help with the sheep. But when they rounded the curve in the land so they could see the cliff ahead of them Perez was still there, and there was a police Land-Rover, which had been driven as far as it could possibly go up the track. People standing in a huddle as if they were waiting for something to happen. Kenny recognized the English detective who had flown up from Inverness.

Again he decided to pretend that none of this was happening and continued on his way towards the house. The old men took his lead and though they shot
glances at the group by the cliff and whispered among themselves they didn’t talk about it to him.

Wilding, though, was too curious just to walk past. He stared at the group of police officers and finally sauntered up to them, all arrogant as if he had as much right to be there as they did.

The rest of them were halfway down the track, too far away to hear the exchange, but they stopped to watch what was happening. In the end Kenny turned to watch too. He would look foolish, striding on down towards the house on his own.

The English detective moved away from the rest of the group and stopped the writer before he could get anywhere close to the edge of the hole. There was a brief conversation, then Wilding was sent away. With a flea in his ear, Kenny thought with some satisfaction.

‘Well?’ Martin asked. ‘What are they all doing up there? Is it the giant’s lassie they’re after?’

Wilding obviously hadn’t heard the story, because he just looked at Martin as if he were soft in the head. The old men chuckled.

‘They won’t tell me anything,’ Wilding said. ‘It’s a crime scene and everyone should keep out. That’s all the man would say. Actually, he was rather rude.’

Perez had watched Kenny Thomson and his team of helpers cross the hill with envy. Bringing in the sheep for clipping reminded him of home. Fair Isle, the furthest south and the most remote island of the Shetland group. Famous for its knitting and for being an area on the shipping forecast. When he’d worked in the city, he’d lie awake at night and listen to the measured voice on the radio.
Fair Isle, Faroes, south-east Iceland. Easterly five to six, light rain, good
. And he’d picture Dave Wheeler, who farmed at Field. The man had come to the Isle after working in the South Atlantic and since Perez could remember had been the met. officer on the island. Before his retirement he’d looked after the airstrip and been one of the firefighters.

At one time Perez had thought Fair Isle was where his future lay. He’d take a croft there and when his father retired he’d become skipper of the mail boat,
The Good Shepherd
. His children would grow up on the isle and know it as well as he had done. Then earlier in the year the opportunity had arisen for him to move back. A croft had become available and he’d have had a good chance of getting it. His mother had been desperate to get him back, but he hadn’t put in the application. Lethargy perhaps. A reluctance to leave
his little house by the water. But more than that. He wasn’t ready yet to give up his work. Policing was a challenge, even in Shetland, he’d realized. And although he’d only just met her, he’d dreamed even then he might get together with Fran. He didn’t have any regrets.

The offer to help Kenny with the clipping had been an impulse, but he’d meant it. He’d enjoy the physical exertion after the stress of the inquiry. It might free his mind, pull out the tightness in his muscles. He turned back to the climbers, hoping that they wouldn’t be long. If Booth’s phone was there, surely they’d find it soon enough. The search area wasn’t huge.

The climbers were a married couple called Sophie and Roger Moore. They’d come to Shetland first as students, liked it and stayed. Sophie was an accountant with Shetland Islands Council; Perez wasn’t sure how Roger made a living. He watched them slide over the edge in turn. They moved slowly, stopping to pass a hand across the ledges where thrift or the mess of a bird’s nest could be hiding the phone they were looking for. When they’d first arrived at the site they’d said it was easy enough, good practice, though Perez had convinced himself that it would be a waste of time for them. He was going through the motions to satisfy Taylor. He couldn’t see that anything would be found. It was a sort of superstition for him, not to be too hopeful at times like this. He was glad Taylor had decided to have a day at his desk, pulling together all the information that had already come in. The wait would drive the Englishman frantic. Perez imagined him standing at the top, shouting ridiculous, meaningless instructions to the climbers below.

When they were out of his view, Perez moved around to the landward side of the Pit, where the grass slope was, so he could see them better across the space. He couldn’t hear what the climbers were saying to each other. They were well down the cliff and although there was only a scattering of kittiwakes there, the birds were making a lot of noise. He thought now that there was probably some law about disturbing the birds in the breeding season. Should he have got permission? The thought distracted him for a moment – the numbers of breeding seabirds had declined, he didn’t want to add to their problems – and when he looked again the couple had reached the floor of the cavern. He moved carefully to the edge of the grass slope and sat, looking down at them. Even here he felt slightly dizzy. The beginning of panic. He had regular nightmares about falling into space, about being sucked to the edge of a cliff.

Roger and Sophie were moving into the tunnel between the hole and the beach. It was dead low water, so there was no danger of being swept out to sea. The channel was narrow, but quite high, certainly tall enough for a man to walk along without stooping. It bulged slightly in the middle and from this view was shaped, Perez thought, like a giant eye of a needle. The bridge of rock that separated the Pit from the shore was about twenty feet thick, so that was how long the channel ran for. In the middle it would be dark, and the climbers had torches. Claustrophobia didn’t hold the same terror for Perez as vertigo, but he was glad he wasn’t with them. They waved to show they were on their way in.

While he waited for them, Perez worried at the
case. The sun was warm. In the far distance occasionally he could hear Kenny’s party calling at the sheep. He needed to find a motive for Booth’s death before he could move forward. Roddy’s could be explained because he’d been a witness to the first murder, or to something leading up to it. But why would a Shetlander want to kill an Englishman who hadn’t set foot on the place for years? It made no sense. He thought it must have been a Shetlander. They’d traced all the outsiders who had been in Biddista that night. That had been the focus for much of the work. The team sitting in the incident room in Lerwick, on the phone for hours at a time. ‘I understand you visited the Herring House on midsummer’s evening. Could you tell me who was with you? What time did you leave? Did you see anything unusual?’ Then the alibis had to be checked and cross-referenced. And they all checked out. Every one.

He must have started to doze, because the shout from below startled him. He realized suddenly how close to the edge he was and could feel his pulse racing. He put his palms flat on the grass at his side, to make sure he was safely anchored to the ground.

‘Jimmy! I think you’d better come down.’ It was Sophie. From this angle she looked all head and no body. Her mouth was open very wide as she yelled to him. A monster from the deep. The giant’s mistress, he thought, remembering the legend.

‘Why?’ He’d given them gloves and plastic evidence bags in case they found the phone.

‘Really, Jimmy, you have to come down. You can manage down the grass, can’t you? You don’t need a rope if you come that way.’

Perez had avoided the climb when Roddy Sinclair was found. Sandy had taken care of the crime scene then. Now he saw he had no choice. Sophie was still looking at him.

He took off his jacket, folded it carefully and placed it on the grass, feeling a little like a man who decides to commit suicide by drowning. Then he slid over the lip of the Pit on to the first of a series of rabbit tracks that crossed the slope. He kept his centre of gravity low and tilted his body into the slope, so one hand was always on the grass. There was no danger of his falling – Sophie would bound down it. He could imagine her confident and upright, jumping from one path to the next, facing forwards all the way down, only needing her heels to grip. He knew he was being painfully slow. Occasionally he stopped and glanced up so he could see how far he’d climbed. He didn’t think it was sensible to look down.

He knew he was approaching the bottom because he could hear Sophie, shouting through into the tunnel to Roger. Her words were blurred by echo, but he could tell she was standing quite close to him. Then he did turn and saw he was only six feet from the ground. He slid it on his backside and landed beside her, one foot slipping on a slimy rock into a pool. There was no direct sunlight there; a strong smell of rotting seaweed, organic and salty. It was somehow prehistoric. He tried not to think about the return to the real world.

‘What have you found?’

‘We didn’t like to touch it. This way.’ She led him into the mouth of the tunnel.

The floor was uneven – shingle, solid rock which
formed crevasses and pools, and small smooth boulders which must have been washed in from the beach. Too late he remembered a directive he’d received a couple of months ago about risk assessment. He wondered what Health and Safety would make of this. Roger and Sophie weren’t even employees.

At this point the tunnel looked like a cave. It must curve further in and the gap leading to the open water must be very narrow, because no natural light showed from the other end. Roger had put on his torch and was waiting for them, haloed in a yellow glow. He was sitting on an outcrop of rock which jutted from the channel wall, eating a bar of chocolate.