White Nights - Ann Cleeves [40]
‘A tourist was found dead in suspicious circumstances yesterday in Biddista. The police are anxious to identify him.’ Then a brief description and a request that anyone who might recognize the dead man should phone the incident room.
It struck him that the tone would be very different if the dead man were a Shetlander. The fact that he was described immediately as a tourist took any sense of panic from the news. It was as if the reporter was describing an incident that had occurred elsewhere. A visitor’s death was almost a source of entertainment.
While he made coffee and stuck two slices of bread into the toaster he listened for the weather forecast. The fog should clear around midday. Perhaps Taylor and his team from Inverness would get in after all today on the plane. Taylor would be pleased. Thirteen hours on the ferry would be purgatory to him. He would be like a tiger caged for transport. Perez imagined him, lying straight and stiff on the bunk in the dark cabin, trying to relax and to sleep. When they’d worked together previously he’d thought Taylor the most restless man he’d ever met.
As he left home, he saw that the cruise ship was still moored at the dock. Usually the huge liners spent very little time in Lerwick. The passengers disembarked, caught the complimentary bus to the town centre, had a trip round the tourist and information centre, the Shetland Times bookshop and the gift shops, then went back to the luxury of the ship. Sometimes he would bump into a group of them in Commercial Street. Most were from the United States. They stared around them at the tiny shops, the passing people. He felt like an animal in a zoo.
In his office he phoned the harbourmaster. When was the Island Belle due to sail? Could Patrick arrange a visit for him before she left?
‘You’ll have to be quick. She’s scheduled to leave on the midday tide.’
‘I’ll go now,’ Perez said. ‘As soon as you can fix it.’
He drove down to Morrison’s Dock, parked facing the water and was distracted for a moment by a seal lifting its soft face out of the water. When he was a boy he’d used the Fair Isle seals for target practice with his father’s shotgun until his mother had found out.
‘What harm did they ever do to you?’
‘William says they take fish and that’s why the catch is so poor now.’ William was an older lad, at that time the fount of all wisdom and knowledge.
‘Nonsense. The catch is so poor because we’ve been over-fishing the North Sea for years.’ His mother, who had been a member of Greenpeace when she was a student, still had theories about the environment that his father found dangerous and extreme.
To be honest, Jimmy had been glad of an excuse not to shoot the seals any more. He’d hated the slick of blood which floated on the water when he’d hit the target. Sometimes he’d tried to miss, but William’s ridicule had been hard to face too.
Patrick must have warned the cruise ship that he was coming because it seemed they were expecting him. He was shown at once into the purser’s office. After The Good Shepherd, the mail boat which ran from Grutness to Fair Isle, the NorthLink ferries had seemed enormous. But this was monstrous, a towering white skyscraper of a ship, taller than any of the buildings in Lerwick. The purser was a lowland Scot. It seemed Shetland wasn’t his favourite stop on the tour.
‘You’ll have heard that a tourist was killed yesterday in Biddista?’ Perez asked him.
‘No.’ Implying, Why would I care?
‘Have any of your passengers explored the island that far west?’
‘Look, inspector, we don’t usually spend this long in Lerwick. It’s a bit of a dead loss. They come expecting something scenic and it’s not exactly pretty, is it? Grey little houses. We do the seabird tour and the silverworks then everyone heaves a sigh of relief and we’re off to Orkney. St Magnus’ Cathedral – now that is a building worth taking a photo