water trapped in the thin, wispy tangle. Silver on grey.
‘Aggie,’ he said. ‘Is anything wrong?’ They had known each other for all that time, but still she had never come into his house uninvited. Even as a child, when she’d wanted to play with them, she’d hung around outside waiting for them to join her. She’d never knocked on the door. Bella and Alec would just have burst in, sat at the table, assumed that the milk and biscuits were for them too.
‘That policeman came by,’ Aggie said. ‘Perez. He told me there was a body in the hut.’
‘I know. I found the man.’ He preferred to think of him as a man rather than a body. Had she just come to gossip? It seemed unlike her. Usually in places like Biddista the shop was the place for gossip, but Aggie never encouraged it. She sat behind the counter. Her book would be face down, but you could tell she was waiting to get back to it. She still seemed preoccupied by the story, indifferent to the rumours being spread.
‘Do you have no idea who he is?’ she asked.
‘I couldn’t see his face,’ Kenny said. ‘It was covered with a mask. A clown’s mask.’
‘Jimmy Perez said that too.’ She paused, fixed him with her eyes. ‘It couldn’t have been Lawrence?’
She waited for Kenny to consider the possibility, watched for a reaction, and when none came she went on. ‘Martin described him to me. He saw him alive. Might have been the last person to see him alive. I just couldn’t help thinking…’
‘The dead man is English,’ Kenny said. ‘He spoke with an English accent. Perez told me.’
‘Lawrence has been away for a long time. He might speak differently now.’
‘You’re talking as if you want it to be Lawrence,’ he said.
‘No!’
‘I would have recognized him,’ Kenny said stubbornly. ‘Even without seeing his face.’
‘Would you? Really? How long is it since he’s been here? Years. Certainly he left before Alice was born and I can’t mind any visits.’
Kenny tried to fix a picture of his brother in his mind. To see his height, the proportions of his body. He thought of the man he’d seen the night before loping down the track. Could that have been Lawrence?
‘When’s the last time you heard from him?’ Aggie asked.
Kenny knew exactly, but he wasn’t going to tell Aggie. He wasn’t going to admit that Lawrence cared so little for him that there’d been nothing but a second-hand message left with Bella. ‘Lawrence says he’s going away again. He told me to tell you.’ Kenny hadn’t even been there to say goodbye when his brother left. Perhaps Lawrence had chosen the moment especially. He’d known that Kenny would persuade him to stay.
‘The man in the hut isn’t Lawrence,’ he said.
He thought she would say more to convince him that it might be, but she suddenly gave up the fight.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’m being foolish. I don’t know what’s been wrong with me to day. My head’s full of all kinds of fancies. You would know your own brother.’ She paused. ‘After the policeman left I even wondered for a moment if it might be Andrew. They didn’t find his body until weeks after he fell. The tide was so strong, the coastguard said he must have been taken out to open water. I thought maybe he survived after all. For all those weeks I kept hoping. There was some chance he’d survived, swum ashore somewhere, taken himself away to sober up. Even when the body was washed up, it could have been anyone.’
‘Andrew’s dead,’ Kenny said.
‘I know. It’s my imagination. I think, What if… and then I’m carried along by the possibility. The story.’ She gave a little smile. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.’
‘Have some tea while you’re here.’ Now, he felt sorry for her, living all on her own. She had no one to take her to bed on stolen afternoons.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I just shut up the post office and ran up here. I need to get back. I might have customers waiting.’
‘It’s the time of year,’ he said. ‘The light nights. It makes us all go a little bit mad.’
Chapter Twelve
Roy Taylor was head of the Inverness team. He’d be the senior investigating officer once he arrived. Perez had worked with him before and they’d become friends of a sort. Not close friends. Perez knew nothing about his private life, didn’t even know if he was married. But they’d come to an understanding about the case they were working on.
Now, listening to Taylor’s impatience, Perez was irritated. He didn’t need telling that the priority was to get an ID on the victim. He’d only officially
Perez was hungry now too. Fran had woken when he got up, made mumbled offers of toast and fruit, but he was already late for work by then. He was tempted to head back for town, thought of bacon sandwiches, fish and chips. Something warm and greasy and filling. But for completeness’ sake he thought he should talk to Peter Wilding, the Englishman who had taken on Willy Jamieson’s house. He could tell Taylor that he’d spoken to everyone who lived in Biddista then. Taylor wouldn’t be able to pull him up on that.
Wilding was sitting in the upstairs window, looking out, just as Martin had described. The fog had made the day so gloomy that he’d switched on a light in the room. Perez could only see him when he reached the end of the terrace and even then the view wasn’t so good. He thought the man had been watching him all along, from the moment he’d pulled up in his car. He’d have watched Perez go to Skoles and to the Manse, seen him in the shop and in Aggie’s house. It seemed odd to him that a man should take so much interest in the trivia of everyday life. In Perez’s experience, women were the nosy ones. Why would this Englishman care what the people of Biddista got up to? But Wilding’s curiosity might be useful. There was a real possibility that he’d seen the stranger.
The writer must just have seen Perez as a silhouette coming out of the mist. Why is he still sitting there, Perez thought, when there’s nothing to see? As soon as he knocked on the door, Wilding left his place at the window. Perez heard footsteps on wooden floorboards, a key turning in the lock. The door must have warped because it stuck against the frame. Did the locked door mean the man hadn’t been out yet that day? Or that security was a habit brought up from the south?
He recognized Wilding as soon as he came to the door as the dark man who’d been talking to Fran at the gallery. He was tall, rather good-looking, Perez saw now. He was wearing a striped collarless cotton shirt and jeans, canvas shoes. The writer smiled. He didn’t speak but waited for his visitor to explain himself. Perez found the silence disconcerting.
Perez supposed he should show his warrant card, but couldn’t quite remember what he’d done with it and introduced himself instead. ‘I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.’
‘Oh, please do. Any excuse to stop staring at a blank laptop screen.’ It was a rich voice, as if he was constantly amused by a private joke. Perez had imagined a writer with a deadline to meet as brooding, self- absorbed, but now there was no hint of that. The man stood aside. ‘I noticed that there’s been some activity on the jetty. Is it about that, I wonder?’ Perez remained silent. ‘Oh well,’ Wilding went on. ‘No doubt you’ll tell me when you’re ready.’ His eyes were so blue that Perez wondered if he was wearing coloured contact lenses. It pleased him to think of Wilding as vain.
Willy Jamieson had been born in this house and lived in it until he’d moved into sheltered housing. He’d scratched a living from fishing and, when he was younger, from odd bits of work for the council. Perez could remember seeing him by the side of the road sometimes, helping the contractors lay new tarmac. He’d never married, and when he’d moved out the house was in much the same state as the day his parents had moved in.
