White Nights - Ann Cleeves [1]
As they climbed into the buses, they watched him disappear down a narrow lane into the town. He was still handing out his leaflets to passers-by.
Chapter One
Jimmy Perez glimpsed the back of the street performer as he drove through the town, but it didn’t register. He had other things on his mind.
He’d just landed at the airstrip in Tingwall after a short break in Fair Isle, staying on his parents’ croft. Three days of being spoiled by his mother and listening to his father complain about the price of sheep. As always after a trip home, he wondered why he found it so difficult to get on with his father. There were never arguments, no real antagonism, but he always left feeling an edgy mixture of guilt and inadequacy.
Then there was work. The pile of paper he knew would be waiting on his desk. Sandy Wilson’s expense forms, a day’s labour in themselves. A report to complete for the Procurator Fiscal about a serious assault in a bar in Lerwick.
And Fran. He’d arranged to pick her up at Ravenswick at seven-thirty. He’d need to get back to his house to grab a shower before then. This was a date, wasn’t it? The first real date. They’d been knocking around together for six months, friends, but now he felt giddy as a teenager.
He arrived at her house dead on time, his hair still wet, uncomfortable in a new shirt which had a starchy, stiff feel to it, faint creases down the front where it had been folded in the packet. He was always nervous around clothes. What did you wear to a party to celebrate the opening of an art exhibition? When the woman who haunted your dreams and distracted your days was one of the artists? When you hoped, that night, to take her to bed?
She was nervous too. He could tell that as soon as she climbed into the car. She was dressed up in something slinky and black, looking so sophisticated that he couldn’t believe he’d have a chance with her. Then she gave that quirky grin that always flipped his stomach, made him feel he’d just spent three hours in The Good Shepherd in a westerly gale. He squeezed her hand. He wanted to tell her how stunning she looked, but because he couldn’t think how without seeming crass or patronizing, they drove all the way to Biddista in silence.
The gallery was called the Herring House: once they had dried fish here. It was at the end of a low valley, right on the water, on the west coast. Further along the beach there was a small stone pier where the fishing boats had pulled up to unload their catch; a couple of men still kept boats on the beach. Walk out of the door and there’d be the smell of seaweed and salt. Bella Sinclair said that when she’d first taken over the place there was still a whiff of the herring in the walls.
Bella was the other artist exhibiting. Perez knew her, as almost everyone in Shetland knew her. To chat to at parties, but mostly second-hand, through the stories that were passed around about her. She was a Shetlander, Biddista-born and -bred. Wild in her youth, they said, but now rather unapproachable, intimidating. And rich.
He still felt flustered after the rush from the plane and by the sense that this was his one chance with Fran. He was so clumsy with people’s feelings. What if he got it wrong? When he held out his hand to shake Bella’s he saw that it was trembling. Perhaps too he’d picked up Fran’s anxiety about how her paintings would be received. When they began to circulate among the guests, to look at the work displayed on the bare walls, he felt the tension building even more. He could hardly take in what was happening around him. He talked to Fran, nodded to acquaintances, but there was no real engagement.