White Nights - Ann Cleeves [48]
Perez shook out the chip paper and a couple of herring gulls came squawking at his feet. ‘I need to make a call,’ he said. ‘Meant to do it earlier. Kenny Thomson, the guy who found the body, left a message for me.’
He walked a few feet away from Taylor and stood to his back to him, so he couldn’t hear the conversation. He wasn’t sure he’d have understood it anyway. When Perez lapsed into dialect he could have been talking another bloody language. He remembered how he’d felt when his mother had left them and moved to north Wales. There’d been an access order which his father had kicked off about. The arrangement hadn’t lasted long but for nearly a year Taylor had been sent to spend a weekend with her every month. Walking into a shop, everyone staring, everyone speaking a language he couldn’t understand. He knew they’d been talking about him. And about his mother setting up home with the respectable chapel man. Leading him astray. Hussey. A word stolen from the English.
Perez had switched off the phone and was waiting for Taylor to ask about the call.
‘Well?’ Taylor asked.
‘He wants another look at the body. Imagination going into overdrive if you ask me. He thinks it could be his brother.’ Perez paused, corrected himself. He always liked to get things right. ‘No, he doesn’t think it could be him. Wants to check that it isn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t he know his own brother?’
‘He left to go travelling. Hasn’t been back in years. And Kenny didn’t get a brilliant view. Only side on, and then there was the mask covering the face. Like I said, it’s just a matter of ruling him out. It’s obviously been bothering him.’
‘I thought you said the victim was English.’
Perez shrugged. ‘People’s voices change. They put on an act.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That he can come and have a look this afternoon, before the body goes south on the ferry for the postmortem.’
Taylor felt a thrill of excitement. This was his first chance to engage with the case. He’d never been a hands-off manager.
‘I’ll be there too,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind?’
Perez didn’t answer. He knew it wasn’t really a question.
Chapter Seventeen
Kenny Thomson arrived at the undertakers’ before they were ready to let him see the body. There were two men to greet him: Jimmy Perez, who always reminded him of that summer he’d spent on Fair Isle, and the big Englishman he’d seen get out of the car at the jetty.
They sat in a dark little waiting room. In one corner there was a bowl of silk flowers. There was a heavy, kind of floral smell in the air. It couldn’t come from the silk, of course, and he wondered what was making it.
He was thinking about that when Perez introduced the English detective, so he still wasn’t sure of his name and what his rank was.
‘What’s all this about then, Kenny?’ Perez said. He had a quiet, hesitant way of talking, thoughtful, as if he was weighing every word before he spoke.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ Kenny said. ‘But I thought, Better to check. Better than lying awake at night wondering.’
‘Tell us a bit about Lawrence,’ Perez said. ‘Just while we’re waiting.’
And Kenny found himself talking about Lawrence, the older brother who was bigger and stronger than him, who left Kenny in his shadow. ‘He was the sort of man who’d walk into a room and everyone would start smiling,’ he said. ‘When he went I missed him. Everyone in Biddista missed him.’
‘Why did he go? Was it for work?’
Then Kenny saw that they didn’t want to know that Lawrence lit up the room when he walked in. What they wanted was facts and dates. But he had more than that to tell them.
‘He had work here,’ he said. ‘Plenty of work. He wasn’t so interested in the croft. He didn’t really have the patience for it. He was more one for quick results. He was a fine builder. He started off working for Jerry Stout and learned the trade from him, then when Jerry died he took over the business. He and Jerry put a new roof on the Manse