Ann Cleeves - Dead Water

‘Did he phone you at work?’ Perez sipped his coffee. The mug had a bright-blue glaze and he recognized the work of a local potter, a friend of Fran’s. This is how it’ll be, he thought. As long as I live in Shetland, there’ll be no escaping her.

Again there was a brief pause before she answered. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Because he told people he was interested in a story on the oil and natural gas, and I thought he might have hoped you could introduce him to colleagues working on the project. He’d shown interest in the wind farm too, and in tidal power.’

‘He would realize,’ she said stiffly, ‘that I’d have very little interest in helping him in any way at all.’

‘Can you tell me about him?’ Through the window he saw a pair of eider ducks on the water. Perez could hear them and thought they chuntered like a couple of old ladies gossiping.

‘He hurt me,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to be objective.’

‘All the same, it’d be useful. Folk don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but sometimes it’s the failings that make them a target for violence. Can you understand why anyone would want to kill Jerry Markham, for instance?’

‘Oh yes!’ The response was immediate. ‘I’d have killed him myself all those years ago if I’d had the chance. But he ran away south.’

‘Would you mind telling me about it? It’s not the facts I’m interested in as much as the man himself. The only sense I have of him at the moment is that he’s a successful journalist. Was he always ambitious, even when he was working on the Shetland Times ?’

‘I suppose he was,’ she said. ‘And perhaps that was what attracted me to him at first, the fact that he was so different from my family. He wanted much more out of life than they did. My parents spent their time trying to preserve the old traditions. My father builds yoals – beautiful boats using the old designs. It takes him months of work; he’s a perfectionist. My mother’s family have always been crofters. Now I’m proud of them both, but then it seemed as if they were living in the past and had no time at all for the future or the world away from Shetland.’

Perez said nothing. He could tell she was ready to talk to him. She just needed the time to get her thoughts in order.

‘I was very young for my age,’ she said. ‘I’d been out at the High School and lived during the week at the hostel, but even while the other kids were going to parties, getting themselves invited to the town students’ houses so that they could go into bars, that had never interested me. I was ambitious too, in my own way. I wanted a place at a good university, to make my parents proud.’

Perez nodded and that was all the prompting she needed to continue.

‘I got a holiday job at the Ravenswick Hotel,’ she said. ‘I was thrilled to pieces. I’d looked at other waitressing jobs, but Peter and Maria paid well and I liked them. And I could live in.’

‘You didn’t want to spend your last summer in Shetland on Fetlar with your folks?’

‘I knew it wouldn’t be my last summer in Shetland,’ she said. ‘I always knew this would be my permanent home. I suppose I was ready for some independence. An adventure.’

It wasn’t much of an adventure, Perez thought. Other kids might pick grapes in Europe or go backpacking across Africa, but Evie had settled for a job in a Shetland mainland hotel. Perhaps she guessed what he was thinking, because she grinned. ‘I was a home bird,’ she said. ‘I hated living in the hostel at school, so really the Ravenswick job was a big deal. I felt very grown-up.’

‘Was Jerry Markham living at home then?’

‘He had a flat in Lerwick because he was working on the Shetland Times , but he spent two or three nights a week in the hotel. He was an only child. I thought he was being kind, coming home to spend time with his parents, but it was probably the free food and drink that brought him back to the hotel. He never paid for anything while he was there.’ Evie poured more coffee into Perez’s mug.

‘How did the two of you get together?’ Perez asked.

‘I fancied him rotten from the first time I met him.’ She smiled again. ‘I was a late starter when it came to the lads. I didn’t have a boyfriend at school. Jerry was older than me, a graduate, with a good job. He seemed to know everything – about films and books and music. I never thought that we might go out together. He was a fantasy. So sophisticated! I dreamed about him, blushed every time he came close to me. I suppose he realized and decided he’d have a bit of fun with me.’

‘Perhaps he liked you,’ Perez said. ‘There’d be lots of girls in Shetland he could have fun with.’

She shot him a grateful glance. ‘Aye, maybe.’ She paused. ‘There was a bit of a do for the staff at the hotel. The chef’s birthday party. After hours, when the bar had closed to the visitors. The energy you have when you’re young! I knew I’d have to be up at six to serve the breakfasts, but still I stayed up drinking most of the night.’

Perez smiled. Evie Watt still seemed very young to him. But he didn’t want to interrupt the story.

‘I don’t remember much about it,’ she went on. ‘I wasn’t used to the drink and I was on the spirits with the other lasses. Peter and Maria were there at the beginning, but they soon went off to bed and left the rest of us to it. At some point Jerry suggested a walk in the garden, just the two of us. Suddenly we’d left all the noise behind. It was a beautiful morning in late June and it was just getting light.’ She turned to Perez. ‘I do remember him kissing me and thinking I’d never be so happy again.’

‘Did you get pregnant that night?’

She shook her head and gave a self-mocking laugh. ‘I was a good girl, Inspector. I’d never sleep with a man on a first date. And Jerry didn’t push it. Not then. For some reason he didn’t want his parents to know we were going out, but he treated me like a real girlfriend. On my days off we’d meet in town and then we’d drive in his car, exploring the islands, heading off down small tracks just to see what was at the end of them. We first made love on one of those trips. In a tiny cove, with cliffs all around. You could only reach it at low water, and the tide came in and stranded us there. I hadn’t planned to have sex with him and we didn’t take precautions. Crazy! I can’t even blame drink that time. It was the sun and the excitement. Romance, I suppose. And I was very naive. I didn’t think I was likely to get pregnant the first time. Later we were more careful, but by then it was too late.’

They sat for a moment in silence. Perez was pleased that she still had happy memories of that summer.

‘I was back home and packing for university when I took the pregnancy test. Already heartbroken because Jerry had made it clear that he didn’t expect the relationship to last once I was at university: “You don’t want to be tied down before you get there.” My mother found me crying in my bedroom. My father was furious and phoned Peter Markham, demanding to know what sort of establishment he was running in Ravenswick, and how his son intended to fulfil his obligations to me.’ She glanced up. ‘All very Victorian, and hugely embarrassing to a seventeen-year-old, but I’d always been a Daddy’s girl. I suppose my attitude was just as old-fashioned. I thought Jerry should stand by me. I didn’t expect marriage, but he disappeared south as soon as the fuss blew up, leaving me to face everything on my own. That’s when I could have killed him.’

She got to her feet and was rinsing the mugs at the sink when she next spoke, her back to Perez.

‘I lost the baby. I’d decided to keep it and had geared up to face the world as a mother, and then it disappeared. There was real grief, of course, but I felt cheated too. No need for the dramatic gesture after all.’ She paused. ‘Jerry had never wanted to be tied down by a teenage girlfriend from the sticks. That was why he dumped me. It was nothing about me having freedom at uni, or even about the baby. He wanted to go south to make his fortune without any complications in his life.’