Red Bones - Ann Cleeves [96]
‘So Mima’s husband, your father and Ronald’s grandfather?’
‘Exactly that. Though Jerry hadn’t married Mima then. They were walking out together but too young to wed.’
Perez said nothing. Cedric would want to tell the story in his own way and Perez had told him he’d have time to listen. He tried not to think of the nurse’s phone number scribbled on the pad in his room or to speculate about what he might have to say.
Cedric began to talk. ‘There have always been tales about Setter. There were odd kind of bumps in the land where the dead lass started digging. Crops never did well there. The bairns thought it was a trowie place and even the grown-ups believed Mima was something of a witch.’ He paused, closed the flaps of skin over his eyes.
‘What did that have to do with the Shetland Bus?’
‘They say there’s a Norwegian man buried there. That was the story I grew up with, though my father always denied it. An agent who’d passed information to the Germans and got some of his people killed.’
‘And the Whalsay men meted out their own form of justice?’
‘That’s what people say. One of the men that died was a close friend of Jerry Wilson. He was in a Whalsay-built boat when he was captured. My father would never speak of it, but there were rumours when I was growing up.’ Only now Cedric opened his eyes very slowly. He paused a moment before continuing. ‘I did hear they found some bones at Setter. The piece of a skull, I heard, and others besides.’
‘Those were old bones,’ Perez said. ‘Older than that.’ But are they? he thought. I don’t really know that. Sixty years is a long time. Would we be able to tell the difference? Wo uldn’t bones from a body buried during the war look just the same as ones buried hundreds of years ago?
‘There you are then,’ Cedric said, suddenly becoming jovial. ‘Like I said, they were all just stories.’
‘How did Jerry Wilson die?’ Perez asked.
‘At sea. A fishing accident. He was taken in a freak storm. Mima was heartbroken. They’d been sweethearts since they were children.’ Cedric paused again. ‘She was wild even as a child. Setter was her house, not Jerry’s. She lived there as a bairn with her grandmother. Her parents both died when she was quite young. Jerry moved in with them when they got married, and when the grandmother passed away they had the place to themselves. It caused some jealousy. Two young people with their own croft. Mima was never liked on the island, especially by the women. She never made any effort to fit in. Things were different then: folk had to work together to make any sort of living. The men went out to the fishing and the women were left to do most of the work on the crofts. Mima was strong and fit – she could cast peat and scythe hay as well as a man – but she was never what they’d call now a team player. If she didn’t feel much like working she’d stay at home in front of the fire.’ Cedric stopped to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot on Perez’s table.
‘Then when Jerry was drowned and she was single again she was a threat to all the island wives. She was a bonny young girl with her own house and her own land and they were scared their husbands would run off with her. She was still in love with Jerry though – with his memory, at least. She had plenty of offers but she never married again. She enjoyed her independence too much for that.’
‘I’m surprised so many people turned out for her funeral if she wasn’t so well liked.’
‘Oh,’ Cedric said, ‘folk wouldn’t want to miss it. She was a kind of celebrity in her day. And the young ones all liked her. It was her own generation who had the problems.’
‘How did she get on with Evelyn?’
Cedric shot him a sharp look under the hooded lids. ‘Let’s say they never exactly saw eye to eye. After Jerry was drowned Joseph was all Mima had. She used to call him her peerie man. She wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone who stole him away. Mima should have married again. She didn