Red Bones - Ann Cleeves [79]
‘That’s what I thought when I first read it, now I’m not so sure. “Sometimes I think I’m not sure that I’m up to carrying it through”. Perhaps that means she was thinking about killing herself.’
‘No,’ Sandy said. ‘It means she was making plans for the future. That’s what it sounds like to me.’
‘If you’re right, something must have happened between her writing the letter and phoning me. Don’t you think so? Or at least she came to see events in a different way.’
Sandy didn’t know what to think. He had very few opinions of his own. He said nothing.
‘I mean, this letter is quite calm. But by the time she phoned me she sounded really distressed.’
‘Have you saved her message on your mobile?’
‘Yes.’ She fumbled in her bag and pulled out her phone.
‘I’d like to take the SIM card with me, let my boss hear it. And there are other things we could learn. Like where she was calling from. It might help.’ He wasn’t sure he could face hearing Hattie’s voice now. Not in this room with her mother listening. But Gwen James hadn’t taken any notice of him; she was already pressing buttons.
‘Mum! Mum! Where are you? Something dreadful’s happened. I can’t believe it. I think I was wrong about Mima. I need to talk to you. I’ll try later.’ The voice was high-pitched with panic. Sandy remembered Hattie sitting at the table in the Utra kitchen, smiling at something Evelyn had said. She’d been upset when she’d learned Mima was dead, but this was quite different. This was real distress.
‘Had Hattie ever tried to kill herself?’ he asked. ‘I know she was ill in the past.’
‘No,’ Gwen said listlessly. She was still staring at her phone. ‘Once she said she wished she was dead but that’s not quite the same, is it?’
‘No.’
‘When I read the letter I thought she was OK. Upset about the old woman but basically fine. I’ve lived with anxiety about my daughter. Some people think I’m hard-hearted because I don’t talk about her, because we didn’t live together. It would have been easier to have her here where I could keep an eye on her, but she needed her own life. Sometimes I don’t think about her for a whole working day; then I feel guilty. I dreamed that one day the anxiety would stop, that I could stop worrying about her. There’d be some magic new medication or she’d find a man to love her and take care of her. Over the winter it seemed that had happened. Shetland had worked some sort of magic. She still had her bad days, but she seemed calmer, almost happy.’ She paused, breathed in a sob. ‘Now I’d give anything to have the worry back.’
Sandy held his glass and sipped the wine. He wished he could say something to make it easier for the woman. Perez should have come. He would have known what to say.
‘Do you think Hattie killed herself?’ Gwen’s question came at him so hard and fast that it made him blink.
‘No,’ he said without thinking. Then, blushing, realizing what he’d done, ‘But you mustn’t take any notice of me. That’s just my opinion and I get things wrong all the time.’
She looked at him. ‘I’m grateful that you’ve come all this way.’
‘My family is from Whalsay. If you’d like to come back and see where she stayed, we’d be happy to show you.’
Standing outside the flat on the pavement with the woman’s SIM card in his pocket and the file of letters in a supermarket carrier bag, Sandy thought he hadn’t achieved a lot. What would Perez say? And the Fiscal? All that money to send him and really he’d not found out much at all. He couldn’t face the rattle of the Underground, the blank faces. He looked at the map under a streetlamp and walked through the mild city night all the way back to his hotel.
Chapter Twenty-six
Perez watched the ferry carry Sandy away from Whalsay on his way to London and thought this must be what his own parents had felt when he was twelve and he was sent off from Fair Isle to stay in the hostel at the Anderson High School in Lerwick: responsible for his loneliness and as if they’d deserted him. All day whenever his phone rang Perez