Текст книги "Red Bones"

Автор книги: Ann Cleeves

Соавторы: Ann Cleeves
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Chapter Thirty-eight

Sandy stumbled down the road towards Setter. Perez had offered to take him right up to the house, but Sandy thought he’d put his boss out quite enough tonight. He’d already made a fool of himself. It was a dark, damp night, much like the one when he’d found Mima. He ignored the picture of the woman’s body, hardly more than a pile of cloth-covered bones lying in the rain, that forced its way into his head, tried to concentrate instead on avoiding the pot-holes and not falling flat on his face in the mud.

As he rounded the bend in the track he saw there was a light in the house. Had he left it on? He didn’t see that he could have done: it had been early afternoon when he’d gone down the island to the Pier House. And this wasn’t the white glow of the strip light in Mima’s kitchen, with its plastic case greasy and filled with dead flies. This was flickering and red.

Sandy broke into a run and he was already wheezing when he got to the house. He opened the door and the heat hit him, scorching his face. There was thick smoke that stung his eyes and made him choke. He tried to push his brain into gear, to remember the training he’d been given in fighting fire. The blaze had started in the kitchen and still hadn’t taken hold of the rest of the house. It was licking up the paint on the cupboards and the wooden panels under the window were alight. There was a towel on the table and he threw it over the flame on the cupboard, smothering the fire, hitting out the air from it. He filled the washing-up bowl with water and threw it over the flames by the window. There was a hissing, but the wood was still burning. He filled the bowl again. This time the fire was doused. He was left heaving for breath, his heart pounding.

He heard a nose outside. A strange kind of cry, like an animal in pain. He stood at the door and looked out. Anger stopped him feeling frightened. Anger and stupidity.

‘Who is it?’ he yelled. ‘What the fuck are you doing out there?’ He wanted to hit someone, to smash in the face whoever had desecrated his grandmother’s home.

A figure moved out of the shadow of the cowshed. His father stood in front of him. He looked small and old. For the first time Sandy saw how like Mima Joseph was physically. The same small frame and wiry strength.

‘Did you see him?’ Sandy demanded. ‘Did you see who did this?’

Joseph didn’t speak.

‘You stay here,’ Sandy said. ‘The fire hasn’t long started and there wasn’t a car. I might catch him.’

‘It was me.’

Something in his father’s voice stopped Sandy short. He’d started to move down the track, but now he turned back.

‘What are you saying?’ Sandy was still wearing his jacket and felt bulky, huge even, looking out at his father.

‘I set fire to your grandmother’s house.’

They stared at each other. Sandy knew he should make sense of this, but he couldn’t. Even when he was sober as a judge he would never make sense of it. The drizzle had stopped and there was a faint fat moon showing through the mist.

‘I don’t want to go inside,’ Sandy said. ‘Not with the kitchen the way it is.’ He walked round to the back of the house, past the dig to the dyke looking over the loch. The moonlight was reflected on the water. He didn’t look behind him but he knew his father was following. They leaned against the dyke to talk, not looking at each other.

Sandy had questioned suspects in his time. It was a part of the job he enjoyed. When he was taking statements from offenders or witnesses he was the boss, in control. It wasn’t like that for much of his life. Now he wished his father would take the lead, but Joseph just stood there in silence.

‘Why would you do that?’ Sandy asked at last, not loud, not in his bossy police voice, but with a kind of desperation. ‘Why would you set fire to your own house?’

‘Because I couldn’t face anyone else living here.’

‘Is this to do with that Norwegian?’ A sudden idea. If he weren’t still a bit pissed Sandy didn’t think he’d have had the nerve to bring the subject up.

‘What do you know about him?’

‘I know that your father found him in bed with your mother, took him outside and shot him.’

‘There isn’t much else to know,’ Joseph said, and then, in a quiet voice. ‘And I’m not even sure that story’s true.’

But Sandy wasn’t ready to listen to that. ‘How did you find out about it?’ he demanded. ‘Did Mima tell you when you were a boy?’ He wondered what it would be like to discover that your father was a murderer. How would Mima pass on that bit of information? Would she tell it as a bedtime story along with the tales of the trows?

‘She didn’t tell me at all.’

‘Who did then?’

‘It was always going to come out,’ Joseph said. Sandy shot a look at him. The moonlight turned his beard and his hair to silver. ‘You can’t keep a good story like that a secret on a place like this. It was while I was at school. The little school here in Whalsay. There was a scrap. You know how boys are. Andrew Clouston came out with it then. A fit of temper, a way of hurting me. He was never much of a fighter when he was young. He was a good bit older than me but a coward. He must have got the tale from his father, old Andy. I ran straight out of the schoolyard to ask Mother if it was true.’ Joseph paused. ‘She was out here, planting neeps, her skirt hitched up and big boots on her feet. I’d been running and I was red, my face all covered with tears and snot. “Why didn’t you tell me my dad was a murderer?” I shouted it out at her. She straightened her back and looked at me. “I’m not sure that he was.”’

Joseph looked up at Sandy. ‘I was angry. As angry as you are now. I started screaming at her, asking what she meant. She stayed very calm. “They took the man away,” she said. “I was never certain what happened to him and your father would never discuss it. I hoped they took him across to Lunna, maybe beat him up a bit. I never knew he was dead. Even when the stories started. I should have told you. But I hoped you wouldn’t have to find out.”’ And she carried on shaking the seed down the row, her shoulders bent and her eyes on the soil.’

‘Did she ever talk to you about it properly?’

‘Later that evening. She’d had a couple of drams. She talked about the Norwegian: “They called him Per. I never knew his second name. He was tall and blond and he treated me kindly. Your father was an exciting man, but he was never kind to me.” That was what she said.’

‘Where did they bury him?’ Sandy asked.

‘I don’t know. I told you, she didn’t even know he was dead. We didn’t discuss it.’

‘You must have thought about it.’

The mist had cleared even more and now there were just a few threads of cloud flying in front of the moon. It was so light it felt like the simmer dim of a midsummer night.

‘When I was a teenager I got it into my head that the Norwegian could have been my father,’ Joseph said. ‘I heard things about my real dad I didn’t like so much. There were stories he beat Mima up. But the Norwegian couldn’t have been my father. The dates don’t work. I wasn’t born in the war.’

And you look so like Jerry, Sandy thought, remembering the photo that stood in Setter. You couldn’t be anyone else’s child.

‘Do you think your father was drowned at sea?’ Sandy asked. The question came into his head unbidden.

Now Joseph turned. ‘That’s what I was always told,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand why you have to get rid of Setter,’ Sandy said. Was he being stupid? Too thick to understand? ‘Why now? When you were so set against selling it, when you hate the idea so much that you’re prepared to set fire to it, to get the insurance instead of selling it on?’ Because it seemed to Sandy that money must come into it somehow. Money was always important in Whalsay.

‘That’s not my story to tell,’ Joseph said. ‘You’ll have to ask your mother about that. Now come home. You can’t stay in Setter the state that it’s in.’

‘I’ll tell Mother it was me,’ Sandy said. ‘A chip pan. She knows I was drinking.’

Joseph didn’t say anything. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder and they walked together back to Utra.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Sandy had to suffer a lecture from Evelyn the next morning about the evils of drinking and frying chips in the middle of the night. ‘You could have been killed. You could have burned the house to the ground!’ He thought about his father and made a pretence of looking contrite.

He hadn’t slept well. The amount he’d had to drink, you’d have thought he’d be out like a light, but ideas had been churning round in his head all night. He’d tried to rerun the conversation with his father. The earlier part of the evening he remembered fine: drinking in the bars in Lerwick, his arm round the shoulders of that fat lassie, the one married to the soothmoother who worked in the canning factory. Then turning up like a fool on Perez’s doorstep. He’d been pretty sober by the time they got back to Whalsay. At least, he thought he had been. But the details of finding the fire, standing with Joseph in the moonlight by the loch, all that seemed harder to pin down. It was as if he’d dreamed it all. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember the way his father had been last night.

Evelyn put a bacon sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of him. Joseph was already out; he’d been gone when Sandy got up.

‘Will you not sit down and have some breakfast with me?’ he asked. His mother was busy with three things at once as usual. She buzzed round the kitchen like a bluebottle trapped in a jar.

‘I had my breakfast hours ago.’

‘Then just sit down and have a coffee!’

She looked at him strangely but she did as he said.

‘Why has my father changed his mind about selling Setter?’

‘He realized it made sense. What would he want with an old house?’ Sandy recognized the tone. She was all bluster and bravado, like some teenage lad who’d stolen a car and driven it into a ditch.

Sandy shook his head. ‘He loves the place. He grew up there. He doesn’t want it full of strangers.’

‘That’s sentiment,’ Evelyn said. ‘You can’t eat sentiment.’

‘He said you’d tell me what this was all about.’

She paused for a beat, stared at him sadly for a moment. ‘Oh Sandy, you’re the last person I could tell.’

It was as if she’d slapped him in the face.

The phone rang then and his mother went to answer it. She came back frowning. ‘That was your Auntie Jackie. She wants to know if you could go up to the big house. Andrew’s fidgeting to talk to you, she says.’

‘Aye. Why not? I’ll walk over.’ He knew he was a coward but he couldn’t wait to get out of the house.

Walking up the track to the Clouston place, he did feel better. There was a wheatear bouncing along the stone wall and skylarks singing in the field beyond. He found Jackie in the kitchen. The table was full of clutter – bags of flour, sugar and oats, tins of syrup and treacle. ‘You look busy. Is this for something special?’

‘Evelyn’s asked me to do some baking for her grand do in the hall,’ Jackie said. ‘I thought I’d make a start today. Anna’s helping me out.’ Then Sandy saw that Anna Clouston was there too, sitting in the corner. She was breastfeeding the baby. You couldn’t see exactly what was going on because she was wearing a loose jumper, but he felt embarrassed just the same, felt his face colour. He turned away.

‘As you see,’ Anna said, ‘I’m not helping very much at the moment.’

‘I’ve told her she should give the bairn a bottle.’ Jackie began to beat together a lump of butter and some sugar. ‘He might start to sleep at night. He’s probably starving.’

‘He’s fine,’ Anna said. ‘He won’t be a baby for long. I don’t mind a bit of disturbance for a while. I don’t mind putting myself out for my child.’ The implication was clear: she thought Jackie was selfish.

Sandy thought this was how women fought. With civilized words carrying poison.

‘Where’s Andrew?’ Because it had come to him that the room seemed quite different and that was because of his uncle’s absence. Andrew usually sat in his chair by the stove, a permanent fixture, like the shiny American fridge and the china dog on the dresser. Huge and imposing, he seldom spoke but somehow made his presence felt.

‘He’s in the lounge. We’re having one of the bedrooms decorated and I’ve asked him to clear out some junk. He’s found some photos and thought you might be interested. Go on through.’

Andrew was sitting in one of the big armchairs with his back to the view. There was a pile of photograph albums on the coffee table in front of him. He looked up when he heard Sandy come into the room and smiled. He didn’t speak. Sandy found it hard to imagine him as a boy, scrapping with Joseph in the school playground. He had fought with words too, Sandy thought. Like the women battling in the kitchen over a baby barely a month old.

‘You remember Jerry,’ Sandy said. ‘My grandfather, Jerry Wilson.’

Andrew screwed up his face in concentration. ‘I don’t remember so much these days.’ The words came out as a series of stutters.

Sandy looked at him. He thought the lack of memory could be kind of convenient. ‘But you told me the story about him. About him killing the Norwegian man during the war.’

Andrew frowned and nodded.

‘How did he die?’ He’d asked Joseph the same question but had no real answer.

‘He was killed in an accident at sea. He was out fishing with my father. There was a storm. A freak wave that turned the boat over. He was drowned.’

‘But your father was saved.’

‘He was a stronger swimmer and he got hold of the upturned boat. He tried to hold on to Jerry Wilson, but he lost his grip.’

‘Are you sure that’s true? It wasn’t just another of the island stories? You know how that happens. People make things up. Like the stories you told about my grandfather being a murderer.’

There was a moment while they stared at each other. Sandy could hear the gulls on the roof and the sheep on the grass by the shore.

‘This isn’t a made-up story,’ Andrew said. ‘I was there when your grandfather died.’

‘You would have been a child!’

‘I was ten years old. Old enough to go fishing with my father. We just had the small boat then.’

‘How did you survive when my grandfather didn’t?’

‘Don’t you see?’ Andrew fixed him with his blue, staring eyes. ‘My father couldn’t save the both of us. He chose to save me. You can’t blame him for that.’

And Sandy supposed that was true. A man was always going to save his son ahead of his friend.

‘Was Jerry’s body ever washed up?’

‘Not here. Not that I heard.’

‘I wondered if his remains had been buried at Setter.’ Sandy had been thinking about that in the night. It was one explanation for his father’s reluctance to let the place go.

Andrew looked up at him. ‘No, I never heard anything like that.’

‘Shall we look at these photos then?’

‘Aye, why not?’

But Sandy was still haunted by thoughts of the past, of buried secrets. ‘Did you ever hear what they did with the dead Norwegian?’

Andrew didn’t respond.

‘The Norwegian who came over with the Bus,’ Sandy said. He found himself becoming frustrated again by Andrew’s slowness. He wondered how Jackie and Ronald managed to keep so patient. ‘Mima’s lover. What happened to him?’

Andrew said nothing. Sandy remembered the sort of man he’d once been, big and loud, easy to rouse to anger. Mima had once said; ‘Andrew Clouston has a tempestuous nature. Like a storm at sea.’ Sometimes she came out with things like that. There was no sign of Andrew’s tempestuousness now. Sandy thought he was more like a boat with a bust engine, becalmed and useless.

‘Let’s look at the photos,’ Sandy said, giving up the struggle to force an answer.

He opened the album and recognized the first picture straight away. It was the one from the wall in Mima’s bedroom with the women who were carrying peat and knitting at the same time.

‘Do you know them, Andrew? Who are they?’

For the first time since he’d come into the room, Andrew seemed aware of what was happening. He pointed to the woman on the left. ‘I know her. That’s your grandmother.’

‘Not Mima! She was never a knitter!’

‘No, no, no.’ Andrew was frustrated by his lack of fluency. ‘Evie. They called her Evie. She was Evelyn’s mother.’

And now Sandy could see the likeness. He’d only known his maternal grandmother as an old woman. But the family resemblance was there. He could see Evelyn in the woman’s sturdy build, the determined look on her face. This is where I come from, he thought.

Andrew had lost interest in the picture and turned the page of the album. He stared at the next photograph, seemed completely lost in his memories.

‘Who’s that then, Andrew? Is it someone you recognize?’ Sandy moved closer to the man so he could get a better look at the book.

The picture was of two men, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning out at the camera. They wore elaborate hand-knitted jerseys, baggy trousers and caps. The sun must have been in their eyes because they were squinting. Sandy thought it had been taken on the shore at Lindby, because he recognized the bit of drystone wall in the background.

‘Who is it, Andrew?’ he said again when there was no immediate reply. ‘Is one of them your father?’

‘That’s my father.’ The older man stuck a finger on to one of the figures. ‘That must have been taken when I was very young. That’s Jerry Wilson.’

Sandy could see now that the man on the right was his grandfather. There was the same quirky smile as in the photo that had stood in Mima’s kitchen. He thought now it looked a bit cruel. This was a man who might make fun of you, so it sounded like teasing but was hurtful all the same.

A picture of two friends who had gone fishing, and only one came back. With his ten-year-old son.

‘I should get home,’ Sandy said. ‘My mother will be sending out search parties. Thank you for showing me the pictures.’ Is that all he wanted me to see? Sandy thought. Is this why he dragged me up here? Or was it all Jackie’s idea? Maybe she wanted to do her baking in peace.

Sandy took his arm and helped Andrew out of the chair. If I ever get like this, I hope they shoot me. Or I have the courage to throw myself over a cliff. But he never thought he would get like that. He was young and the idea was unthinkable. The old man moved slowly to the corner window. From there they could see Setter, and beyond the house the trenches of the dig.

‘They never buried that Norwegian man there,’ Andrew said. ‘They took his body out to sea in Jerry Wilson’s boat and they threw him overboard. That’s what my father told me.’

Chapter Forty

Thursday morning. Perez shaved carefully. The bathroom was cold and he wiped condensation from the mirror to check it was properly done. This was a special day: Fran would be home. He would meet her and Cassie from the airport and take them back to Ravenswick. He felt nervous and excited, as if there was something illicit in this meeting, as if he already had a wife and Fran was his mistress. He couldn’t understand it, especially as he knew he wouldn’t spend the evening with her. Later, after dropping them home, he’d have to go to Whalsay.

The Whalsay trip was work and unavoidable. Fran would understand that; work was important to her too. She wouldn’t have a tantrum and make a scene, but she wouldn’t put herself out for him either. She wouldn’t wait up for him with a bottle of champagne and sexy underwear. There was no guarantee he’d be back that evening. She’d learned that when he was working there were nights when he didn’t get home. She’d take herself off to bed and when he joined her, if she was asleep, he wasn’t sure he’d wake her. He wasn’t sure he had that right.

Perez thought today would mark the end of the investigation, one way or another. He’d woken to fog, so he couldn’t see beyond the Victoria Pier from his living-room window and his first thought was that the planes would be cancelled and there would be no way in for Fran or Gwen James. The star of Evelyn’s show would be absent and Perez would have another day to wait for the woman he adored. Then in a matter of minutes, in the time it took to make a pot of tea, the sun had burned the cloud away and now the weather was perfect – clear and sunny and warm as most days in midsummer. Eating his breakfast he saw a puffin flying low over the water. The first of the season. He thought he should see it as a good omen but he still felt jittery.

In his office he took a phone call from Val Turner.

‘Jimmy, just to let you know that I’m going into Whalsay this morning. I’ll see you in the community hall this evening. It’s all set.’

He tried to make an appointment to talk to the Fiscal but she’d taken a couple of days’ leave at short notice. There was no explanation and he realized again how little people knew about her. She managed her privacy in a way that nobody else of note in Shetland could. Although he didn’t like her much, Perez felt isolated; he missed Sandy’s blundering presence too. In previous cases he’d had Roy Taylor from Inverness to share responsibility and anxiety with. It hadn’t always been an easy relationship but Perez had valued Taylor’s bluntness, his common sense. I take my work too seriously, he thought. I make everything complicated. I need someone else to set me straight and keep things real.

Later he phoned Sandy’s mobile and heard Evelyn’s voice giving orders in the background before Sandy even spoke.

‘How’re things?’

‘It’s a madhouse here. You’d think my mother was hosting the bloody Oscars, not a history lecture in the Lindby Community Hall.’

Perez was just about to say that he’d see Sandy that evening, but the Whalsay man continued talking.

‘I went to see Andrew yesterday. According to him that Norwegian wasn’t buried at Setter at all. After he was killed they took him out in a boat and dropped him over the side.’

‘You said “they” took him out in the boat,’ Perez said. ‘Who are “they”?’ And if that’s true, what is the fragment of more recent bone Val Turner says they found at Setter?

‘I’m not sure. I think it was Jerry Wilson and Andrew’s father. They were friends. Close friends.’ Sandy paused. ‘Andrew’s father was out with Jerry when he drowned.’ There was a silence. Perez waited for Sandy to continue, could almost hear the strain over the phone as his colleague struggled to find the right words. ‘Andrew was there too,’ Sandy went on. ‘He was ten years old. It sounds as if that was why Jerry didn’t make it. Andrew’s father couldn’t get them both back and chose to save his son.’

Perez had planned to have a late lunch in the bar of the Sumburgh House Hotel. He would rather wait there than in the airport. It always looked desperate, being in the airport too early, desperate or neurotic. But driving past the runway he took a detour to Grutness, the jetty where the Good Shepherd, the Fair Isle mailboat, put in. To day was boat day and if he were quick he’d have time for a word with his father and some of the other boys in the crew before they set off back to the Isle. The Perez family had run the mailboat for as long as anyone could remember. When Jimmy had been growing up his grandfather had been skipper; now it was his father’s turn. Perez wondered who would take it over when his father came to retire.

He arrived at the pier just as the men were loading the boat. There was a car to go on. It was being winched into position as Perez drove down the road. The boxes of supplies for the shop were already in the hold. A couple of passengers stood waiting to be allowed on board: an elderly birdwatcher with binoculars round his neck and a young woman whom Perez recognized. He thought she worked at the observatory. Although he couldn’t make out her words he could tell she was joking with the crew. She had long black hair, curly and unruly. She threw back her head and laughed.

When he got out of his car his father jumped ashore. His hair was still dark and he was fit and strong, but his face looked older, as if it didn’t belong to his body.

‘Well, Jimmy, are you coming home with us?’ He could never tell what his father was thinking. There always seemed to be an element of recrimination or challenge in his words. Now Perez wondered if he was implying that he didn’t get home often enough. Or that he had an easy sort of job if he could decide on the spur of the moment to spend a few days with the family. He told himself he was being ridiculous and his father had meant neither of those things. He was just asking a question. Perez was always too sensitive where his father was concerned.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m picking someone up from the airport and I’m early.’

‘You should get home more often,’ his father said. ‘Bring your new woman to see us.’

Perez had avoided taking Fran to Fair Isle. His parents had met her, but only when they came to Lerwick on their way south. Perez was worried that she’d be frightened off by their expectations, their desire that he should have a son to carry on the family name. Without a boy, he would be the last Perez in Shetland.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Maybe I will. Not over the summer. Fran will be busy with an exhibition. We’ll come in the autumn.’ It wasn’t something he could put off much longer than that. Looking at the men he’d grown up with, laughing together as they passed the boxes and the mail sacks from the pier to the boat, he had a pang of regret. That could have been him. He’d had the opportunity to take up a life on the island but he’d turned it down. Now it seemed a simple and tempting alternative to the evening ahead of him.

He stood and watched the boat until it was out of sight. The water was calm but there was a bank of cloud on the horizon and soon that swallowed up the vessel. It became blurred like a ghost ship and then it disappeared. It would take the Shepherd more than three hours to get home. Fair Isle wasn’t like Whalsay. There was no roll-on-roll-off ferry every half hour. It was the most isolated inhabited island in the UK. They’d been taught that at school. He still thought of the place as home.

When he got to the airport Sandy was already there. Early too. scared of messing up the task of collecting Hattie’s mother. He looked grey and tired, sitting at one of the tables outside the shop clutching a mug of coffee. Perez bought a coffee and a sandwich and joined him.

‘I can’t make sense of it all,’ Sandy said. ‘You ken there’s that saying about skeletons in cupboards. A family’s past coming back to haunt it. That’s what it means, right?’

Perez nodded.

‘This is about bones in the land. Old, red bones. But I don’t understand how they matter after all these years.’

‘Red?’ Perez had a fanciful picture of bones steeped in blood.

‘My mother says that’s the colour they go when they’ve been in the earth for a long time.’

‘They’re like the stories you heard as a child and which stay at the back of your mind,’ Perez said. ‘Hard to forget.’

They went to the big glass window near Arrivals and watched the plane come in, the people walking down the ladder and on to the Tarmac. Fran and Cassie were among the last off and Perez felt the quiver of anxiety in his stomach. Perhaps she wasn’t there. Perhaps at the last minute she’d changed her mind and decided the city suited her better.

‘That’s Gwen James,’ Sandy said. And although he couldn’t remember ever seeing her on the television, Perez thought he would have picked her out from the rest of the passengers. She wore a long black coat almost to her ankles, black boots. She carried a leather holdall and it seemed she had no other luggage, because she walked straight past the carousel to Sandy and held out her hand.

Perez had spoken to her the evening before and wanted to introduce himself, but at that point he was distracted by the sight of Fran and Cassie getting off the plane. Fran was grinning and waving like crazy. He waved back, tried not to beam like a madman. There was something about her not quite as he remembered. A different haircut, a new pair of baseball boots, pink and covered with sequins. He wondered if she’d wear them when he took her to Fair Isle and what his father would make of them.

‘This is my boss,’ Sandy was saying. ‘Jimmy Perez.’

‘We’ve talked on the phone.’ Gwen James had the same jazz singer’s voice that Perez remembered.

‘Are you sure you’re happy with everything we have planned?’ Perez couldn’t understand how she could be so poised, so calm.

‘I need to know what happened,’ she said.

‘The car’s outside,’ Sandy said awkwardly. ‘I’ll get you back to Whalsay.’

‘And I’ll see you again this evening, Inspector Perez?’

‘Oh yes, you’ll see me then.’

Sandy picked up her bag and started walking quickly to the exit. Suddenly Perez realized he was hoping to get the woman out of the terminal before Cassie bounded up to them with her chat and hugs. He didn’t want to distress Gwen James with memories of Hattie as a young girl. Oh Sandy, Perez thought, how you’ve grown up.

Cassie couldn’t wait for her bag to arrive. She climbed through the barrier and threw her arms around Perez’s waist. As he picked her up and lifted her into the air he saw Gwen and Sandy disappearing through the revolving door and into the car park.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Have you missed me?’

Then Fran came up to them too, dragging a huge suitcase, laden with carrier bags, and it was she who answered.

‘We haven’t, have we, Cass? Hardly at all.’

‘Yes we have. Mum told everyone how much she missed you. She was really boring. She kept saying she wanted to come home.’

‘Well, we’d better get you back then, to the old house in Ravenswick.’ He set Cassie on the floor and took the handle of Fran’s suitcase. At that moment he thought he’d do anything to look after this family and keep it together. He’d kill for it. ‘Didn’t you have to pay excess baggage on this?’

‘Nah, I chatted up that pretty boy on check-in at Dyce.’

It was then, as they walked together towards the exit, that Perez realized that another person connected with Whalsay had been on the Aberdeen plane. Standing at the car rental counter, filling in a form, frowning slightly, was Paul Berglund.