Ann Cleeves - Red Bones

Perez yelled at the woman but she had her back to him and she couldn’t hear. He tapped her on the shoulder, could feel the sharpness of her bone through the sticky nylon. She switched off the machine.

‘I’m looking for one of your guests. Paul Berglund.’

‘Don’t ask me, hen. I only do the cleaning. And keep the show on the road.’ An incomer from Glasgow. She grinned to show that she was happy enough with her role there. ‘I’ll fetch Cedric for you.’ She disappeared into a back room and returned with an elderly man with a stoop.

‘Is Paul Berglund here?’ He couldn’t work out why he felt it so important to speak to Berglund again before he left Shetland. Perhaps it was the way Hattie had looked when she talked about him.

The landlord was going to ask who Perez was, then he saw Sandy who’d wandered in from the car and realized he must be police. ‘He checked out earlier. He’s been back since to pick up his stuff. You’ve just missed him. That lassie from the dig was with him.’

Outside they could see the ferry was already moored at the pier, a dark shape in the mist. From here Perez couldn’t tell if it was disembarking or being loaded with cars. He drove far too fast down to the jetty, but by the time they arrived the boat was sliding away towards the opposite shore.

‘What do you want to do?’ Sandy peered out into the mist.

‘Nothing.’ They’d be able to trace Berglund if they needed to speak to him. Besides, Perez was sure the death would go down as a terrible accident. Mima had been an old woman and there was nobody to make a fuss on her behalf. ‘I’m going back to the office and I’ll talk to the Fiscal. You’ll go and get some sleep. Take a couple of days’ compassionate leave. I’ll see you back at work after the weekend.’

Suddenly Perez was eager to leave the island. He wasn’t sure he could make sense of the place while he was still there. He’d been aware for so long of the Whalsay myths: its wealth, its friendliness and its traditions. Now, surrounded by fog, he knew it was quite different from anywhere else in Shetland, certainly from the bustling town of Lerwick and the self-contained remoteness of Fair Isle. But he couldn’t define it. Perhaps it didn’t matter. If Mima Wilson’s death turned out to be an accident, what did it matter what Perez thought of the place where she’d spent her life? But Perez thought it did matter and that he needed to be away from Whalsay so he could think about it more clearly.

Perez had offered Sandy a lift back to Lerwick. ‘If you want to go back to town, that is. You’re too tired to drive. You can come back to Whalsay and collect your car another time.’ For a brief moment Sandy was tempted to leave Whalsay. Usually he did what Perez told him, not because he thought his boss was always right but because it was the easier course of action. And how good it would be to drive away and leave the mess surrounding his family behind. An afternoon’s sleep followed by a few pints with the boys in The Lounge in Lerwick and he’d feel fine again. What good was he doing on Whalsay anyway? His mother would deal with all the practical details of arranging a funeral for Mima and he was in no position to provide the reassurance Ronald needed.

But he told Perez he’d stay for another night on the island. It was an instinctive feeling that it was the right thing to do. His father wouldn’t have run away in this situation and ever since he was a boy, more than anything Sandy had wanted to be like his father. Now he saw Perez give a brief nod of approval too and that reinforced his sense that he’d made the right decision. He watched Perez drive into the ferry and waited until it had moved out of the harbour. He felt suddenly bereft.

His car was still on the jetty where he’d left it after driving down to meet his boss. He switched on the engine and the clock on the dashboard lit up. It wasn’t midday yet. It always amazed Sandy how much Perez could pack into a small space of time. If you met him you’d think the inspector was kind of slow. It was his way of thinking before he spoke so you knew that when the words came out they were just the ones he’d intended. But Perez wasn’t slow at all. There was a sort of magic in his asking the right questions the first time, picking up the clues in a situation, knowing when it was time to move on.

As he drove past the Pier House Hotel on his way back to Utra he saw that Ronald’s car was parked outside. Sandy jammed on the brakes, felt the car slide on the greasy road then pulled in too. Getting pissed at lunchtime wasn’t going to help the man. Sandy thought he might not have Perez’s brains but he knew that much.

The woman in the pink overall had finished cleaning the bar but the place still had that smell of last night’s beer mixed with furniture polish, the smell of bars everywhere before customers arrive and start drinking. Cedric Irvine stood polishing glasses. He’d owned the Pier House for all the time Sandy could remember. He’d served the boy his first under-age pint, winking as he slid it over to him. There’d never been a Mrs Irvine, just a series of live-in barmaids and housekeepers who, it was rumoured, satisfied all his needs. The skinny Glaswegian was the most recent. Nobody was ever quite sure what the relationship was between Cedric and these women. When one of the regulars got sufficiently drunk to ask, Cedric would only shake his head and say that gentlemen never spoke of these things. ‘And neither will you if you hope to set foot in this establishment again.’ That was how he spoke. Sandy thought there was something of the preacher about him.

Now Cedric looked up from his work and gave Sandy a smile of welcome that was more than professional. He nodded to the corner of the room, where Ronald sat in front of a pock-marked copper table. The man had finished his pint and was halfway through his whisky chaser.

‘He needs a friend,’ Cedric said. ‘It’s never a good thing drinking on your own. Not like that. Just drinking to get drunk.’

‘He feels dreadful.’

‘So he should. Mima was a good woman.’

‘It could have happened to any of the boys.’ Sandy had seen it before. The young men would get fired up on beer, then jump into cars and vans and roar across the island with their shotguns to try for rabbits or geese or anything else that took their fancy, as likely sometimes to hit each other as what they were aiming for. They were lucky there’d been no other accidents. On a number of occasions Sandy had been with them, whooping and cheering them on, behaving like a moron. It didn’t only happen in Whalsay. Whenever men got together and drank too much they made fools of themselves. Never again, he thought. How would he feel if he’d been the one to kill Mima? But he knew that if he were with a gang of his friends he’d get dragged along on other foolish escapades. He’d never been able to stand up to them.

Cedric had pulled Sandy a pint of Bellhaven. Ronald still hadn’t noticed that his cousin had come in. The whisky glass was empty now and he was staring out of the window into space.

‘Give me another pint for him,’ Sandy said. ‘Then I’ll take him away for you, before anyone else comes in and there’s a scene.’

He carried the pints across to the table. At last Ronald looked up. Sandy thought he’d never seen the man look so ill.

‘I thought we’d already done the wetting of the baby’s head.’

Ronald glared. ‘Leave the baby out of this.’

‘I take it Anna doesn’t know you’re here,’ Sandy said. ‘She’d kill you.’ He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, but Ronald didn’t seem to have heard them.

‘I can’t see how it could have been me.’ It came out as a cry. He’d changed into a shirt and a tie. Perhaps it was his way of paying respect, but it made Sandy see him as a different person. The sort of person Ronald might have become if he’d stayed on at the university for that last year and got his degree. Someone who worked in a museum or a library. When they’d talked about careers at primary school Ronald, to the astonishment of the rest of the class, had announced that he wanted to be an archivist. Where had that come from? Not from Jackie and Andrew.