there’s anything we can do.’
And before either of them could stop her she stooped to put the cat on the floor and was out of the house and on her way to Utra. Halfway there she realized her eyes were streaming with tears.
Chapter Ten
Perez wasn’t sure what to make of the hysterical girl who turned up at the door of Evelyn Wilson’s house. At first he mistook her for one of the island children; she might have been fifteen or sixteen, certainly not old enough to be a postgraduate student. Even after Evelyn had introduced her and she had calmed down sufficiently to talk more rationally, he still thought of her as a girl. Her voice was breathy, high-pitched. The voice of a well brought- up child.
She was small and thin. Big dark eyes and very black hair, cut short so the eyes looked even bigger. They were ringed by grey shadows, which made her look exhausted. He wished she wasn’t so sad, caught himself wondering how he could make her feel better, then stopped himself. ‘It’s not your responsibility. It’s a sort of arrogance, thinking you can change the world.’ Fran’s words, spoken with exasperation and affection, repeated often enough that they came into his head in situations like this.
Hattie leaned against the doorpost to take off her work boots and looked as if she didn’t have the strength to stand upright. Without the boots she seemed even more frail. Perez had the fancy that without them on her feet to anchor her to the floor she might float into the air.
Evelyn helped the girl to a chair, automatically moved the kettle on to the hotplate. Hattie reached across the table towards Sandy, not quite touching his hand. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you were close to your grandmother. She talked about you all the time.’ In her confusion she seemed not to notice Perez.
‘You shouldn’t have had to hear like that,’ Evelyn said. ‘One of us should have come to the Bod to tell you. What a shock it must have been! But we’ve all been so busy here and it never crossed my mind. How did you find out?’
‘From Paul. He was waiting for us when we got to Setter. He said it was an accident, but I don’t understand.’
‘Sandy’s cousin Ronald was out shooting rabbits. He won’t admit it but he must have fired across the Setter land. He couldn’t have thought Mima would be out on a night like that. What other explanation is there?’ Evelyn stood quite still for a moment, then turned to pour water into a brown earthenware teapot which she covered with a striped cosy and put at the back of the Rayburn. She sat at the table next to Hattie. ‘I’m very sorry, my dear, but she was wearing your waterproof. You won’t be able to use it again. We’ll replace it for you.’
‘No.’ It seemed to Perez that she hadn’t heard more than the first couple of sentences. She was frozen with shock and couldn’t take in the information. Not all at once. ‘There’s no need for that. Of course not.’ She turned to Evelyn. ‘Are you sure that’s the way it happened? How could Ronald not see the jacket? It’s bright yellow.’
‘It was very dark,’ Evelyn said. ‘The mist came down again last night.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. She began to cry again.
Perez found a clean handkerchief in his pocket and handed it over to her. She seemed to see him for the first time and stared, startled. ‘My name’s Jimmy Perez,’ he said, though Evelyn had introduced him when she’d arrived. ‘I work for the police. We have to ask questions, to be satisfied about the accident.’
Hattie blinked quickly like a camera shutter clicking. Perez had the impression of thoughts and images fizzing in her head. ‘If I hadn’t given Mima the coat,’ she said, ‘perhaps she wouldn’t have gone out.’
‘That’s plain stupid,’ Evelyn said. ‘Don’t you dare think like that. We all wonder if there was anything we could have done to prevent it. It’s natural after a tragedy like this but does no good at all.’ She stood up. Perez watched her take an old biscuit tin from a cupboard. When she lifted the lid he smelled cheese scones, another memory of home. She split and buttered them and set them on a plate, poured the tea into mugs.
‘Why
She had just picked up her tea and stared at him over the mug. ‘It was yesterday afternoon,’ she said. ‘It was pouring with rain. We came in drenched to dry out before going back to work. Mima admired my jacket when she took it out to dry. She’d been so kind that I said she could have it. I had a spare in my rucksack.’
‘Aye,’ Evelyn said. ‘That’s how it was. I was there. She was so pleased with it. “How fine I’ll look going out in that! The hens won’t know me.” You know how she carried on, Sandy?’
Sandy nodded. They sat for a moment in silence, then Evelyn became all efficient and businesslike:
‘You mustn’t think this will affect the project. Not at all. Everything will carry on just as before. Setter will come to Joseph when everything’s sorted out with the lawyers. We haven’t even thought what we’ll do with the croft just yet, but you can continue with the dig as soon as you like.’
Perez looked at Sandy. Was Evelyn speaking for the whole Wilson family? But Sandy said nothing.
‘I’d rather you didn’t work on the dig today,’ Perez said quietly. ‘Today the Fiscal might need to visit. It’s her decision whether any action needs to be taken and how we should proceed.’
‘Will Ronald be charged?’ Hattie asked.
‘That’s not a decision for me.’
‘The weather’s so bad,’ Sandy said, his first contribution to the discussion, ‘that you wouldn’t want to be working this morning anyway.’
‘Oh I would!’ Hattie said immediately. ‘I hate it when it’s too wet to work. It’s fascinating, addictive I suppose. You understand that, Evelyn.’
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Perez thought she looked quite different when she spoke about her work. Her face lit up, and the grey shadows around her eyes seemed to disappear. Another young woman driven by her work, just like Anna Clouston.
‘Local archaeologists picked up signs of a dwelling on that site in the sixties, but nothing much happened with it. According to Mima, although most of the Setter land is fertile, nothing much would grow just there – she said her mother had called the mound there a trowie knowe. You know the myths about the trows, the little people. It was supposed to be a hole in the ground, a place where they kept their treasure. Mima explained them to me, told me some of the stories.’
Perez nodded. He’d been brought up on stories of trows too, small malevolent creatures who lived in the islands and ruled their kingdom with magic and decorated their houses with glittering jewels and gold.
Hattie continued: ‘Everyone assumed that it was a croft that had gone out of use before the first Ordnance Survey map. They thought perhaps the present house developed from it. Or that the remains composed some sort of outbuilding. Then I came to Shetland on a working holiday with Sally Walker, one of my lecturers. We took a closer look at the Setter site and thought the house looked more substantial than had been assumed. I was looking for a postgraduate project and it seemed perfect. Sophie’s taking a year out after graduating and agreed to come and help. Sally left on maternity leave and didn’t feel she could continue to supervise me.’
The words came out in a rush.
‘He’s my supervisor. Yes.’
‘And what have you found?’
‘Well, we’ve still got a long way to go, of course, but we did a geophysical survey and there certainly seems quite a grand building on that site. The excavation we did last season bears that out. I think it could be a merchant’s house. We know that Whalsay was an important trading point within the Hanseatic League. That was a community of ports around the North Sea, a sort of medieval EU. The mystery is that there’s no record of the house, or of the man who lived there. It’s frustrating. It would be wonderful to put a name to the man who built it. We’ve just got a couple of months left here to see if there’s enough evidence to justify funding for a full-scale dig. I suppose the bones might tell us something. They’ve gone for carbon dating, but I’m assuming they’re fifteenth- century. There’s nothing in the context to suggest otherwise.’
‘Sandy told me about the skull.’
