Ann Cleeves - Dead Water

Willow remembered meeting Evie for their lunch in the Tollclock Centre, the conversation about the wedding, the impromptu invitation to the celebration party and thought: This woman isn’t a killer. She didn’t stab her fiancé, dump his body by the road and make it look like a dummy, then talk to me about Jerry Markham. Nobody is that good an actor.

Jimmy Perez approached the door and knocked. Willow continued to stare through the window. Jessie was startled by the noise and Francis got to his feet to answer. Evie didn’t move. It was as if she hadn’t heard it.

‘Francis, I’m so sorry.’ As Willow watched from the shadow, Perez put his hand on Watt’s shoulder. The men stood very close for a moment, then pulled apart. ‘This is Inspector Reeves,’ Perez went on. ‘She’s in charge of the investigation. You don’t mind if we come in?’

‘Come away inside,’ Francis said. The habit of good manners and hospitality meant he wouldn’t refuse them entry, even tonight, even when his family was in crisis.

The women looked up when the visitors walked into the room, but didn’t get to their feet. Willow saw that the mother had shifted chairs in the moment that her husband had left the kitchen; now she was sitting next to her daughter. Francis moved around the room, which was obviously familiar to him, switching on the kettle, putting teabags in a pot. Still Willow felt removed from the action: she had wandered onto the stage, but she wasn’t part of the play. She needed to become engaged. She pulled out a chair so that it was facing Evie.

‘I’m so sorry about John, Evie, and I know it’s the last thing you need, but we have to talk. You do understand?’

Evie nodded.

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would have wanted to hurt him?’

‘No! He was a good man. Everyone liked him.’ She looked at her parents for confirmation.

‘No one had anything but good to say about John Henderson,’ Francis said. ‘He didn’t have an enemy in the world.’

‘Yet someone stabbed him in the garage of his home at Hvidahus, drove him almost all the way here and set his body beside the dummy of you on the verge. Our crime-scene investigator found the original in the ditch further up the road. That would suggest to me that John had an enemy.’ Willow kept her voice even, but looked to check that Evie had heard her and was taking in the words. She would have preferred to talk to the woman on her own, but could hardly send the parents away. ‘I assume that you do want the murderer caught and punished.’

‘That’s not for me to worry about,’ Evie said. ‘That way lies madness.’

Willow saw that one of the photographs pinned to the board on the wall was of Evie at her hen party. She was in the bar in Voe, dressed up in some sort of animal costume. A fake-fur suit and furry ears. A glass of beer was on the table in front of her and she had her arm round a plump woman dressed liked a pirate. Both of them were pulling faces.

The silence that followed the words was broken by Francis Watt, who put the teapot on the table and handed round mugs. The ritual of tea, Willow thought, is like a liturgy itself, comforting because it’s so familiar. She watched Jessie pour, waved her hand to show that she didn’t take milk.

‘But you will help us,’ Perez said. ‘You will answer our questions truthfully?’

‘Of course! But I won’t guess. I won’t speculate.’

‘When did you last speak to John?’ he asked.

OK! Willow thought. So now Perez is taking over my interview. But she didn’t interrupt. Perez seemed to have grasped Evie’s attention. Demanded it and held it tight. Her eyes were fixed on his face. Two people who had lost the people they loved. They could have been alone in the world.

‘On the phone this morning,’ Evie said. ‘We spoke to each other when we first woke up. Every day. Even if we planned to meet up later. He was an early riser and so am I. It was seven o’clock. I made tea, sat here and phoned John.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘The usual things.’ For the first time Evie sounded close to tears. ‘How much I loved him. How I couldn’t wait to see him. How I was counting the minutes to Saturday when we could be together as man and wife.’

‘He was going to work at lunchtime?’ Perez asked.

‘Yes.’ Evie still directed her answers to Perez alone. ‘I planned to meet him when he finished at eight. Just for a couple of hours.’

‘Was the plan that you’d go to his house or would he come here?’

‘He’d come here,’ Evie replied. ‘It was almost on his way home. We’d share a meal, talk over the final arrangements for Saturday.’

‘Then he’d go back to Hvidahus?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was firm. ‘Then he’d go back to Hvidahus.’

‘We’re looking for a motive for his death,’ Perez said. ‘He was a good man. We understand that. Everyone says it. So perhaps he knew something about Jerry Markham’s murder. Knew something or saw something. Did he mention anything of that kind to you?’

‘No.’

But this time she hesitated, and Perez picked up on the pause.

‘Maybe he didn’t talk about it directly. Maybe he seemed concerned, tense, anxious.’

‘The last couple of days he seemed a bit distracted,’ Evie said at last. ‘When we spoke today I asked what he would do for the rest of the morning. He was always a busy man. Not one for sitting around and reading the paper. I thought he might plan to be out in the garden. But he said there were some loose ends he had to tie up. It was as if he had come to a decision.’

Perez weighed the words. ‘Did you ask what he meant? Weren’t you curious?’

‘A little curious,’ she said. ‘I should have asked him. But I thought it might be legal business. He’d talked about writing his will. And I was in a hurry. It was a big day for me. The meeting of the steering group. We talked about that too. Tidal energy and my grand project. John knew how much it meant to me.’

For the first time Willow moved her gaze from Perez and Evie, the stars of the piece, and looked at her parents. They sat side by side, the tea untouched on the table in front of them, their faces rigid, determined to be strong for their daughter.

‘We’ll come through this,’ Jessie said. ‘It seems desperate now, but you’ll come through it.’

Evie turned her head to look at her mother with clear, dry eyes. She said nothing, the silence a sort of reproach.

Perez gave a little cough to pull Evie back to him. She returned her gaze to his face. ‘One last question,’ he said. ‘The loft room in John’s house – did you decorate that? Was it your space?’

Evie gave a little smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was none of my doing. I think he was almost embarrassed by it. The mess and the clutter. Not like John at all.’

‘So it was all Agnes’s stuff?’

‘I suppose it was,’ she said. ‘And he could never bear to get rid of it. A kind of shrine. Though he never said. Perhaps he thought I’d be jealous.’

Perez drove Willow Reeves to her hotel before going home. He still sensed the awkwardness between them and felt an undefined guilt, the idea that somehow he had behaved badly towards her. It wasn’t just disappearing off to Fetlar without letting her know what he was doing, or refusing to break the news of Henderson’s death to Evie; it was insinuating himself into this case, where he had no right to meddle. Except that officially he was still on the team. And she had invited him to be a part of the investigation. And it was on his patch. There was a bubble of resentment along with the confusion.

At the hotel she didn’t immediately leave the car. ‘Do you fancy a nightcap? One drink before you go?’