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By Root 664 0

a couple of hundred yards further on. He and Lawrence had put it up and it was solid enough, though some of the corrugated-iron panels on the roof would need replacing in the next year or so. They never bothered locking it – it was used by all the Biddista men who kept a boat – and nobody much else strayed to the jetty. Once everything people needed was delivered here by ship – coal and corn and animal feed. Now a few holidaymakers in yachts put up for the night, but he hadn’t even seen many of them yet this year. There was a heavy bolt on the door, so they could fasten it from the outside to stop it blowing in the wind. Today the bolt was unfastened and the door was a little ajar. Kenny tried to think who might have been in the hut last, who might have been so careless. It would only take a sharp squall to have the door off its hinges. Roddy Sinclair, he thought. It would be just like him. That boy had no consideration. Once he’d held a sort of party in here and Kenny had come in the next day to a pile of red tins, an empty whisky bottle and a strange lad in a sleeping bag. Kenny pulled the door open and took in the familiar smell of engine oil and fish.

Because he’d been thinking about Roddy Sinclair, he assumed at first that the figure swinging from the ceiling was one of the boy’s pranks. Roddy had got drunk at Bella’s party and thought he’d cause mischief. Kenny knew when he got closer it would turn out to be a fertilizer sack filled with straw, dressed up in a black jacket and trousers. The head was smooth, gleamed a little. Realistic, Kenny thought. He pushed the figure. It was surprisingly heavy, not made of straw at all. Its shadow swung backwards and forwards on the back wall of the hut and it twisted on its rope so for the first time Kenny saw the face. It was made up by a clown’s mask, shiny white plastic reflecting the morning sunshine coming through the gap in the door, with a grinning red mouth and blank staring eyes. Then he saw that the figure had real hands. Skin. Bony knuckles. Fingernails, smooth and round like a woman’s. But this wasn’t a woman. It was a man, with a bald head. A dead man hanging from one of the roof joists, his toes only inches from the ground. Beside him, on its side, was a big plastic bucket. Kenny thought he must have turned it upside-down to use it as a step, then kicked it away. He felt the hysteria rise in his stomach. He wanted to lift away the mask; it looked indecent on a dead person. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he put his hands on the man’s arms to hold him steady. He couldn’t bear the thought of him swinging there, a scarecrow on a gibbet.

His first thought was to call Edith on his mobile phone. But what could she do? So, feeling a little foolish and faint, he went back outside, sat on the shingle and dialled 999.

Chapter Five

Perez heard the news on his mobile as he was on his way in to work from Fran’s house. Before that, lightheaded through lack of sleep, he was so absorbed in recalling the events of the night before that he was driving automatically, unaware of his surroundings. In his head was the music Fran had put on her CD player when they first got in – a woman singing, something lilting and Celtic he hadn’t recognized. He wondered if he was reading too much into what had happened with Fran. That was his way. He brooded. His first wife, Sarah, had said he expected too much from her, that he made emotional demands. I should be tougher, more resilient, he thought. More of a man. I care too much what women think of me.

Then he got the phone call and he forced himself to concentrate. Work was a constant, something he did well. And Sandy, who had never been the most articulate person, always got incoherent at times of stress or excitement. It took Perez’s full attention to deal with him.

‘We’ve got a suicide,’ Sandy said. ‘Kenny Thomson found him hanging in that hut where the Biddista lads keep the stuff for the fishing.’

‘Who is it?’ Perez asked.

The voice on the end of the phone interrupted. ‘Kenny Thomson. You’ll know him. He’s lived