White Nights - Ann Cleeves [87]
She paused. ‘I phoned him at home a few days ago. I thought he should be back by then. Some woman answered.’
They were on their way back to Yorkshire when Taylor took the call from Sandy Wilson, saying there’d been another death. He dropped Jebson in Huddersfield and began the drive north. Excited to be on the move again, but sick that he wasn’t there to take control.
Chapter Thirty
Perez went straight from Fran’s house to collect Taylor from the airport at Sumburgh. It was a gusty, showery day, with brief flashes of sunshine, then the shadows of clouds blown across the flat land around the runways. The water at Grutness was choppy, blown into thousands of little waves which scattered the light, but the wind wasn’t strong enough to cause a delay. He arrived a little early and sat in the terminal building drinking coffee. A group of Japanese tourists waited for the plane.
Perez had stayed in Biddista until Roddy’s body had been lifted out of the Pit on a stretcher. He felt the boy deserved that, and, opening the body bag to look at him, he had the strange sense that for the first time he was seeing Roddy Sinclair in the flesh. Before, it had all been image, glossy and unreal as a magazine advert. By the time he had got to Ravenswick it was four in the morning and as bright as midday. Fran was asleep, must have been disturbed by dreams, because she’d thrown off the covers and lay, naked, on top of the twisted sheet. There was a white blind at the bedroom window and she looked somehow smudged, like one of her own paintings, in the filtered light.
He straightened the sheet and pulled it on top of her, then slid in beside her. It seemed like an unforgivable intrusion, but he didn’t want to wake her and he was exhausted. Her skin was cool and smooth. She stirred and smiled at him, wrapped herself around him. They both slept very deeply and were lying in exactly the same position when the television in the next room woke them. Cassie was singing along to a Saturday-morning children’s programme.
‘You do realize,’ Fran said, ‘that this will be all round Ravenswick School on Monday morning?’
‘I’m sorry, I should have thought.’ He wasn’t sure now what he should have thought. She’d invited him, after all. Did she not want it known that they were seeing each other?
‘Don’t worry. They think I’m a scarlet woman anyway.’ And she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and went to make tea.
Later they had pancakes for breakfast, with syrup and chocolate sauce. Cassie, still in her pyjamas, was getting silly and excited because of the novelty of the treat. But all the time he was wishing that he knew exactly what Fran was thinking and that he had some rules to follow. This relationship was so important to him and he didn’t want to get things wrong. Maybe I should ask her to marry me, he thought suddenly. Then at least I’d know where I was. The idea was at once tantalizing and ludicrous, so he found himself grinning. Fran asked him what he was laughing about.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m happy. That’s all.’
When Taylor walked into the terminal he seemed surprisingly alive and energetic. He said he’d had a few hours’ sleep in the hotel at Dyce and now what he really wanted was caffeine and carbs and he’d be fit for anything. Perez took him into the Sumburgh Hotel. The bar was quiet; the barman, a gaunt Englishman who’d lived in Shetland for so long that he spoke like a native, was chatting in a low voice to an old man sitting on a tall stool. Taylor ordered a burger and a Coke and when that was finished he couldn’t stop talking. Perez was reminded of Cassie, bouncing around the kitchen in Ravenswick, full of sugar and E numbers.
‘I found Booth’s wife