But since yesterday evening he’d been thinking that he might get out in the boat today after all. He didn’t say anything to Edith. She worked so hard and he felt like a boy considering playing truant from school.
She finished the toast on her plate, then she was away into the little bedroom, which had once been Ingirid’s room and which Edith now used as an office, to gather up her papers into her bag. He walked outside with her and kissed her before watching her drive off.
He’d intended to do a couple of hours with the neeps before getting out the boat, but found himself making the short walk down to the beach, to the hut where he kept the outboard and his lines and pots. There was a little breeze. Easterly. He wondered for a moment if he wanted company after all, and started thinking who might be free to go out with him. Martin Williamson was a pleasant young man, but most days he put in an hour in the shop before he started working in the cafe at the Herring House. He stopped for a moment and in the silence heard the puffins on the headland beyond the pier. There were fewer than there’d been when he was a boy, but still enough for him to hear them chattering as he approached.
He walked across the shingle that separated the sand from the road. It was a bit of a short-cut, but he made sure he watched his feet as he went. Once he’d ricked his ankle here and it had been painful for days. He stopped when the Herring House threw its shadow on to his path, just to see if anyone was about, but it looked empty. The gallery cafe opened for coffee, but not until later, and there were no cars parked outside.
The hut stood by the side of the road, just where it joined the jetty, a couple of hundred yards further on. He and Lawrence had put it up and it was solid enough, though some of the corrugated-iron panels on the roof would need replacing in the next year or so. They never bothered locking it – it was used by all the Biddista men who kept a boat – and nobody much else strayed to the jetty. Once everything people needed was delivered here by ship – coal and corn and animal feed. Now a few holidaymakers in yachts put up for the night, but he hadn’t even seen many of them yet this year. There was a heavy bolt on the door, so they could fasten it from the outside to stop it blowing in the wind. Today the bolt was unfastened and the door was a little ajar. Kenny tried to think who might have been in the hut last, who might have been so careless. It would only take a sharp squall to have the door off its hinges. Roddy Sinclair, he thought. It would be just like him. That boy had no consideration. Once he’d held a sort of party in here and Kenny had come in the next day to a pile of red tins, an empty whisky bottle and a strange lad in a sleeping bag. Kenny pulled the door open and took in the familiar smell of engine oil and fish.
Because he’d been thinking about Roddy Sinclair, he assumed at first that the figure swinging from the ceiling was one of the boy’s pranks. Roddy had got drunk at Bella’s party and thought he’d cause mischief. Kenny knew when he got closer it would turn out to be a fertilizer sack filled with straw, dressed up in a black jacket and trousers. The head was smooth, gleamed a little. Realistic, Kenny thought. He pushed the figure. It was surprisingly heavy, not made of straw at all. Its shadow swung backwards and forwards on the back wall of the hut and it twisted on its rope so for the first time Kenny saw the face. It was made up by a clown’s mask, shiny white plastic reflecting the morning sunshine coming through the gap in the door, with a grinning red mouth and blank staring eyes. Then he saw that the figure had real hands. Skin. Bony knuckles. Fingernails, smooth and round like a woman’s. But this wasn’t a woman. It was a man, with a bald head. A dead man hanging from one of the roof joists, his toes only inches from the ground. Beside him, on its side, was a big plastic bucket. Kenny thought he must have turned it upside-down to use it as a step, then kicked it away. He felt the hysteria rise in his stomach. He wanted to lift away the mask; it looked indecent on a dead person. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he put his hands on the man’s arms to hold him steady. He couldn’t bear the thought of him swinging there, a scarecrow on a gibbet.
His first thought was to call Edith on his mobile phone. But what could she do? So, feeling a little foolish and faint, he went back outside, sat on the shingle and dialled 999.
Chapter Five
Perez heard the news on his mobile as he was on his way in to work from Fran’s house. Before that, lightheaded through lack of sleep, he was so absorbed in recalling the events of the night before that he was driving automatically, unaware of his surroundings. In his head was the music Fran had put on her CD player when they first got in – a woman singing, something lilting and Celtic he hadn’t recognized. He wondered if he was reading too much into what had happened with Fran. That was his way. He brooded. His first wife, Sarah, had said he expected too much from her, that he made emotional demands. I should be tougher, more resilient, he thought. More of a man. I care too much what women think of me.
Then he got the phone call and he forced himself to concentrate. Work was a constant, something he did well. And Sandy, who had never been the most articulate person, always got incoherent at times of stress or excitement. It took Perez’s full attention to deal with him.
‘We’ve got a suicide,’ Sandy said. ‘Kenny Thomson found him hanging in that hut where the Biddista lads keep the stuff for the fishing.’
‘Who is it?’ Perez asked.
The voice on the end of the phone interrupted. ‘Kenny Thomson. You’ll know him. He’s lived out at Biddista all his life. They croft that land that runs away up the hill from the voe…’
‘No, Sandy. I didn’t mean who found him. Who’s the suicide?’
‘I don’t know. Kenny didn’t recognize him. At least he said he couldn’t tell. I’m just on my way.’
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Perez said. ‘Just in case.’ He knew Sandy shouldn’t need telling and knew anyway that he’d forget about the warning as soon as he got there, but it made him feel better to say it.
It was only as he drove down the road he’d taken the night before that he remembered the man who’d broken down in tears in the Herring House. Perez hadn’t made much of an effort to find him. He’d gone out of the kitchen door and looked on to the beach and up at the road, past the graveyard, but there’d been no sign. If he’d felt anything at all, it had been relief. The man must have been in a car after all – how else could he disappear so quickly? So he had recovered, if indeed he’d been ill. It had occurred to Perez briefly as he stood for a moment before going back to the gallery that he should let someone know. But who? And what would he say?
Instead of wondering about the nameless stranger, he’d been thinking of Fran, of the shape of her under the lacy black dress she was wearing and what it would be like to touch her.
He’d walked back to the gallery. From the road he saw the party continuing through the long windows, but had the sense that things were already winding up. Roddy was looking out at the sea, still holding the fiddle loosely under his chin, as if it was another limb, a part of his body. Inside again, Perez could see that the artists were disappointed. They had made some sales, but they’d expected a bigger crowd, more of a buzz. Fran took his hand and whispered that she’d like to go home. Despite the flattery from the intense man with the black hair, she needed cheering up. Part of him was glad she was a little bit sad. It gave him an excuse to comfort her.
Now he thought the suicide was too much of a coincidence. The mystery southerner had been clearly distraught, unbalanced even. The dead man had been found only a few hundred yards from the Herring House, where the stranger had last been seen. Perez hadn’t considered the possibility that he would take his own life. He felt guilty that he’d been so careless, responsible for a stranger he’d only once met. Then he tried to form in his head the words he’d use to explain the situation to Fran. Would she blame him for the man’s suicide? And hoping against the odds that, when he reached the hut by the Biddista pier, he would find that someone altogether different had killed himself.
He took the road north and west through Whiteness. Here twisted fingers of land ran into the sea and it was hard to tell where the line of the coast lay. There were lochs and inlets, so the land beyond looked like islands. In the low meadows flowers everywhere – buttercups, campion, orchids which his mother would have been able to name. In this light, at this time of the year, on impulse visitors bought up the old houses for second homes.
The road narrowed, became single-track with occasional passing places, then turned a bend in the hill, so Perez could see Biddista laid out in front of him. The cemetery, then the Herring House, close to the beach, the hut on the jetty, and beyond that, three terraced single-storey houses. The largest held the post office and shop. Then
