Ann Cleeves: White Nights

‘Don’t touch anything,’ Perez said. ‘Just in case.’ He knew Sandy shouldn’t need telling and knew anyway that he’d forget about the warning as soon as he got there, but it made him feel better to say it.

It was only as he drove down the road he’d taken the night before that he remembered the man who’d broken down in tears in the Herring House. Perez hadn’t made much of an effort to find him. He’d gone out of the kitchen door and looked on to the beach and up at the road, past the graveyard, but there’d been no sign. If he’d felt anything at all, it had been relief. The man must have been in a car after all – how else could he disappear so quickly? So he had recovered, if indeed he’d been ill. It had occurred to Perez briefly as he stood for a moment before going back to the gallery that he should let someone know. But who? And what would he say? Keep a look out for a chap who cries a lot. He might have amnesia . Listening to the suck of the tide on the shingle, he’d decided not to bother. Some tourist, he’d thought, disturbed or drunk or drugged. This time of year the islands seemed to attract them. They came looking for paradise or peace and found the white nights made them even more disturbed.

Instead of wondering about the nameless stranger, he’d been thinking of Fran, of the shape of her under the lacy black dress she was wearing and what it would be like to touch her.

He’d walked back to the gallery. From the road he saw the party continuing through the long windows, but had the sense that things were already winding up. Roddy was looking out at the sea, still holding the fiddle loosely under his chin, as if it was another limb, a part of his body. Inside again, Perez could see that the artists were disappointed. They had made some sales, but they’d expected a bigger crowd, more of a buzz. Fran took his hand and whispered that she’d like to go home. Despite the flattery from the intense man with the black hair, she needed cheering up. Part of him was glad she was a little bit sad. It gave him an excuse to comfort her.

Now he thought the suicide was too much of a coincidence. The mystery southerner had been clearly distraught, unbalanced even. The dead man had been found only a few hundred yards from the Herring House, where the stranger had last been seen. Perez hadn’t considered the possibility that he would take his own life. He felt guilty that he’d been so careless, responsible for a stranger he’d only once met. Then he tried to form in his head the words he’d use to explain the situation to Fran. Would she blame him for the man’s suicide? And hoping against the odds that, when he reached the hut by the Biddista pier, he would find that someone altogether different had killed himself.

He took the road north and west through Whiteness. Here twisted fingers of land ran into the sea and it was hard to tell where the line of the coast lay. There were lochs and inlets, so the land beyond looked like islands. In the low meadows flowers everywhere – buttercups, campion, orchids which his mother would have been able to name. In this light, at this time of the year, on impulse visitors bought up the old houses for second homes.

The road narrowed, became single-track with occasional passing places, then turned a bend in the hill, so Perez could see Biddista laid out in front of him. The cemetery, then the Herring House, close to the beach, the hut on the jetty, and beyond that, three terraced single-storey houses. The largest held the post office and shop. Then the track wound on past the Manse where Bella Sinclair lived until it came to Kenny Thomson’s croft. Once the community had been bigger. There were traces of ruined houses in a number of Kenny’s fields. He’d bought up the land steadily as folk moved out, either too old to carry on crofting or because they could get a better wage working for the council in Lerwick. Now the houses would be tarted up and sold for a fortune, but when he’d started expanding the croft there was no demand for them and he’d got the land dirt-cheap. The kirk had been pulled down years before when the population declined, the stone carried away for use throughout the island. Now this was all there was to Biddista, a community isolated from the rest of the island by the hill on one side and the sea on the other.

Sandy’s car was pulled in to the side of the road. He was sitting on the harbour wall smoking a cigarette. Perez, who had worked for a time in Aberdeen and dealt with more real crime in a month there than Sandy had in his entire career, wondered what he would do with the butt when he was finished. Throw it on to the ground and contaminate a possible crime scene? Instead, seeing Perez approach, Sandy stood up, pinched out the cigarette and hurled it into the tide. A different sort of pollution.

‘Where were you?’ Sandy asked. ‘I tried to phone you at home.’

Perez ignored the question and Sandy didn’t follow it up. He was used to being ignored.

‘I let Kenny get on back to his place,’ he said. ‘No point him staying around here and we’ll know where to find him. He was in a bit of a state. It hasn’t bothered me so much. It doesn’t look real, does it? With that thing over his face.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? You’ll see.’

Perez walked to the shed, stood in the doorway and looked in. The body hung from a thick noose tied to a rafter close to the apex of the pitched roof. The face was turned away from them, but Perez recognized the clothes. Black trousers, black linen jacket. Only when he went a few steps further forward did he see the mask, grinning. He felt suddenly sick, but forced himself to look into the hut again. He took in the scene, the overturned bucket. On the face of it this was certainly suicide.

Sandy had come up behind him. ‘The doctor will come as soon as he can,’ he said. ‘But he might be a while. There’s an emergency call-out. I said that was all right. Our man isn’t going anywhere.’ Sandy had an anxious-to-please, peerie-boy air about him still. It made Perez want to reassure him that he was doing OK, even when he got things wrong.

‘Good. Who did you get hold of?’

‘That new man who’s just moved in at Whiteness.’ Sandy paused. ‘What do you think’s going on there, with the mask?’

‘I don’t know.’ Perez had found it so disturbing that he’d turned his back on the hanging man. It was the bare shininess of it, the manic grin. After the gloom in the shed, the sunlight, reflected from the water, hurt his eyes for a moment.

‘He must be a tourist,’ Sandy said, with absolute certainty. ‘Not anyone from Biddista at least. Not according to Kenny. He could tell that without seeing the face. And a place this small, he’d know. I haven’t checked his belongings for identity. You said not to touch.’

‘Good,’ Perez said again, distracted. He was remembering the man the night before, standing with the linings of his pockets pulled out. There would be nothing to identify him in his clothes. He began to run through the process he’d follow to trace him. Phone calls to hotels and guesthouses. Check with NorthLink and British Airways. They might have to wait until the man failed to turn up for his return trip south before they got a name for him. This time of year there were more visitors than locals on the islands. Despite himself he was interested. What had led first to the loss of memory and then for the man to become so desperate that he took his own life?

‘What do you think the mask is about?’ Sometimes he asked Sandy questions, not expecting much of an answer, but because he wanted to make him think, hoping that it might become a habit.

‘I don’t know. Making some sort of statement, maybe?’

What sort of statement? That his life had been a joke? He hadn’t been laughing much the night before.