Ann Cleeves - Thin Air

Polly shook her head.

‘You were the last person to see her alive, and she was still sitting outside?’

‘Yes.’ Polly looked at him and wondered if she should mention the figure she’d seen in the mist on the tideline. But then the detectives might think she was psychotic too. ‘I expected Eleanor to follow me into the house.’

‘But you didn’t hear her? You don’t know if that happened?’

‘No,’ Polly said. ‘I didn’t hear anything until I woke up the next morning.’ She paused because she was embarrassed by the admission. ‘I don’t sleep well. Occasionally I take sleeping tablets.’

‘And Mr Wentworth?’ Willow seemed to be staring out of the window. ‘Was he still there when you woke up?’

‘Of course he was! He went to bed with me.’

‘In the same bed?’

‘No, there were two singles. One room was a double and the other a twin. We tossed a coin for the double, and the Longstaffs won.’ Polly thought that seemed like an eternity ago. Their arrival at Sletts, bursting into the house and checking out the space. Laughing as they fought over who would get the double bed.

‘So he might have left the room without you hearing. To get a glass of water perhaps, or to see the sun coming up.’ The detective gave a gentle smile, the sort Polly might have given to encourage a timid reader to ask more detailed questions about the background to a story.

‘I’m really not sure where you’re going with this.’ Polly felt a mounting anger. The trivial questions seemed to have nothing to do with Eleanor.

‘I’m saying that you’re assuming Mr Wentworth was in bed all night, but really we can’t be certain, can we?’ Willow paused. ‘Any one of you could have left Sletts that night without the others knowing.’

The room was hot because it was in full sunlight. Perez sat in the corner listening to Willow and Polly talking and for a moment he struggled to concentrate. He was thinking about Cassie and hoping that Duncan had seen her all the way into school. Then he told himself he was being ridiculous: Cassie would be perfectly safe and he should stop being over-protective; she’d end up resenting him. He returned his focus to the woman who was being interviewed. Polly puzzled him. She was timid, so much the stereotypical librarian that it was hard to believe in a friendship between her and the exuberant film-maker. Had she felt frustrated at always being in the shadow of Eleanor, with her beauty and her powerful personality?

Perez was just about to ask the woman about her work when Willow put the question for him, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. ‘What do you do for a living, Ms Gilmour?’

‘I’m a librarian, with a special interest in British myths and customs. I work for the UK Folklore Society. They have a library in Hampstead that is open to the public and I run it for them.’ Her voice was suddenly enthusiastic. ‘I was assistant librarian in a busy public branch for a while, but that didn’t suit me nearly so well.’ She gave a little self-deprecating smile, so that Perez caught a glimpse of what Eleanor might have seen in her. She did have a sense of humour after all. ‘I’m much better at stories than I am with people. It’s my dream job.’

‘Perhaps Eleanor consulted you then. About her ghosts.’

‘Not really. I told her about Peerie Lizzie when we decided that we’d come up for the hamefarin’. That was when she explained that her company had been commissioned to produce a documentary about people who claimed to have experienced the supernatural. I offered to look out some material for her, but by then her staff had already made their contacts. It was clear she was more interested in contemporary sightings than in the origins of the stories.’ Polly looked up and smiled. ‘Eleanor never had the patience for detailed research.’

The room fell silent. Outside there was the call of an oystercatcher in the distance. Willow looked at Perez to see if he had any questions.

‘Do you know if Eleanor had an affair recently?’ As soon as the words were spoken he thought that he should have been more tactful. Half his mind was on Cassie still, wondering if it would seem odd if he phoned the school to check that she’d arrived there safely. Polly blinked at him as if he’d slapped her.

‘No!’ she said. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t.’

He wondered again at the uneven relationship between the women. Polly’s attitude felt more like hero-worship than a friendship between equals. But perhaps that was always the way in a relationship – one person was always more dependent than the other.

‘She had moral qualms about sex outside marriage?’

She stared at him. ‘We never discussed it in those terms.’

‘You think such a thing would have been impossible for her?’

‘No,’ Polly said at last. ‘I don’t suppose it would. She didn’t have moral qualms about anything much. But she would have told me about it. We didn’t have secrets. Not about a big thing like that.’

‘When was the last time the two of you met alone?’ Perez wished he’d seen the two women together when Eleanor was alive. He remembered Fran with her friends in London and in the islands. She’d been easy and relaxed with them all. They’d laughed and drunk too much wine and gossiped, and he was struggling to imagine this woman behaving like that. But perhaps Polly was strained because she was grieving, and he thought again that he was being unfair to her.

‘Thursday evening. The day before we left London.’ Polly looked up at him. ‘It was to check last-minute details for the trip. Eleanor met me from the library and we walked back to my flat. I cooked her supper and we talked through the final arrangements.’

‘How was she then?’

‘Fine.’ The answer came too quickly and he waited for her to continue. ‘Really fine. Excited. About work – this documentary that she was making. It was a big deal for her company. A new departure. More popular than the stuff she’d made before, and if everything worked out it would be shown on BBC1. She was fizzing. More excited than I’d seen her for years. I thought that she’d finally moved on after losing the baby.’

‘But she didn’t talk about a new man in her life?’

Polly shook her head. ‘I don’t know where that idea has come from. Have you been talking to Cilla? She never thought that Eleanor’s marriage would last. She’s an intellectual snob and Ian was never good enough.’

‘Cilla is Eleanor’s mother?’

‘Yes, she’s an art historian. She works for the British Museum. Very grand. A character.’ She paused and Perez wondered if Cilla had considered that Polly wasn’t quite good enough for her daughter too.

Later they were eating lunch in the kitchen of Springfield House. James Grieve had been fretting all morning about missing his flight and had already left. Sandy had gone with him to collect Vicki Hewitt, the CSI, so again it was just Perez and Willow Reeves sitting across a table, sharing food. Perez felt comfortable working with her, but ambiguous about the effect she had on him. Another woman in his life, even if she were a colleague, felt like a kind of betrayal to Fran. And Willow was tall and big-boned with tangled hair and scruffy clothes. Her parents were hippies living in a commune in North Uist. He’d never met anyone quite like her before.

‘So what do we think?’ Willow leaned forward across the table. They were eating lentil soup and home-baked bannocks. ‘It must be one of the three friends, mustn’t it? None of the locals would have met Eleanor Longstaff except at the wedding party. They’d certainly have no reason to kill her.’ She dipped the corner of a bannock into the soup and reconsidered. ‘We need to check the alibis of the Malcolmsons, of course. They’ve known her for years too. So our murderer must be one of those five.’