Ann Cleeves - Thin Air

Willow looked at Sandy. She’d asked him to begin the interview. He looked panic-stricken for a moment, then cleared his throat.

‘You were at the hamefarin’ on Saturday night?’

The woman stared at him. ‘Don’t I know you? Weren’t you in Anderson High? The year below me. You were a Whalsay boy, and you stayed in the hostel too.’ She paused. ‘Well, I’d never have had you down as becoming a detective.’

‘Perhaps you could tell us about the hamefarin’.’ Willow thought the garrulous Vaila was about to launch into a series of school reminiscences, and interrupted before she had the chance. Sandy would be too polite to stop her in mid-stream. ‘Did you meet Eleanor Longstaff there?’

‘Yes, but I’d met her before that. It was supposed to be secret, but now she’s dead that’s not important, is it?’

‘When did you first meet her?’ Sandy made another attempt to control the conversation.

‘That afternoon. The afternoon of the party. It was all arranged by phone. I went up to Sletts. She said that would be better, because if her friends came back from their walk we could make an excuse about why I was there. If she came here it would be more difficult to explain where she’d been.’

‘Why was she so keen to talk to you?’ Again Sandy asked the question.

‘Because of Peerie Lizzie, of course. Eleanor was making a film about her, and we were going to be in it. We were going to get paid. An appearance fee, she said.’ Vaila paused. ‘Do you think it’ll still be made? Neil was a bit shy about it, but I was dead excited about being on the telly. It wasn’t just the money…’

‘Why was it so important to keep the meeting secret?’ Willow looked outside. She thought the fog might be clearing. There were denser shadows in the distance that might have been the Meoness community hall and the Malcolmsons’ croft house.

‘Eleanor said her friends wouldn’t understand. Because she really believed the story and her husband wasn’t the sort to accept that it might be true. So that afternoon I went to Sletts and I told her what happened. How I saw the lassie and then I fell pregnant, and we’d been trying for years. We were planning on another round of IVF, but in the end we didn’t need to.’

Willow thought Vaila must be in her early thirties, but she still spoke like an excitable schoolgirl, the words tumbling out without thought. Vaila paused for a moment to catch her breath and then continued talking. ‘I thought Eleanor was hoping to see Lizzie herself. You could tell that she wanted a bairn. Later, at the party in the hall, she was all over the baby.’

‘So you went to Sletts that afternoon,’ Sandy said. Perhaps all this talk of babies was making him uncomfortable. ‘And Eleanor was expecting you.’

‘Nothing much happened,’ Vaila said. ‘There were no cameras or anything, but Eleanor had this little recorder and asked me to speak into it. To tell the tale of when I saw Peerie Lizzie. She said it was better than her taking notes.’

Willow shot a look at Sandy, but he seemed so focused on keeping Vaila on track that he appeared not to understand the importance of the information. No recorder had been found in the search of the holiday home.

‘And what was the tale?’

‘Well.’ The woman settled back in her chair as if she were about to tell a bedtime story to a child. ‘It was a misty sort of day much like this, but a bit earlier in the year. February and late afternoon, so it was already getting a bit dark. I work as a classroom assistant in the school in Meoness, only I’m on maternity leave just now, and I was on my way home. Then there she was on the track in front of me. A girl of about ten, all dressed in white. Kind of old-fashioned, you know, with white ribbons in her hair. And she danced. Like she was performing just for me. Like it was a sort of sign. Then she disappeared into the fog. I shouted and ran up the track after her, but I didn’t see her again.’

Willow was sceptical. ‘Couldn’t it just have been an island girl dressed up? Things look so weird in the fog.’

‘I know all the kids in this part of Unst and I didn’t recognize her. But it was more than that. I knew she wasn’t real and that something important was happening to me. It was a kind of religious experience. And she just vanished in front of my eyes.’

Willow knew there could be a number of explanations for the disappearing child, but she didn’t say anything. If she challenged Vaila too hard, she might be offended and clam up. She’d convinced herself that she’d seen an apparition. Willow had met people in the commune who’d believed that trees had spirits, and that a guru from Wolverhampton would save the known universe; she hadn’t been able to persuade them that their ideas were irrational, either.

The woman went on, ‘Besides, there was no fog the next time I saw her.’

‘You saw her again?’

‘That was late July. One of the still, sunny evenings you get sometimes in the summer. I’d spent the evening down with Grusche and George. He’s a relative, a kind of uncle, and when Neil’s working away I sometimes go down to see them. I’m not good with my own company. It was such a fine evening that I took the path along the beach to get home and I saw the lassie again. This time she was quite a way off, just a silhouette up by the standing stone on the headland. I dashed back to George’s house because I wanted someone else to see her. They’d all made fun of me when I said that I’d seen her in the mist. But when we got on the shore and looked up towards the stone there was nothing to be seen.’

‘And that was what you told Eleanor Longstaff?’ It was impossible to tell from Sandy’s voice whether he believed every word or thought it was a load of nonsense.

‘Yes. I spoke it all into her little machine, and then she replayed the first bit to make sure it had recorded properly.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She asked whether my husband believed me,’ Vaila said. ‘And I told her that my Neil wasn’t the sort to believe in ghosts, but he knew I wasn’t making it up, so he kind of went along with it.’ A beat. ‘He’s a plumber.’ As if that explained everything.

‘Did you see what Eleanor did with the machine when she’d finished?’ Sandy’s voice was calm and easy. Willow thought he was brighter than he always made out. ‘She wouldn’t want it left where all her friends might see it. If she was trying to keep your meeting secret.’

Vaila screwed up her face in an effort to concentrate. ‘I think she just put it in her pocket. She was wearing a knitted jacket over jeans, and the jacket had a patch pocket. I think she stuck it in there.

Sandy glanced across at Willow and she gave him a nod of approval. He always needed to be encouraged.

‘But that wasn’t the end of the story.’ Vaila was beaming and Willow thought again how young she seemed. ‘And not the important part really. It was about a month later that I found out I was pregnant! So it must have been Lizzie, mustn’t it?’ She looked round at them for confirmation as if the logic were inescapable.

Sandy and Willow looked at each other, but said nothing. On cue the baby began to cry and Vaila went into the porch and gathered her into her arms.

They drove to the end of the track near the footpath that led to the murder scene and sat in the car watching the mist shifting, so that the cliffs in the distance began to appear.

‘A bit of a coincidence that Eleanor claimed to have seen the girl on the afternoon that Vaila was telling her story.’ Willow wiped the condensation from the inside of the windscreen with a mucky handkerchief.

‘Wishful thinking? She was desperate to get pregnant, so she convinced herself that some random girl was a ghost?’