Ann Cleeves - Dead Water

‘He met her in the winter, an advent course at a church in north London.’

There was a pause. ‘You’re telling me that Jerry got religion?’ Now the woman sounded incredulous.

‘According to Ms Grey.’

‘Then she’s lying!’ Suddenly Evie took off her shoes and rolled up the legs of her jeans. She ran towards the sea. A tiny wave rolled over her feet. The water must have been freezing, but it was as if she hadn’t felt its iciness. When Willow joined her she was still standing there, staring out to the horizon. ‘Jerry was a committed atheist. He mocked me for my faith. There is absolutely no way he’d have changed his mind on that. He was too proud to admit anything beyond his own experience. Too arrogant. And even if he had been tempted to explore belief, he’d have kept it secret. Trust me, turning up at a church just wasn’t his style.’ She looked up at Willow. ‘What’s she like, this Annabel Grey?’

Willow thought for a moment. ‘Young,’ she said. ‘Tall. Pretty.’

‘Of course.’ Evie’s voice was bitter. ‘Any girlfriend of Jerry’s would have to be pretty.’ She continued in a rush, an admission of hatred: ‘I’ve been thinking that it was Jerry’s fault. That John’s dead, I mean. It was Jerry coming back that started this off. If he’d stayed away, I’d be married by now. I’d be happy.’

‘We don’t know yet what happened, what triggered these dreadful events.’ But Willow thought that was probably true. Out at sea there was a huge tanker on the way south. Was that carrying crude oil from Sullom Voe? She turned back to Evie. ‘Jerry hadn’t mentioned in his voicemail message that he had a girlfriend?’

‘He didn’t tell me anything. The message was just: Please call me back. Something of that sort. A request. But I owed him nothing.’ Evie walked on through the shallow water. Willow couldn’t see her face and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

‘Weren’t you interested in knowing why he wanted to see you?’ Because surely we’re all interested in ex - boyfriends . Especially the ones who have dumped us , the ones we really adored .

‘Perhaps I was a bit curious.’ Evie stopped, watched the tide suck at her toes, the tiny eddies in the sand. ‘But I didn’t see him.’ She focused on a gull tugging at a bit of seaweed on the shore. ‘I’d been besotted with him, you know. Part of me was afraid that all the old feelings would come back if we met, that some of the old attraction would still be there. I didn’t need the complication. And I thought he’d want something. Jerry always did want something.’

‘Might Jerry have contacted John?’ Willow thought if the man had been desperate for Evie’s forgiveness, he might have asked her fiancé for help in setting up the meeting. Jerry had been at Sullom Voe on the afternoon of his death. John Henderson had been working there, just across the water from the terminal. She imagined how that conversation might have gone: I took advantage of your woman, got her pregnant and dumped her. Please help me to put things right. You’d think that Jerry Markham would have realized that the right thing to do just before the marriage was to leave things alone. To stay away. But then Markham had always been self-absorbed and self-indulgent. He’d probably be selfish even in this.

‘John didn’t say anything about it,’ Evie said at last. ‘If Jerry met him or phoned him, John didn’t tell me.’

‘And things were just the same between you? Those last few days of John’s life?’

There was a silence filled with gulls screeching.

‘I don’t know!’ Evie screamed louder than the gulls. ‘I was busy, about to be married, anxious about dresses and flowers and crazy stuff like that. And about work. If he was different, I didn’t notice. Don’t you think I wish I’d stopped? Dropped everything. Spent every last second with him.’ She stopped abruptly. It was as if the needle had been lifted from a vinyl record mid-track. When she started again, the voice was almost a whisper. ‘We never made love. Came close a few times. But we thought we had years ahead of us. Let’s wait, we thought. Make the marriage night something special. And now? Now, I wish we’d never got out of bed.’ She turned towards Willow and there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘Then I might have been pregnant. Now I’ll never have a child.’ Willow put her arm round her shoulder and walked with Evie back up the beach.

As they approached the house, Willow saw that Evie’s parents were looking out for them through the kitchen window. Would my parents behave like that if someone close to me had died? And she thought that they would. They’d be over-protective too. And they’d feel guilty, like Francis and Jessie, convinced that they should have been able to save their daughter from this pain. She thought again that it was time to take a trip to Uist to see them. Before it was too late.

Inside the house Evie reverted to the mode of obedient child. She’d left the anger on the beach. She sat at the table with her back to the window, sipped at her tea and crumbled a biscuit into the saucer. When Willow and Perez stood up to go, she hardly acknowledged their leaving.

Perez wished he were the person walking on the beach with Evie. Here, in the stuffy kitchen, surrounded by the clutter of the family’s life, he could hardly breathe. Jessie chattered, a stream of pointless observations, as if words would somehow prevent her from thinking. She was washing up at the sink and turned occasionally for a response from him. He would nod or prompt her with a short phrase of agreement, and off she would go again. Francis said nothing unless he was asked a direct question.

‘We told Evie’s brother Magnus not to come back just yet,’ Jessie said. ‘He was planning to be here for the wedding of course, coming up on the ferry on Friday night, but we told him to stay put when we heard the news about John. Evie needs her space just now, don’t you think so, Jimmy?’ A look over her shoulder, a nod from him, and the words went on. ‘We’ll organize the funeral when John’s body is released. He has no family of his own left now. There’s a cousin, I think, somewhere in the south, but they’ve not met since they were bairns. Much better that we do it.’

She paused for breath and to carry the dripping baking tray to stand on the back of the range to dry. ‘Was John already dead the last time you were here, Jimmy? I’ve been thinking about that.’

‘I think he must have been.’ Perez supposed this was information that was already generally known. Willow had released a press statement asking for people who might have seen Henderson early on the morning of his death.

‘And we were here, carrying on as normal – me in the fields and Francis in his boatshed – and we knew nothing about it. That’s such a strange thought. I’m glad we live in Fetlar. It means that Evie can escape from all the gossip about the murders. There’ll be talk, because she knew both men. You know what folk are like, Jimmy. You know how cruel they can be.’

He nodded again. Then he spoke just to stop her. It would be easy enough to sit in the traditional Shetland chair with its high wooden back and listen, but he thought she must be exhausted with this need to fill the silence with all those words. He felt it was his responsibility to give her a rest.

‘It seems that Jerry Markham had changed,’ Perez said. It came to him that this was gossip of a kind too. Unsubstantiated gossip. They only had Annabel’s and her father’s word that it was true. Willow had asked Sandy to get details of the vicar, and other members of the congregation, so they could check it out. ‘He’d joined a church in London and had found a girlfriend there.’ Jessie and Francis stared at him.