sense that he’d made the right decision. He watched Perez drive into the ferry and waited until it had moved out of the harbour. He felt suddenly bereft.
His car was still on the jetty where he’d left it after driving down to meet his boss. He switched on the engine and the clock on the dashboard lit up. It wasn’t midday yet. It always amazed Sandy how much Perez could pack into a small space of time. If you met him you’d think the inspector was kind of slow. It was his way of thinking before he spoke so you knew that when the words came out they were just the ones he’d intended. But Perez wasn’t slow at all. There was a sort of magic in his asking the right questions the first time, picking up the clues in a situation, knowing when it was time to move on.
As he drove past the Pier House Hotel on his way back to Utra he saw that Ronald’s car was parked outside. Sandy jammed on the brakes, felt the car slide on the greasy road then pulled in too. Getting pissed at lunchtime wasn’t going to help the man. Sandy thought he might not have Perez’s brains but he knew that much.
The woman in the pink overall had finished cleaning the bar but the place still had that smell of last night’s beer mixed with furniture polish, the smell of bars everywhere before customers arrive and start drinking. Cedric Irvine stood polishing glasses. He’d owned the Pier House for all the time Sandy could remember. He’d served the boy his first under-age pint, winking as he slid it over to him. There’d never been a Mrs Irvine, just a series of live-in barmaids and housekeepers who, it was rumoured, satisfied all his needs. The skinny Glaswegian was the most recent. Nobody was ever quite sure what the relationship was between Cedric and these women. When one of the regulars got sufficiently drunk to ask, Cedric would only shake his head and say that gentlemen never spoke of these things. ‘And neither will you if you hope to set foot in this establishment again.’ That was how he spoke. Sandy thought there was something of the preacher about him.
Now Cedric looked up from his work and gave Sandy a smile of welcome that was more than professional. He nodded to the corner of the room, where Ronald sat in front of a pock-marked copper table. The man had finished his pint and was halfway through his whisky chaser.
‘He needs a friend,’ Cedric said. ‘It’s never a good thing drinking on your own. Not like that. Just drinking to get drunk.’
‘He feels dreadful.’
‘So he should. Mima was a good woman.’
‘It could have happened to any of the boys.’ Sandy had seen it before. The young men would get fired up on beer, then jump into cars and vans and roar across the island with their shotguns to try for rabbits or geese or anything else that took their fancy, as likely sometimes to hit each other as what they were aiming for. They were lucky there’d been no other accidents. On a number of occasions Sandy had been with them, whooping and cheering them on, behaving like a moron. It didn’t only happen in Whalsay. Whenever men got together and drank too much they made fools of themselves. Never again, he thought. How would he feel if he’d been the one to kill Mima? But he knew that if he were with a gang of his friends he’d get dragged along on other foolish escapades. He’d never been able to stand up to them.
Cedric had pulled Sandy a pint of Bellhaven. Ronald still hadn’t noticed that his cousin had come in. The whisky glass was empty now and he was staring out of the window into space.
‘Give me another pint for him,’ Sandy said. ‘Then I’ll take him away for you, before anyone else comes in and there’s a scene.’
He carried the pints across to the table. At last Ronald looked up. Sandy thought he’d never seen the man look so ill.
‘I thought we’d already done the wetting of the baby’s head.’
Ronald glared. ‘Leave the baby out of this.’
‘I take it Anna doesn’t know you’re here,’ Sandy said. ‘She’d kill you.’ He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, but Ronald didn’t seem to have heard them.
‘I can’t see how it could have been me.’ It came out as a cry. He’d changed into a shirt and a tie. Perhaps it was his way of paying respect, but it made Sandy see him as a different person. The sort of person Ronald might have become if he’d stayed on at the university for that last year and got his degree. Someone who worked in a museum or a library. When they’d talked about careers at primary school Ronald, to the astonishment of the rest of the class, had announced that he wanted to be an archivist. Where had that come from? Not from Jackie and Andrew.
Ronald continued: ‘There were times when I was reckless with a gun, but not last night. Last night I knew where I was and what I was doing. But it must have been me. No one else was out there last night. Am I going mad, Sandy? Help me here. What can I do?’
‘We can get you away from the Pier House for a start,’ Sandy said. ‘It’ll do no good for people to see you in here so soon after what happened. Finish your pint and I’ll take you back.’
Ronald looked at the full glass, pushed it away from him so the beer slopped on to the table. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be drinking at all. I’ll give it up. It won’t bring Mima back but I’ll not do that to anyone else. I’ve got the bairn to think about now. And it’ll make Anna happy. Maybe. You have it Sandy.’
But suddenly Sandy couldn’t face the beer either. They walked out of the bar leaving the glasses untouched on the table.
They stood together at the cars. The mist was still so low that they couldn’t see much beyond the harbour wall. The fishing boats with their huge winches and aerials turned into the silhouettes of sea monsters with spiny backs and serrated jaws.
‘What’s Anna up to?’ Sandy asked.
‘She’s at home. The midwife was going to visit. I’d only be in the way.’ Sandy was surprised by the bitterness in Ronald’s voice and wondered what it must be like to live with a woman who made you feel that way. His mother was desperate for him to marry someone with brains and an education but that was the last thing Sandy wanted.
Ronald continued. ‘I wish I could be at work myself. Usually I hate it, but just now it would be good to have a few weeks in the Atlantic after the white fish.’
Sandy couldn’t understand that either – working at something you hated, even if the money was so good. He supposed there’d been pressure from Ronald’s family for him to take his place in the boat. And how would they be able to afford that huge house without the money it brought in?
‘You don’t mean that, not with the baby just home.’ Though Sandy thought babies brought out the worst in women. All the female relatives would be crowding into the bungalow, cooing and gurgling, sharing stories of labour and the cowardice of men. He could understand why Ronald had taken himself off on his own with a gun the night before.
‘Will you be OK on your own?’ Something about the way Ronald was talking made Sandy picture him holding a shotgun under his chin and blowing his head off. It couldn’t happen that way, of course – Ronald’s shotgun was in Perez’s boot on the way to Lerwick – but in Shetland suicide wasn’t hard to arrange if you wanted it badly enough. There were cliffs to jump from, water to drown in.
‘Sure.’
‘Do you want to come back to Utra for a meal? You could ask Anna to come too. Mother would be delighted to see the bairn.’
‘And have Auntie Evelyn reliving what happened last night and enjoying every minute of it? No thanks.’
‘We could take a drive up to the golf course. Just for a laugh. Catch up on the old times.’
For a moment Sandy thought Ronald was tempted, but the man shook his head and got into his car. He was probably close to the limit for driving, but this wasn’t the time for a lecture. He followed his cousin as far as the turning to the Clouston bungalow and then continued on his way home.
In the yard outside his house he met his father on his way in for the midday meal. All the time Sandy was growing up Joseph Wilson had worked as a joiner for Duncan Hunter, a Shetland businessman. Joseph had put up with being treated like shite and ordered around as if he was an apprentice and not a craftsman, just for the sake of a pay packet at the end of the week. There’d been times when he had to stay out in Lerwick to get the work finished. The croft had been a kind of hobby, fitted in after the regular work was done. There’d been little time left over to spend with his sons.
A couple of years before, Joseph had given up working for Hunter and taken on the croft full-time. Sandy wasn’t sure now how he managed for money – Evelyn had never worked – but that wasn’t the sort of thing he could discuss with his parents. The new arrangement seemed to be working out fine. Evelyn liked the idea of
