‘I didn’t recognize the man,’ Kenny said.
‘He was here at Bella’s launch,’ Roddy said. ‘But I didn’t take much notice of him then.’
‘You saw him alive?’
Kenny almost asked Roddy if the man could have been Lawrence, but what would Roddy know? Lawrence had left when Roddy was still a small boy. He was living in Lerwick with his parents and only came to Biddista to visit Bella. He had been an annoying boy even then, spoiled, running wild about the place.
‘Yes. I wish I’d talked to him. If we knew who he was and where he’d come from, we could just get back to normal.’
What would you know about normal? Kenny thought. It seemed a strange thing for the boy to say. Normal was the last thing Roddy had ever wanted. He wanted drama, a different woman every night. Surely he’d be enjoying this small excitement.
Roddy turned to Edith. ‘What do you make of all this?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It sounds very callous, but I can’t get excited by the death of a man I didn’t know.’
Roddy was about to answer, but he was interrupted by the sound of a car driving down the road outside. Two cars. Everyone’s attention was turned to the window. The old ladies from Middleton stood up so they could get a better view. Quite shameless. Despite himself, Kenny swivelled round in his chair so he could see too.
Jimmy Perez got out of one of the cars. With him was a tall, heavily built man with a bald dome of a head. You could tell even from this distance that he was the boss. There were two other men and a woman, and a couple of police officers Kenny recognized: Sandy from Whalsay and young Morag. Suddenly he didn’t want to be here any more, staring down at the spectacle like children at the circus. He stood up and waited for Edith to follow him home.
Chapter Sixteen
Roy Taylor wasn’t sure what he felt about being back in Shetland. Certainly he was pleased to have finally arrived; all that waiting in Aberdeen had made him feel he was about to explode. And at least they’d got in on the plane. He hadn’t liked to tell the rest of the team – he didn’t believe leaders should admit to weakness, all that sharing, caring stuff wasn’t for him – but he felt queasy on the Mersey ferry. An overnight crossing on the boat and he knew he’d have thrown up.
Now, standing at the front of the queue waiting to get off the plane, that memory of the Mersey ferry suddenly made him homesick. A series of images played in sentimental succession in his head. The view of the Liverpool skyline from the river, Scouse voices in busy pubs, singing his heart and soul out in the Kop on a Saturday afternoon. It made him wonder if it wasn’t finally time to go back. His father was dead and couldn’t hurt him now. He dwelled briefly on the possibility of returning, then pushed it from his mind. He had other things to think about.
He’d headed for Inverness because it was the farthest place from home he could find. There’d been a masochistic pleasure in landing in a town so alien, so unlike anywhere he would otherwise have chosen to live. As if he’d wanted to punish himself as well as the family he’d left behind. And now he was back in Shetland, which was even more remote and more strange.
The plane door opened. He took the steps at a trot and strode across the tarmac to the little door in the terminal building. He’d given instructions that his team should only bring carry-on luggage. They’d wasted enough time and he didn’t want them hanging around again for the stuff from the hold to appear.
Jimmy Perez was waiting for them. They’d worked well together on a previous investigation and had got on, perhaps because they had such different styles. If Perez had been a full-time member of his team, Taylor would have found the unconventional attitude, the long hair and the lack of urgency irritating. Here in Shetland, the quiet approach seemed to work. Perhaps too well. Taylor had always been competitive, and mixed with the affection was a residual resentment because Perez had been credited with solving the Catherine Ross case.
All the same he greeted Perez with warmth, taking his hand and clapping him on the back.
‘How’re things, Jimmy?’
The rest of the group should know that there would be no territorial rivalry on the case. Besides, it couldn’t be easy for Perez to have a senior officer fly in to take over the most interesting cases. Taylor himself wouldn’t be able to bear it.
They drove north and west, missing Lerwick, the only place in the islands where Taylor had felt anything like at home. At least in Lerwick there were shops and bars, chip shops and curry houses. If he thought of the space all around him, he felt giddy and nauseous. It was the sleepless night in the Holiday Inn in Aberdeen, he thought. Once he got stuck into the investigation he’d feel on top of his game once more.
To pull himself back he began to fire questions at Perez, who was driving.
‘Are you telling me that in a place as small as this no one can put a name to him?’ He knew Perez would resent the tone, but couldn’t help himself.
Perez paused for a moment before answering. ‘We get fifty thousand visitors a year. Many of them have little contact with local people. It’s not that surprising it’s taking a while to trace him.’
‘All the same, someone must have missed him by now. A guesthouse. Hotel.’
Perez didn’t answer. He had this knack of keeping quiet if he had nothing to say. Taylor had never been able to master it.
The cars slowed down and they pulled up next to a small jetty. It looked to Taylor that they were in the middle of nowhere. You couldn’t call it a village. A couple of houses built along the road and that was it. On the way they’d passed the gallery, which was built almost on the beach. It seemed an odd set-up to Taylor. Who would come all this way to look at a few pictures? Perez had roused himself from his silence to explain that that was the last place the victim had been seen alive.
‘I was there,’ he said. ‘At a party to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.’ Taylor thought he had more to say but was waiting for another time, when there was nobody else listening. He reminded himself to ask him about it when they were alone.
He got out of the car to the shrieking seabirds and the smell of seaweed and bird shit. Behind the row of low houses the hill rose steeply. He thought, Why would anyone want to live here? He recognized it from a documentary there’d been about the folk musician Roddy Sinclair. Quite a long sequence had been taken in Biddista; the camera followed him round the place, showed him talking to the crofters, visiting the shop, drinking with his mates. Then it had been back to London and Glasgow, the music and the groupies.
Taylor didn’t go into the hut. From what Perez had said there’d been enough contamination of the scene already. Now they could let the CSI get on with her work. He’d just wanted to get a feel of the place before they started. And he was glad he’d come. He had this sense that everyone in Biddista was staring at him. He could feel the eyes. He didn’t look at the houses to check if there were people staring from the windows; he didn’t have to. He wouldn’t have understood what that was like just from chatting to Perez. This was a place where it was impossible to keep secrets. He couldn’t believe that nobody knew who had killed the man. Perhaps they all knew. Perhaps it was all one huge conspiracy.
He turned back to Perez. ‘Why don’t we leave them to it? Let’s get into Lerwick, just the two of us, and you can fill me in on the details.’ He phrased it as a suggestion, but he knew Perez would have no choice but to agree.
In the car he was aware of the sea to the right of him, but all his concentration was on Perez. ‘You say you were one of the last people to see the victim alive. What was he doing?’
There was one of those pauses. Perez pulled into a passing place to let a woman in a clapped-out van squeeze by.
‘He was weeping.’
Taylor wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Not that.
‘What do you mean, weeping? What had upset him?’
Another beat of silence. ‘He didn’t know. Or so he claimed.’ And then Perez told his story. About the stranger who caused a scene at some arty-farty do by bursting into tears and then claiming not to know who he was or how he’d got there. Taylor knew better than to interrupt. He was full of questions, but he had to let Perez tell it in
