Red Bones - Ann Cleeves [10]
‘You know you should go back to Lerwick,’ he said to his colleague. ‘Leave the case to me now.’ If there was a case, which most likely there wasn’t.
Sandy looked wretched, fidgeted in his seat but made no move to leave the car. Perez wondered how he would feel if his own family was caught up in a sudden death. If anything happened to Fran and Cassie. In the past, they’d been too close to one of the cases he’d been working on and he could never have walked away from that and handed responsibility to another officer.
‘I don’t know Whalsay,’ Perez said slowly. ‘I suppose it would be helpful to have you around for a while to show me the lie of the land. But you don’t interfere. You introduce me to your folks and then you keep quiet. Do you understand?’
Sandy nodded gratefully. His long fair fringe flapped over his forehead.
‘We’ll leave your car there then, shall we? You’re in no state to drive. Let’s go to Setter and see where you found your grandmother.’
‘I moved her body,’ Sandy admitted. ‘It was dark and cold and I couldn’t see the wound then. I thought she was ill and she might still be alive. I’m sorry.’
There was a moment’s pause. ‘I would have done exactly the same myself,’ Perez said.
Sandy directed Perez to his grandmother’s house. Perez could count the number of times he’d been to 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. People from the outside see Shetland as one community, he thought, but it’s not like that at all. How many of the people who live in Lerwick have ever been to Fair Isle or Foula? Some of the Biddista folk managed to keep secrets from the rest of us for decades. The visitors are more adventurous than any of us.
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