Ann Cleeves - White Nights

The offer to help Kenny with the clipping had been an impulse, but he’d meant it. He’d enjoy the physical exertion after the stress of the inquiry. It might free his mind, pull out the tightness in his muscles. He turned back to the climbers, hoping that they wouldn’t be long. If Booth’s phone was there, surely they’d find it soon enough. The search area wasn’t huge.

The climbers were a married couple called Sophie and Roger Moore. They’d come to Shetland first as students, liked it and stayed. Sophie was an accountant with Shetland Islands Council; Perez wasn’t sure how Roger made a living. He watched them slide over the edge in turn. They moved slowly, stopping to pass a hand across the ledges where thrift or the mess of a bird’s nest could be hiding the phone they were looking for. When they’d first arrived at the site they’d said it was easy enough, good practice, though Perez had convinced himself that it would be a waste of time for them. He was going through the motions to satisfy Taylor. He couldn’t see that anything would be found. It was a sort of superstition for him, not to be too hopeful at times like this. He was glad Taylor had decided to have a day at his desk, pulling together all the information that had already come in. The wait would drive the Englishman frantic. Perez imagined him standing at the top, shouting ridiculous, meaningless instructions to the climbers below.

When they were out of his view, Perez moved around to the landward side of the Pit, where the grass slope was, so he could see them better across the space. He couldn’t hear what the climbers were saying to each other. They were well down the cliff and although there was only a scattering of kittiwakes there, the birds were making a lot of noise. He thought now that there was probably some law about disturbing the birds in the breeding season. Should he have got permission? The thought distracted him for a moment – the numbers of breeding seabirds had declined, he didn’t want to add to their problems – and when he looked again the couple had reached the floor of the cavern. He moved carefully to the edge of the grass slope and sat, looking down at them. Even here he felt slightly dizzy. The beginning of panic. He had regular nightmares about falling into space, about being sucked to the edge of a cliff.

Roger and Sophie were moving into the tunnel between the hole and the beach. It was dead low water, so there was no danger of being swept out to sea. The channel was narrow, but quite high, certainly tall enough for a man to walk along without stooping. It bulged slightly in the middle and from this view was shaped, Perez thought, like a giant eye of a needle. The bridge of rock that separated the Pit from the shore was about twenty feet thick, so that was how long the channel ran for. In the middle it would be dark, and the climbers had torches. Claustrophobia didn’t hold the same terror for Perez as vertigo, but he was glad he wasn’t with them. They waved to show they were on their way in.

While he waited for them, Perez worried at the case. The sun was warm. In the far distance occasionally he could hear Kenny’s party calling at the sheep. He needed to find a motive for Booth’s death before he could move forward. Roddy’s could be explained because he’d been a witness to the first murder, or to something leading up to it. But why would a Shetlander want to kill an Englishman who hadn’t set foot on the place for years? It made no sense. He thought it must have been a Shetlander. They’d traced all the outsiders who had been in Biddista that night. That had been the focus for much of the work. The team sitting in the incident room in Lerwick, on the phone for hours at a time. ‘I understand you visited the Herring House on midsummer’s evening. Could you tell me who was with you? What time did you leave? Did you see anything unusual?’ Then the alibis had to be checked and cross-referenced. And they all checked out. Every one.

He must have started to doze, because the shout from below startled him. He realized suddenly how close to the edge he was and could feel his pulse racing. He put his palms flat on the grass at his side, to make sure he was safely anchored to the ground.

‘Jimmy! I think you’d better come down.’ It was Sophie. From this angle she looked all head and no body. Her mouth was open very wide as she yelled to him. A monster from the deep. The giant’s mistress, he thought, remembering the legend.

‘Why?’ He’d given them gloves and plastic evidence bags in case they found the phone.

‘Really, Jimmy, you have to come down. You can manage down the grass, can’t you? You don’t need a rope if you come that way.’

Perez had avoided the climb when Roddy Sinclair was found. Sandy had taken care of the crime scene then. Now he saw he had no choice. Sophie was still looking at him.

He took off his jacket, folded it carefully and placed it on the grass, feeling a little like a man who decides to commit suicide by drowning. Then he slid over the lip of the Pit on to the first of a series of rabbit tracks that crossed the slope. He kept his centre of gravity low and tilted his body into the slope, so one hand was always on the grass. There was no danger of his falling – Sophie would bound down it. He could imagine her confident and upright, jumping from one path to the next, facing forwards all the way down, only needing her heels to grip. He knew he was being painfully slow. Occasionally he stopped and glanced up so he could see how far he’d climbed. He didn’t think it was sensible to look down.

He knew he was approaching the bottom because he could hear Sophie, shouting through into the tunnel to Roger. Her words were blurred by echo, but he could tell she was standing quite close to him. Then he did turn and saw he was only six feet from the ground. He slid it on his backside and landed beside her, one foot slipping on a slimy rock into a pool. There was no direct sunlight there; a strong smell of rotting seaweed, organic and salty. It was somehow prehistoric. He tried not to think about the return to the real world.

‘What have you found?’

‘We didn’t like to touch it. This way.’ She led him into the mouth of the tunnel.

The floor was uneven – shingle, solid rock which formed crevasses and pools, and small smooth boulders which must have been washed in from the beach. Too late he remembered a directive he’d received a couple of months ago about risk assessment. He wondered what Health and Safety would make of this. Roger and Sophie weren’t even employees.

At this point the tunnel looked like a cave. It must curve further in and the gap leading to the open water must be very narrow, because no natural light showed from the other end. Roger had put on his torch and was waiting for them, haloed in a yellow glow. He was sitting on an outcrop of rock which jutted from the channel wall, eating a bar of chocolate.

‘Sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘Jimmy was a tad slow.’

‘Have you found Booth’s phone then?’ Perez thought they were playing a sort of practical joke on him. They knew he was uncomfortable with heights and had dragged him down here under false pretences. They’d pull out some ridiculous object that had been washed in – a pair of false teeth, an old boot – and expect him to find it amusing.

‘No,’ Roger said. ‘But we found this.’

He shone his torch into a pile of debris which had been lifted on to a shelf in the rock. There were scraps of fishing net, shell and seaweed, two of the plastic rings which hold four-packs of beer and, creamy and smooth, a piece of bone.

‘Very funny,’ Perez said. A sheep had become trapped down here, starved to death. It wouldn’t take long for the flesh to rot and be eaten away by fish and other creatures. When it was exposed to the air the bonxies and the rats would have it. The tide would have lifted the small piece of bone on to the ledge.