White Nights - Ann Cleeves [67]
‘Who did you take fishing with you?’
‘They all wanted to come fishing with me. All the lads. Kenny and Lawrence Thomson. Alec Sinclair. The lasses too. Bella Sinclair and Aggie Watt. Though Aggie was a timid little thing, and they were awful cruel the way they teased her. Bella was as strong on the boat as a boy. Nothing frightened her.’ He stared into the distance and Perez thought he was imagining midsummer evenings out on the water. The children laughing and fighting, the family he’d never had.
‘You stayed friendly with them, did you, Willy? As they got older?’
Willy seemed not to hear. He tore a chunk of bread from the roll on his plate and dipped it into the broth.
‘There was Roddy Sinclair too,’ he said. ‘He liked the fishing when he came to stay at the Manse.’
‘That was later,’ Edith said. ‘Roddy was younger than Kenny and Lawrence. They wouldn’t have gone fishing with you together.’
Willy tried to think about that. The soup dripped from his bread on to the front of his jersey. Edith leaned across and wiped it carefully with a paper napkin. Willy shook his head as if trying to clear the pictures in his mind.
‘Did you ever have any English friends, Willy?’ Perez asked.
Willy suddenly gave a wide grin. ‘I liked going out with the Englishmen. They brought a hamper full of food and tins of beer. Sometimes, later, we’d build a fire on the beach to cook the fish and they always had a bottle of whisky. You remember that, Edith, don’t you? The summer when Lawrence and me took the Englishmen fishing?’
‘I remember that Lawrence always liked a drink,’ she said.
Willy grinned again.
‘What were the Englishmen’s names?’ Perez asked.
‘It was a fine time,’ Willy said. ‘A fine time.’ He returned to his meal, suddenly eating with great gusto, and Perez thought he was tasting the fresh fish caught just that day and cooked over the driftwood beach fire.
Perez turned to Edith. He didn’t want to pull Willy back to the present, to the indignity of slopped food and endless games of cards. ‘Do you know who he’s talking about? Were there any regular English visitors to Biddista?’
She shook her head. ‘Willy used to hire out his boat for fishing to the tourists, but I don’t remember anyone regular. Perhaps it was before my time.’
Willy jerked out of his reverie. ‘The Englishman came asking me questions, just the other day,’ he said. ‘But I told him nothing.’
‘Which Englishman would that be?’ Perez asked Edith.
‘There’s a writer called Wilding who comes after the traditional stories,’ she said. ‘Something to do with a book he’s writing. That must be who he means.’
Perez would have liked to spend the afternoon there, sitting in the sun flooding in through the windows, listening to Willy talking about fishing and the Biddista children, but he knew he couldn’t justify it. How would he account for his time to Taylor? Edith got up from the table and walked with him to the door.
‘Come back,’ she said. ‘Any time.’
In the car, his mobile phone suddenly got a signal again. It bleeped and showed a couple of missed calls, both from Sandy. Perez rang him, could hear the buzz of the incident room in the background. Sandy seemed to have his mouth full of food and it was a moment before Perez could make out what he was saying.
‘I’ve tracked down the lad who gave the Englishman a lift. Stuart Leask. He works on the desk at the NorthLink terminal and he’ll be there all afternoon.’
Chapter Twenty-four
Fran was working on a still-life, some pieces of driftwood and a scrap of fishing net she’d found on the beach. It was more as practice than for a picture to sell. She’d become obsessed by the need to improve her drawing. Even at art school, she thought, she hadn’t paid it enough attention.
The phone call came just as she’d taken a break from work and put on the kettle for tea. She thought it would be Perez. He was her lover, the man who had been there at