Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) (25 page)

Grusche was answering. ‘Because her nursemaid was Sarah Malcolmson, who was George’s aunt, and she should have taken better care of the girl. There are different stories to explain Lizzie’s death, but one of them is that Sarah was distracted from her duties, and her carelessness caused the accident. She was talking to her sweetheart, who worked in the garden at Springfield House, and didn’t notice that the girl had run down to the shore in the mist. It’s probably a pack of lies, but everyone loves a romance.’

‘And she lived with her family in the house that’s almost derelict now.’ Polly was remembering her encounter with Charles Hillier and the strange smile on his face as he’d passed on the information. Looking back at the painting, she thought the girl in white had the same knowing smile.

‘The house was called Utra,’ Grusche said. ‘We have photos of it before it fell into disrepair, if you’re interested. George’s mother as a young woman, just married, sitting outside it, knitting.’

‘Why didn’t they stay there?’

Grusche shrugged. ‘Because it was so small. When old George married he’d want his own space. Imagine them all crammed in together. Old George – that’s Lowrie’s grandfather – built Voxter before they started their own family.’

Polly pushed away her bowl and stood up to get a closer look at the painting. But as she got nearer, the girl seemed to disappear into the texture of the background. It was only when she moved back again that the figure became clearer, and once more there was another shock of recognition.

‘Really, she does look just like the girl I saw on the beach outside the hall on the night of your party.’ The words came out before she could stop them, and she gave a little laugh to show that she didn’t really believe in the vision as a ghost. ‘She has the same mouth and eyes. Some coincidence, huh?’

‘Perhaps the child you saw was someone local,’ Caroline said, ‘and she acted as a model for the painting. Are you sure you don’t know her, Grusche?’

Grusche stood up too to get a closer look, but shook her head.

Again Polly’s eyes were drawn back to the painting on the wall. The background was of woodland and quite unlike Shetland. She knew she was being quite ridiculous. ‘I thought I saw her another time,’ she said. ‘In the old house that’s derelict. Utra. It was the night we’d all been to supper at your house. A girl dressed in white twirling round on her toes.’ She snapped her mouth shut before she could say any more, but felt relieved that she’d told them about the visions. It felt good to have the words out in the open. She’d been wrong to bottle up her worries in her head. That way madness lay.

‘You think you saw Eleanor’s ghost-child in Utra?’ Caroline looked at her strangely as if she was crazy already.

‘Well, it obviously wasn’t a ghost.’ Polly gave little self-deprecating smile, but really she wasn’t sure. Perhaps that was what she
had
seen. The idea had been creeping up on her over the last few days, tugging at her reason, so she felt her rational thoughts unwinding like a hank of yarn. What other explanation could there be for the dancing child? A child whom nobody in Meoness recognized. She looked up at the other women. ‘But somebody was inside.’

‘That could have been anyone.’ Caroline was dismissive. ‘It must have been almost dark when you walked past. And we were all pretty spooked after Eleanor’s murder.’

Not you! You’ve never been scared in your life. And I’ve been scared for most of mine. Not of being haunted, but of saying the wrong thing, causing embarrassment. Showing myself up. That’s why I’m pretending now.
Suddenly she longed for Eleanor, who would have listened to her without preaching or looking disapproving, whose solution to the ills of the world was laughter and another bottle of wine. ‘I expect you’re right. My imagination playing tricks in the weird light.’

Grusche gave her a strange look, but Caroline hardly seemed to hear. She’d wandered away to the gallery. Grusche followed, and Polly could hear them talking about curtains and colours, and whether an abstract painting inspired by Muckle Flugga would look well in a room with a polished wooden floor. ‘I think that’s the one Lowrie would prefer,’ Grusche was saying. ‘That’s the one you should get.’

Polly heard the words, but they seemed to come from a long way off. She stood in front of the painting of the girl. There was an artist’s signature in one corner.
Monica Leaze.
The name meant nothing to her, but she didn’t need to make a note of it. She knew she wouldn’t forget.

In the ferry on the way back to Unst they stood on deck once more and Polly felt a sense of foreboding as the island drew closer. She told herself that she just had to survive for one more night. When the vessel turned to inch its way to the pier she had a view south to Yell and saw a grey bank of fog on the horizon. It was as if the route of her escape had been closed behind her. By the time they’d driven back to Meoness the light had gone again.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Willow and Sandy put together a scratch lunch in the kitchen at Springfield House. Willow was feeling restless. If she were on the Scottish mainland she’d be at the post-mortem by now. She’d know how Charles Hillier had died. Here, there seemed little to do but wait and she’d never been very good at that.

David had retreated to the walled vegetable garden. Earlier Willow had watched him from her bedroom window, digging and digging the uncultivated patch close to the shattered greenhouse, as if the activity would wear out his mind as well as his body and he’d stop thinking. She went outside to call him in for lunch, but even when she was right behind him he continued to plunge the spade into the sandy soil, then push it with his foot, his whole body straining to get the blade into the peaty soil, oblivious to everything else. She tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Come in and get some lunch. You need to eat.’

He stopped. His face was red, and sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes.

‘Where is he?’

She didn’t have to ask what he meant. ‘Annie Goudie, the funeral director, has just arrived with a couple of men. Charles will be on his way to Lerwick soon. He’ll be on the boat for Aberdeen tonight.’ She paused. ‘Do you want to see him? To say goodbye?’

‘No!’ He turned away angrily as if he intended to continue digging, then stopped, the spade dropped to the ground at his feet, and faced her again. ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t bear it. To see him so unlike himself. When he was alive he was never still.’

She nodded. A wheatear flicked along the wall that separated the garden from the open hillside. ‘Is there anything I can get you? Tea? Water?’

He nodded towards a bottle of water standing on the path that ran around the garden. ‘I’m fine. Really, it’s very kind, but I’m better out here.’

Inside, Sandy and Perez had started to eat. Perez was making notes, methodical, just as when he’d transcribed Eleanor’s scribbling. He reached out for a piece of bread with his left hand while he was still focused on writing with his right. Willow poured herself a glass of water from the tap and wondered how long they could continue to run the operation from Springfield House. This felt like an investigation from a different age, the three of them left to run the inquiry without outside interference. A Special Operations team during the war, perhaps a resistance group in a strange land. Soon she’d be under pressure to move back to the police station in Lerwick, where they’d have the technical support to investigate in a more orthodox way. And where her boss would insist on regular conference-call updates from Inverness. He was already worrying about the budget. ‘Don’t think you can claim overtime because you’re staying out there. That’s your choice.’ When the three English people moved south they’d have no real excuse for being in Unst, so the following morning she’d hand Springfield House back to David and his memories.

She wondered what he’d do then. He had no real friends in the islands. Charles had been the sociable one, dropping into the bar occasionally in the evenings to chat to the locals. David had been happy to make things run smoothly behind the scenes. She suspected that he would sell up and move back to an anonymous flat in some small university town. He’d spend his days walking the hills and remembering with regret the only time he ever took a risk.

Perez looked up from his notes. ‘How is he?’

‘Angry,’ she said. ‘Trying to exhaust himself with digging. As if he could bring the man back by turning over the whole plot.’ There was a clock on the wall and in the silence she heard it ticking, marking down the seconds until they would have to leave. The pressure felt tight around her head and she forced herself to breathe slowly. ‘What have you got for me? Sandy, any news on the mysterious Monica mentioned in Eleanor’s notes? We wondered if she might be Sarah Malcolmson’s daughter.’

Sandy had his mouth full of smoked mackerel and bread and she had to wait for him to speak, and then he was full of apologies. Perez looked up from his writing again. ‘Just get on with it, man!’

‘Once Mary Lomax turned up to wait with the body, I went down to Voxter.’ He looked anxious. ‘You weren’t here, but I thought that would be the best thing to do. I know you’ve talked to George already, Jimmy, but I thought he might know more about Sarah’s daughter than he said. He would have met her at the funeral, so he’d have known her name at least.’

‘Well? Was she our mysterious Monica?’

Sandy shook his head. ‘Elizabeth. Her name was Elizabeth.’

‘Sarah Malcolmson named her daughter after the child whose death she was accused of causing?’ Willow couldn’t make sense of that. It seemed like a strange kind of masochism. And hardly fair to the girl who’d remind her mother every day of why she’d been forced to leave the islands.

‘Apparently.’

‘Perhaps Sarah had been really fond of Lizzie Geldard.’ Perez set aside his notes. ‘In those days wealthy parents didn’t do much of the real childcare, did they? Sarah would have been more like a mother to the girl. Perhaps the name was a way of honouring her memory.’

Willow wasn’t sure about all that. It seemed a macabre thing to do. ‘So we’re still looking for the Monica who featured in Eleanor’s notes. I don’t suppose you’ve come across anything useful, like a phone number, Jimmy?’

‘No.’

‘So perhaps she hadn’t tracked it down yet.’ Willow took a ripe tomato from the bowl on the table and bit into it. The juice dribbled down her chin and she tore a piece of kitchen towel from the roll on the bench to wipe it away.

‘Or maybe she knew it already. There’s no surname, so perhaps Eleanor was friends with the mysterious Monica. Or had met her previously at least.’

Willow thought again that they didn’t have time for this kind of speculation. She needed something concrete to give to her boss in Inverness. ‘I want to track Charles’s movements yesterday evening after he met Polly and Ian in the old house in Meoness. Did he go into the Springfield bar when the men were there, for instance?’

‘Lowrie says not,’ Perez said.

‘Well, Lowrie’s hardly an unbiased witness, is he?’ Willow could hear the frustration spill out into her voice. ‘He’s an ex-lover of Eleanor Longstaff and a potential suspect.’

‘Shall we look in Hillier’s office?’ Perez said. ‘It might be a good time, while David’s still outside. I’d be interested in any communication between Eleanor and Charles. Even if she just made one phone call asking about the history of the house and the Geldard family, why didn’t he tell David? David was the historian, the expert.’

‘And then I’d like to go to the derelict house where he met Ian and Polly.’ Willow was already on her feet. Any action was better than sitting in this sad house waiting for inspiration to strike. ‘Why would he go there? I don’t buy the notion that he just drove around in the fog.’

‘To meet someone?’ Sandy had been following the conversation and was trying to help.

‘Polly Gilmour, you mean? That could work. They’d arranged to meet and then Ian came along and surprised them.’ But Willow couldn’t see what possible connection there could be between a librarian from London and an ex-magician who ran a classy B&B in Shetland. It still seemed as if only Eleanor Longstaff linked all the people involved in the case. With her death they’d turned into a group of disparate individuals. And the encounter in the croft had obviously left Polly shaken. Would she have been so scared if the meeting had been planned?

The hotel office was a small room on the ground floor. Any money had been spent refurbishing the guest rooms and this work space was shabby. Flatpack shelves had been put up in the alcoves and the desk looked as if it might have come from a charity shop in Lerwick. Willow sat at it and started the computer. Hillier hadn’t logged off and she didn’t need a password to get into the system or his emails.

‘Nothing from Eleanor,’ she said. ‘Either they communicated by phone or he deleted the messages as soon as he’d read them.’

‘Anything from the mysterious Monica?’ Perez was working through the shelves, pulling out guide books and files. There was a box file full of receipts for the work done on Springfield House. He set it on the desk next to Willow.

‘Nothing saved. But he seems to have been very diligent about deleting his emails. Mine go back for years.’

‘More secrecy,’ Perez said.

‘But who would have access to this computer? Only David.’ She was aware of Perez standing very close to her and looking over her shoulder. She imagined that she could feel his breath on her neck.

‘That was the point, surely,’ Perez said. ‘Charles was involved in something to do with Eleanor’s project and he knew that David would disapprove.’

‘We’ll take the computer with us when we go south tomorrow.’ Again Willow sensed the movement of time as something tangible, like the tide or the wind. ‘The geeks in Inverness should be able to track the email history. We might have some mention of your Monica yet.’ She began to lift the receipts from the box file.

‘Look at this! Hundreds of pounds for a set of bedroom curtains. You can see why the couple were running out of cash.’ She wondered if David had sanctioned the expenditure or if he’d closed his eyes to it because he knew the excitement of renovating and decorating Springfield was all that kept Charles in Shetland.