Whalsay on one hand. There’d been a piece of vandalism – one of the yoals they used for racing had been holed and then tipped into the harbour. No one else had been available and he’d come to deal with it out of interest. Then Sandy had asked him and Fran along to his birthday party – a do organized by his parents in the Lindby community hall. Perez knew that the night before Sandy had been out in Lerwick with his younger friends, but Perez hadn’t been invited to that. The party in Whalsay had been an old-fashioned community do – a hot meal of boiled mutton and tatties, a band, dancing. It had reminded Perez of the dances at home in Fair Isle, raucous and good-natured.
His infrequent trips to Whalsay had given him no real idea of the geography of the place or of the relationships there.
Sandy directed him to take a road to the right from Symbister and soon they were on the southern shore of the island, in the community of Lindby, a scattering of crofts running down to the water, surrounded by the crumbling walls of old abandoned houses. Not a village in the English sense of the word, but half a dozen families, mostly related, separated from the rest of Whalsay by sheep-grazed hill, peat banks and a reed-fringed loch.
Setter took Perez back to the old days at home too, to a croft run by an old man who found the work too much for him but refused to let anyone help.
Someone had let out the hens and they were scratching around in a patch of weeds by the door, looking damp and bedraggled. Everything was untidy and overgrown. An ancient piece of agricultural machinery – quite unidentifiable now – rusted against the cowshed wall. These days, people wanted a better income than this sort of smallholding could provide. In Fair Isle families from the south had taken over some of the crofts and set up small businesses – IT, furniture-making, boat-building. There were even recent incomers from the United States. He knew he was a soppy romantic, but he quite liked the old ways.
‘What happens to this place now?’ he asked Sandy. ‘Did your grandmother own it, or was she a tenant?’
‘It was her own place. It always was hers. She inherited from her grandmother.’
‘What about her husband?’
‘He died very young. My father was just a bairn.’
‘Had she made a will?’
Sandy seemed shocked by the idea. ‘It’ll just come to my father,’ he said. ‘She had no other close relatives. I don’t know what he’ll do with it. Take on the land and sell the house, perhaps.’
‘You said there was a cousin, Ronald. He has no claim?’
‘Ronald’s related to me on my mother’s side. He won’t get anything as a result of Mima dying.’
They were still standing outside the house. Perez was what the locals called a black Shetlander; his ancestor had been washed up from a sunken Spanish Armada ship. He’d inherited the name, the dark hair and Mediterranean skin. Now he felt the cold seeping into his bones and thought he’d inherited a love of sunshine too. He couldn’t wait for the summer.
‘We should tape off the garden where the body was found,’ Perez said gently. ‘Even if the Fiscal puts it down as an accident, at the moment we have to treat it as a potential crime scene.’
Sandy looked up at him, suddenly horrified. Perez realized the suggested piece of routine police work had made Mima’s death real again.
Sandy pushed open the door and they arrived in the kitchen. Again Perez was taken back to his childhood. His grandparents, and a couple of elderly aunts, had lived in houses like this. It was the smell as much as the furniture that took him back: the smell of coal-dust and peatsmoke, a particular brand of soap, damp wool. At least in here it was warm. The solid-fuel Ray-burn must have been banked up the night before and still gave out plenty of heat. Perez stood in front of it and put his hands on the covered hotplate.
‘I don’t know what will happen to the cow,’ Sandy said suddenly. ‘My father milked her this morning, but I know damn well he’ll not want to do that twice every day.’
Reluctantly Perez pushed himself away from the range.
‘Let’s go outside,’ he said. ‘You can show me where she died.’
‘I keep thinking that if I hadn’t stayed for that one last drink I might have been here in time to save her,’ Sandy said. ‘I might have stopped her going outside at all.’ He paused. ‘But I only came in to give me time to sober up before going back to my parents’ house. If I’d gone straight home, I’d have taken the first ferry out this morning and someone else would have found her.’ He paused. ‘She phoned me earlier in the week and asked when I’d next be home. “Call in and have a dram with me, Sandy. It’s a long time since we had a chat.” I should have spent the evening with her instead of going down to the Pier House with the boys.’
‘What was she doing outside at that time of night?’ Perez asked. He tried to imagine what would have taken an elderly woman from the warmth of her fire into a sodden, cold field long after darkness had fallen.
‘There was washing on the line. Maybe she’d gone to fetch it in.’
Perez said nothing. Sandy led him round the house. The laundry was still there, so wet now that it dripped on to the grass beneath it. This was rough grazing rather than garden, though a strip of ground running parallel to the washing line had been dug over for planting. Sandy saw Perez looking at it. ‘My father did that. She’ll have one strip of tatties and another of neeps. He sows a planticrub with cabbage each year for feeding the cow.’
‘There’s no laundry basket,’ Perez said. ‘If she’d come outside to fetch in the washing, what would she put the clothes in?’
Sandy shook his head, as if he couldn’t see how such detail could matter.
‘What’s going on down there?’ Perez nodded towards the trenches at the end of the field.
‘An archaeological dig. A postgraduate student is researching it for her PhD. She’ll be here for the next few months, working on it with her assistant. A couple of lasses. They were here for a few weeks last year and they’ve just arrived back. They’re camping out at the Bod just now. This time of year there aren’t too many people wanting to stay there. There’s a professor who visits every now and again to keep an eye on things. He’s here at the minute, staying at the Pier House Hotel. He came in with them.’
‘We need to speak to him,’ Perez said.
‘I thought you might do. I called in to the Pier House while I was waiting for your ferry. He said he’d meet us here.’
Perez was surprised that Sandy had shown so much initiative, wondered if he should congratulate him or if that would just be patronizing. In the office Sandy was always considered a bit of a joke. Perez had shared the low opinion at times. He was still making up his mind how to respond when a big figure appeared out of the mist, as if Sandy had conjured him up by talking about him. He wore a full-length Barbour jacket and big boots. He was a big man, very blond, with cropped hair. He approached them, hand outstretched. ‘Hello. I’m Paul Berglund. You wanted to talk to me.’
Despite the foreign name, the accent was northern English. It was a hard voice and suited the man. Perez wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting in an academic. Not this large male with his uncompromising speech and the shaved head.
‘Sandy will have explained that there was an accident here last night,’ Perez said. ‘We’d prefer it if your student stays off the site for the day.’
‘No problem. Hattie and Sophie will be here to start soon. I’ll hang on and tell them what happened. Is it OK if I wait in the house? It’s a bit damp out here.’
For a moment Perez hesitated, then he recalled this was an accident, nothing more. It wouldn’t be sensible to get dramatic about it. ‘Is that OK, Sandy?’
Sandy didn’t hesitate. The Whalsay hospitality again. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Berglund turned round and left them alone. Perez felt a little ridiculous because the encounter had been so brief, but just now he had nothing specific to ask the man. If he’d asked about the archaeology he’d have shown his ignorance. Besides, what relevance could the archaeological work have to Mima Wilson’s death? Instead, he directed his questions to Sandy.
‘Have the students found anything?’ Perez was intrigued by the idea of digging for a living. He thought he’d enjoy it. Detailed, meticulous, picking his way through other people’s lives. With the right sort of case it was what he liked most about his work.
Sandy shrugged. ‘I haven’t taken much interest,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there was much. A few bits of pot.
