Ann Cleeves - Thin Air

She led him into a wide hallway. The walls had been painted a deep green and there were pictures everywhere. The art was unfamiliar. Some looked like prints of cave paintings, scratched images of animals and birds. Primitive, but also amazingly lifelike. There were photos of strange dwellings growing out of a hillside, a collage made from scraps of woven cloth and two large abstract oils. He would have liked to spend more time with them, but she’d already moved on and had settled on the windowsill in a room that seemed half-sitting room and half-study. There was a desk and the walls were hidden by bookshelves. In one corner an armchair was covered with a batik throw and next to it stood a coffee table made from animal hide. There was a glass on the table and Perez thought that she’d been sitting here when he’d phoned the night before. Now she was framed by the window, so she looked like a piece of art herself. The background was a small courtyard garden, where the sun had been trapped by a brick wall. In the corner stood a tree covered in pink blooms in a pot.

She pointed him to a chair on the other side of the desk, but didn’t offer him tea or coffee. To a Shetlander that seemed so odd that for a moment Perez was unsure how to proceed.

‘Well,’ she said with a touch of impatience, ‘I suppose that you have questions.’ The voice threw him too. It was the voice of the old-fashioned upper classes, of the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day and 1950s radio recordings. Over the phone the cut-glass accent had been less pronounced.

‘I’d like you to tell me about your daughter,’ he said.

That obviously wasn’t what she’d been expecting. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘No.’ He paused. ‘You’ll know what’s important about her. And what might have led to her murder.’

A moment of silence. From the window behind her he began to hear faint sounds. The distant hum of traffic. A blackbird’s song.

‘She was always a headstrong girl,’ the woman said at last. ‘People said she took after me. Bright, of course.’ As if that went without saying.

‘An only child?’

‘My husband left me soon after Eleanor was born,’ she said. ‘He was a child himself and couldn’t bear the fact that he no longer got my full attention. I had other male partners to share my life, but nobody with whom I’d have contemplated parenthood.’

‘And now?’ But Perez thought he already knew the answer. This flat was Cilla’s territory. Nobody else stayed here.

There was a brief pause. ‘There are occasional distractions, but now I live alone and I’m grateful for that. I’ve discovered that I’m too selfish to share my home.’

‘Did Eleanor keep in touch with her father? Had they met lately?’ Perez wondered if this might have been the man in the restaurant seen by Caroline Lawson.

‘I doubt it. Oriental art is his subject and he travels a lot. He’s seldom in London and he has a new young family of his own. By his third wife.’ The last phrase was spat out like venom.

‘But you never discouraged contact?’

Cilla shrugged. ‘If I had, Eleanor would have taken no notice. As I’ve told you, she was headstrong. I think she had Richard’s email address and they might have met occasionally when he was in town, but she never discussed him with me.’

‘What did you make of her marriage?’

‘Ian Longstaff wasn’t the sort of man I would have expected her to marry, but he seemed to make her happy. She claimed that he did.’ Cilla Montgomery smoothed her skirt. ‘Of course he couldn’t give her children, and that was a disappointment.’

Perez wondered how a man could be held responsible for a miscarriage in late pregnancy, but didn’t respond. Cilla continued, ‘I thought she made too much of it. These things happen, and men expect women to get on with it. A child isn’t everything.’

‘There was some tension within the marriage?’

‘She never said that.’

‘But you felt it?’

Another silence. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm had been triggered. The wailing drilled into Perez’s brain and then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

‘Not tension exactly. She could have lived with tension. Eleanor enjoyed excitement and challenge. Like me she was most scared of being bored. Even the drama of the miscarriages had its element of satisfaction for her, guaranteeing that she would be the centre of attention at least for a while.’ Cilla turned briefly to look out of the window to the courtyard beyond. ‘Ian began as a challenge. His background and skills were very different from my daughter’s. She found his solidness and his working-class family interesting, almost exotic. And he stood up to her in arguments. But, as time went on, he loved her too much and gave into her too easily. Not his fault. How can you fight with a woman who has just lost a baby? I think she began to despise him just for those qualities that another person might admire: gentleness, compassion, loyalty.’ She paused again and gave a strange little laugh that jarred on Perez’s nerves in the way that the car alarm had done. ‘I’m not painting a very flattering picture of my daughter, am I, Inspector? But I understood her because she was so much like me.’

‘Do you think she was having an affair?’ Perez wondered that this mother could be so dispassionate and clear-eyed about a daughter who had died so recently. If anything happened to Cassie, he’d be howling at the moon and incapable of carrying on a rational discussion.

‘She never mentioned anything of the sort to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘When did you last see Eleanor?’

There was another brief pause. ‘The day before she set off to Shetland,’ Cilla said. ‘She phoned me at work and asked if I might be free for lunch.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘The British Museum. I’m an art historian. My speciality is Africa.’ There was a sudden spark of passion and for a moment he thought that her work was the most important thing in her life. ‘I arranged to meet Eleanor in a Turkish restaurant not far from the museum. It was rather a nuisance actually, because I was in the middle of putting together a proposal for an exhibition. But Eleanor seldom asked to meet up, so I reorganized my day.’

‘And was there something specific that she wanted to talk about?’ Perez was suddenly tense. Perhaps he was catching the mood from the small woman, who was still leaning against the windowsill. The light from the garden behind her meant that her features were indistinct, but he sensed a stress in her too. Maybe she was deciding how much she should confide.

‘Perhaps.’ She leaned forward and wiped sudden and unexpected tears from her eyes. He saw for the first time how tired and sad she was, the lines between her mouth and her nose, the sagging jawline. It occurred to him that her choice of seat was a habitual vanity; she presented a younger face looking into the room. She straightened, dry-eyed once more. ‘It was an odd encounter. Usually Eleanor was very direct, but that day she was…’ she paused to find the right word, ‘elliptical. As if she wanted me to guess what was going on. It was clear that she was troubled about something. I could see that she was excited about her work. She was ambitious from a young age and work has always been important. But her mood was strained too. I should have asked her what was wrong, but I chose not to. It seems terribly petty now, but we were always competitive and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that I was curious about her life.’

‘Can you remember exactly what she said?’ Perez struggled to imagine the conversation between the two women. They’d be seated across the table from each other picking at plates of spicy food. A glass of wine each perhaps. And they’d be batting words back and forth, a peculiar game of verbal ping-pong. Eleanor must have wanted something from the meeting. She’d be busy, if it was the day before she set off for Shetland. What had been so important that she’d insisted on seeing her mother for lunch?