Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (11 page)

‘But you think Lowrie and Caroline will come back?’

‘Maybe. We’d like that, wouldn’t we, George?’

The man smiled from his chair. ‘Yes, it’d be good to see our grand-bairns growing up. And to have some help on the croft.’

‘We could make no assumptions about either of those things.’ Grusche’s voice was sharp. ‘Not about children, or what Lowrie and Caroline would do when they were here. But I missed him when he left home and it would be wonderful to see him back.’

‘Was there ever a possibility that Lowrie would settle with Eleanor then? Did he go out with her?’ Perez hadn’t been told about that. Did it mean the English people were keeping information from him? Or had it happened so long ago – a brief student fling – that they’d forgotten about it? Perhaps Shetlanders had longer memories than other folk.

Grusche shrugged. ‘He went out with Eleanor a couple of times. She was an attractive woman.’

George stood up and leaned his back against the range. ‘Yon woman broke his heart,’ he said. ‘We need to be honest with Jimmy. He’ll find out these things anyway. It’s impossible to keep a thing like that hidden.’

‘Lowrie was nineteen,’ Grusche said. ‘A boy. Away from home for the first time. It’s not surprising that he took rejection so seriously.’

‘But he came home threatening to leave the university,’ George said. ‘You even thought he might kill himself! You called her a witch.’

‘I was overreacting,’ Grusche said. ‘And so was he. He found Caroline, who is sensible and not given to games.’

‘But that was the sort of woman Eleanor was, Jimmy.’ It seemed to Perez that George thought carefully about every word before he spoke it, that he was trying to convey a special message hidden behind the words. ‘She was a generous person and warm and funny. But she wasn’t very kind. She wasn’t aware of anyone’s pleasure but her own, and she was always after excitement.’

Perez looked at the man. He thought George had been brooding about all this since Eleanor Longstaff’s body had been discovered. ‘Is there anything else you think I should know?’

The man hesitated and then he shook his head. ‘No. But when I heard that someone had killed her, I wasn’t surprised.’

Chapter Thirteen

Willow Reeves watched the hearse from Lerwick drive away with the body, past Sletts, until it disappeared behind the Meoness community hall, where two days ago the victim had been dancing. From this distance the vehicle looked like a shiny beetle, and sunlight bounced from its black paint. Eleanor Longstaff would be in the boat south tonight and in Dr Grieve’s Aberdeen mortuary tomorrow.

She turned to look at Vicki Hewitt at work. So far the crime-scene manager had found little to excite her close to where Eleanor’s body had been lying. The ground was too dry for footwear marks and the heather grew right to the edge of the loch. No mud or sand. When they’d lifted the woman from the water they’d seen the blow to the head, just as James Grieve had predicted. There’d been bloodstains on the back of the expensive silk dress; spatters that had remained even though the body had been underwater for some time and the material was soaking. And there were other marks that might have been grass or soil.

‘Does this mean she was killed elsewhere and carried here? That the blood dried into the fabric before she was placed in the loch?’
If so, why? Because the place had a special significance? To make Eleanor look perfect?

‘Dragged rather than carried.’ Vicki’s words were muffled by her mask. She pointed to where the heather had been flattened in places, the stalks snapped. ‘Not conclusive of course, because the vegetation damage could have been caused by walkers in heavy boots any time in the last couple of weeks, but it’s possible, don’t you think? Dragging would explain the grass stains on the back of the dress. And I don’t think she was murdered very far away. I didn’t see any damage to the vegetation near the stile.’ She began moving in slow sweeps, bent almost double, parting the bog grasses and heather with her gloved hands. She stopped where the grass was shorter, cropped by sheep, then bent again and picked up an object so small that Willow couldn’t make it out, and slipped it into an evidence bag.

‘What have you got?’

‘Not sure yet. Wait a minute.’ Vicki continued her fingertip search and crouched again to slide a scrap into a different bag.

Willow was wearing overshoes, but she waited where she was until Vicki called to her. Here they were close to the edge of the cliff and the noise of breaking waves and the onshore breeze were suddenly exhilarating. There was sea pink and blue squill. Vicki laid the bags on the palm of her hand so that Willow could look inside.

‘Torn scraps of paper.’ Willow was disappointed. ‘Could be anything.’

‘Not ordinary litter,’ Vicki said. ‘Not sweet paper or crisp packet. And anyway, why tear them into pieces?’

‘What then?’

‘It’s stiff, shiny. My guess is it was a photo.’

Willow thought about that. Who printed out photos these days? People took digital pictures and then posted them on Facebook or Twitter. ‘So somebody up here tore up a photo. A fit of rage perhaps? It would be good if we could find the rest of it.’

Vicki laughed. ‘With this breeze the rest will be halfway to Norway by now. These pieces were caught in the longer grass.’

Close to the cliff edge, stones – round and smoothed by the water – had been thrown up by violent storms. Some were as big as a small child, too heavy almost for a man to lift, yet during gales the tide had tossed them like marbles from the shore below. ‘One of those could be your murder weapon.’ Vicki stretched her hands above her head and then rubbed her aching back. ‘Though if I was the killer I’d have thrown it back over the cliff, once I was done.’

‘Not premeditated then.’ Willow was talking almost to herself. ‘The killer didn’t bring a weapon with them.’

‘Unless they knew these rocks were here and arranged the meeting. And the victim would have been walking away. Or turned away. This wasn’t self-defence or a scrap that got out of hand.’

Willow couldn’t imagine the immaculate Eleanor in a catfight. ‘Would there have been blood on the killer’s clothing? We’ve bagged what her friends were wearing that night and sent it south. No results yet.’

‘Not from the original blow perhaps, but it’d be hard to avoid it if you were dragging the body and then arranging it.’ Vicki frowned. ‘I’ll collect some samples of heather. I’d hope to find small traces of blood on the grass too, especially if the killer dragged Eleanor by her feet, in the hope of keeping themselves clean. And you’d expect the shoes and socks to be wet. You couldn’t place the body so accurately without getting into the loch.’

‘Unless the killer went barefoot too.’ Willow paused. ‘Sandy did a quick search of the area yesterday.’

Vicki snorted. ‘Have you ever known a man search properly for anything? My husband’s hopeless. A quick look then it’s “Vicki, what have you done with my football kit?” and, like a mug, I find it for him because it’s easier than getting him to do it for himself.’

‘You think they’ll be somewhere here then?’ Willow hadn’t known that Vicki Hewitt had a husband and was distracted for a moment, wondering if there were children too.

‘It’s possible.’ Vicki was already bent double again, feeling among the boulders with gloved hands. Then she was lying flat on her stomach reaching into the holes in the sandy soil close to the cliff edge. But she found nothing and stood up and stretched again.

Willow wondered what her husband did for a living, if he didn’t mind these strange call-outs to crime scenes. She herself had never found a man prepared to put up with the frequent and sudden disappearances.

‘I’d get a search team in to look properly,’ Vicki said, ‘but if the killer had any sense the shoes would be at the bottom of the cliff and swept away by the tide by now.’ She walked to the edge of the cordon and began to take off her paper suit, pushing her mask from her face so that she could talk properly.

‘So the killer didn’t panic,’ Willow said. Out at sea a trawler was pitching and tipping over the waves. She felt slightly nauseous watching it. ‘They didn’t hit Eleanor over the head in a blind rage and run away. They threw the murder weapon, the cloak that she was last seen wearing and the sandals into the sea. And perhaps they tore up a photograph and scattered the pieces in the wind. Then they walked back to the road as if nothing had happened. It would have been early in the morning and already light.’

‘How did the phone get to the hill by the hall?’ Vicki was packing up now and had started walking down the hill with the big silver box in which she kept her equipment.

‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t left there to throw us off track. The murderer wanted the body found. Otherwise why not tip Eleanor over the cliff with everything else? If the body had been discovered on the boulder beach at the bottom of the headland we’d probably have put it down to an accident. She’d been drinking, after all. There were lots of witnesses to that. One head wound wouldn’t show up among the others, and nobody would survive that fall.’ Willow thought it would have been no further to drag the body to the cliff edge than to the loch. And it would have been easier because the grass there was so much shorter.

‘Perhaps Eleanor had dropped the phone earlier in the evening?’ Vicki turned to wait for Willow at the stile.

‘But someone sent that email at two o’clock in the morning. What was Eleanor doing wandering around in the early hours? And why go from the stone enclosure near the hall and then walk in the opposite direction to the loch? Too many questions and nothing that makes sense.’ Again Willow thought that there’d been a meeting here. It had been planned. She tried to imagine the scene. The strange half-light of early morning, Eleanor waiting, shivering perhaps, wrapping her cloak around her party clothes to keep warm. Had she dozed? Been surprised in the end by the visitor for whom she’d been waiting? Or had the murderer moved silently over the grass like one of Eleanor’s ghosts and killed the woman without warning?

Later, on her way into the grand entrance hall of Springfield House, Willow bumped into Perez. ‘How did you get on with the Malcolmsons?’

‘It was interesting . . .’ He paused, shot a glance behind him and only then did she see Ian Longstaff waiting for them in the shadows of the hall. ‘But I’ll explain later.’

They sat in the yellow room with its flashes of sunshine. Willow asked Perez to lead the interview; he’d already formed a relationship with the man and she could tell that Longstaff viewed her with distrust. Most of the women he knew worked in the media and were fashionable, well groomed and neurotic. They didn’t have unmanageable hair or charity-shop clothes. She settled carefully on a low spindly chair out of his line of view.

‘I understand that this must be difficult for you,’ Perez said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You understand nothing!’ Longstaff leaned forward. ‘I loved Eleanor from the moment I saw her. I might as well be dead myself.’

There was a silence. Willow became aware of sounds outside the room. Curlews on the hill. The inevitable sheep. Inside, the tension became so uncomfortable that she wondered if she should intervene. Perez was an intensely private man and wouldn’t explain that the love of
his
life had been murdered too. She couldn’t do that, but she might ask a harmless question while Perez recovered his composure. In the end she waited. It wasn’t her place to interfere.

‘Of course,’ Perez said at last, ‘it’s the guilt that’s the hardest thing. The idea that you might have done something different. The rerunning of various scenarios in your head.’

Another silence before Longstaff nodded. ‘I should have gone outside to fetch her in, that night after the party. I should have protected her.’

‘Did she
need
protecting? Were you aware that she might be in danger? She worked in the media, and high-profile people can attract unwanted notice.’ Perez’s voice was so low that Willow had to listen carefully to make out the words. ‘You’re a sound engineer and you work in the same business. You’ll understand that.’

‘You think she had a stalker?’ Longstaff looked up at him sharply. ‘No, there was nothing of that sort. She never appeared on television herself. And she would have told me if she was getting any hassle.’

‘This project she was working on – the project that seemed to trigger the . . .’ Perez hesitated and seemed to be searching for the right word, ‘disagreement between you, when you were drinking with your friends after the wedding party. Can you tell me a little about that? Were you working on it too, on the sound?’

‘There wouldn’t have been a role for me yet,’ Longstaff said. ‘The show was still in pre-production. Eleanor had decided on a scriptwriter, but she wasn’t sure exactly what form the broadcast should take yet. She was researching stories. Intelligent, rational people who were convinced they’d seen a ghost. She said she didn’t want an hour full of weirdos and loonies.’

‘And she’d heard the story of Peerie Lizzie.’ Perez was looking down at the water from the small window by his side, as if he expected to see the ghost of the child rising up from the sea. ‘A girl who grew up in this house in the 1920s, who was drowned in a high tide and who comes back to haunt the childless.’
And drunk young men.

Longstaff waited a beat before replying. ‘Is that the story? That only the childless see her? Eleanor didn’t tell me that.’ Another beat. ‘Or perhaps she did, but I wasn’t listening. I’d begun to lose patience with her. That seems cruel now – cruel and wasteful. I’d give anything to have her back and prattling about her favourite projects.’

‘There are lots of stories.’ Perez gave a smile and turned slightly to include Willow. ‘That’s the way of ghosts.’

‘I’ve never believed in the supernatural,’ Longstaff said.

‘And now?’

‘Now I can see why people might
want
to believe. We’re grateful for anything that might maintain that contact.’

‘Had Eleanor been in touch with anyone here in Unst about Peerie Lizzie? Had she arranged to meet someone who claimed to have seen the ghost?’