Ann Cleeves - Red Bones

‘So you offered to sort the matter out for him.’

‘Something had to be done!’ Ronald said, his voice unnaturally loud. ‘My father was making himself ill and scaring my mother. I said I’d go to see Mima, persuade her to be reasonable, offer her something.’ There was a silence. Perez waited for him to continue. Ronald went on, more calmly. ‘Back in the bungalow, I had dinner with Anna. Then she started having a go at me. About my drinking and the baby. I just couldn’t stand it. I had to get out of there. I said I was going after the rabbits.’

‘But you went to Setter.’

‘I was going to shoot rabbits,’ Ronald said. ‘Nothing was planned. But I kept going over and over it in my mind. What would happen if Mima started to rake up the past? So I went to see her.’

Again Perez remained silent. The lawyer stared at the inspector as if she wanted the questions to continue, so the interview would be over more quickly. Her hands fluttered nervously in her lap.

‘It was foggy. I saw the lights on in Setter and I could hear her television even through the closed door. I knocked and waited. She came to answer and I could smell she’d been drinking. Mima always liked a dram. “So Andrew’s sent his bairn to do his dirty work.” That was what she said. Then she pulled on a yellow jacket and pushed past me into the garden. “Come and see where they buried my lover,” she said. “It’ll all come to light once the bones have been tested.” Then she stamped ahead of me round the side of the house and towards the field. It was so easy. She was still talking and I couldn’t bear the sound of complaining any more. I let her walk a distance away from me. She turned to see why I wasn’t following. I lifted up my gun and I shot her.’ He put his head in his hands, almost as if he was covering his ears, and stared into the distance, towards the high window, where it was starting to get light. ‘Once the noise of the shot had faded it was beautifully quiet. No more talking. On the way home I took a couple of rabbits, so I wouldn’t have to explain to Anna why I’d come back empty-handed.’

‘What about Hattie?’ Perez asked. ‘Did she really have to die? And like that?’

‘She guessed, worked it out in the days after Mima died,’ Ronald said. ‘Not all of it, but that the family was involved. She heard Mima talking on the telephone to my father about the bones. And we had to get her off that land. She was obsessed about the dig. While she was alive she would never leave it alone and some time the Norwegian’s body would be found. Then it would all come out. They’d identify him and remember the money, the kroner sealed in the tobacco tins.’

‘And you wouldn’t be the rich Cloustons of Whalsay any more.’

Ronald looked away, and continued to speak. ‘Hattie heard Mima talk to Andrew on the phone. She heard them arguing. It never occurred to her that I had anything to do with the old lady’s murder. I’d been to the university in the south. I’d been civilized by my contact with the academics, I read books and knew about history. She bumped into me after she’d had her meeting with her boss: “Can we talk Ronald? I wanted to let you know that I’ve phoned Inspector Perez. I know your father’s an ill man, but really I think he might have shot Mima. I just wanted to warn you…”’

‘Give me the details, please. How did you kill her?’

‘I walked with her back to Setter. I pretended to be interested. “So you think there might be a more recent body buried here alongside the ancient one?” Then she turned away from me and I hit her on the back of the head with a round smooth stone.’

‘Not hard enough to break the skin,’ Perez said. ‘But it knocked her out. I understand. That gave you the opportunity to fake her suicide. Why did you slit her wrists with Paul Berglund’s knife?’

‘Is that who it belonged to?’ Ronald looked back at the inspector, surprised. ‘I didn’t realize. It was there and it did the job.’

The matter-of-fact words made Perez feel suddenly sick. He leaned forward towards the man again. ‘How could you do it to her?’

Ronald considered, then took the question literally. ‘I’m used to blood. Gutting fish. Killing beasts. The girl was unconscious by then. It had to look like suicide.’ He was struck by a sudden thought. ‘You got Cedric to phone me tonight. And you made up the story of a witness. Anna told me about that when she got home from the party. Cedric was never there at all that afternoon.’

No , Perez thought. But he was involved all the same, in a roundabout way . His father had worked with the Shetland Bus too. It had made sense for them to use Cedric to bait the trap, to say that he wanted his share of the money.

‘Two people were dead,’ he said. ‘We had to make it stop.’

He stood up and looked again out of the window. It was a beautiful morning. There was sunlight on the water.

That evening they met up at Fran’s house in Ravens-wick. She’d cooked a meal and when it was over they sat around the table in the kitchen, drinking wine and talking. The dishes had been cleared but there was still a plate of cheese and a bowl of red grapes, like a still-life study, in front of them. It was late because Fran had wanted to get Cassie to bed first. Perez could tell that Sandy was nervous. This wasn’t the sort of social event he usually went in for. He drank less than they did, although Perez had already suggested he could get a taxi back to town. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself. All the same he was pleased to have been invited. Perez could tell that.

‘How’s Anna?’ Fran asked as soon as Sandy came in. He had stayed the night in Whalsay, taking statements.

‘In shock, of course. She’s going south to stay with her parents until she’s come to terms with what’s happened. She talks about coming back to Shetland but I don’t think she ever will. She tried very hard to fit in, but she was never really cut out to be a Shetland wife.’

‘What about me?’ Fran asked with a little laugh. ‘Am I cut out to be a Shetland wife?’

Perez knew what she was doing. Sandy had believed Ronald to be his friend. He still saw the Whalsay deaths as a personal betrayal. Fran was trying to lighten the mood. There was no more to her question than that.

‘Oh, you!’ Sandy said. ‘You’d fit in fine wherever you lived.’

‘Will Andrew and Jackie be charged?’ Fran reached out for a grape, cut another wedge of cheese.

‘Not Jackie,’ Perez said. ‘If she guessed that Ronald was involved in some way, she didn’t really know. And we’ve no evidence to suggest that she understood where the original source of wealth came from.’

‘If we go back far enough all the rich families in the UK got their money in a dubious fashion,’ Fran said. ‘The spoils of war, off the backs of the poor.’

Perez smiled but said nothing. After a few drinks she often believed herself to be a champion of the people.

Sandy shifted in his chair. ‘But surely we should have enough to charge Andrew? We know he was involved. He tried to focus our attention away from Setter by telling me they threw the Norwegian’s body into the sea. If we exhume Per’s body, get the forensic accountants to look at Andrew’s business records over the years, we should have enough to satisfy the Fiscal.’

Perez realized that Sandy was more comfortable believing Andrew to be a murderer than he was thinking of Ronald in that way. Sandy had been deceived by his old friend and they’d both been taken in by Ronald’s fine acting.

‘Aye,’ Perez said. ‘Maybe.’ He knew how long the investigation would take and he doubted whether Andrew would still be alive at the end of it. Maybe living in the giant house on the hill, with a heartbroken wife who’d lost her son to prison and her grandchild to his relatives in the south, would be punishment enough.