Ann Cleeves - Thin Air

‘History’s always been a passion. I loved doing it. And, as you said, I thought the ghost story might bring in punters. We charge more than the other B &Bs on the island. We need to give our guests something extra.’

Willow turned to Charles. ‘How did you leave things with Mrs Longstaff? You passed on David’s research. Anything else?’

‘She said that she’d be in Unst in a few weeks’ time and might get in touch then.’

‘And did she?’

‘Of course not.’ His voice had become shrill and high-pitched and he turned towards Perez as though he considered him to be more sympathetic. ‘I would have told you, Jimmy. I would have realized how important that would be.’

Willow left it at that, but Perez didn’t quite believe him. The hoteliers disappeared from the room, Charles seeming relieved to be let off the hook.

‘Well?’ Willow had finished her tea and had her elbows on the table. ‘What now?’

‘I think I could do with a bit of a walk to clear my head after all my travels.’

Willow looked at him quizzically and he thought she didn’t quite believe him either.

He left her sitting in the kitchen and walked out of the main gate and down towards the voe, imagining a ten-year-old child escaping down this path many years before. This was a precious child conceived in middle age. Spoilt perhaps, doted on, used to getting her own way. The nursemaid would have had problems containing her. Lizzie must have played here before surely, and she would know the shore and the tides. This wasn’t a stranger from the south come to visit relatives in the big house. But if the fog came down suddenly, as it could in the islands, it wasn’t impossible that she lost all sense of direction. Even if the nursemaid followed her down to the beach and shouted for her, sound could be distorted by the mist. Then voices seemed to swirl in all directions, just like the fog itself. It wasn’t the death of the girl that had sparked questions in Perez’s mind, though, but the condition in which she’d been found. She was lying on her back with her hands by her side and she seemed quite perfect. Almost posed, he thought. Just like Eleanor. And a body that had been in the water, even for one night, wouldn’t look like that. Sea creatures would have nibbled at it; she’d be bloated and covered in weed and sand. Of course it could just be a story. Like the story of the ghost. The idea of a perfect body might have been a fiction created to provide comfort for the grieving parents. Besides, he wasn’t here to solve a case that was nearly a hundred years old.

He walked back to the house and found himself sitting in his car. Here he paused for a moment. He should find Willow and tell her what he was doing. She’d be angry if he just drove off without telling her what was in his mind. That would be bad manners. But he started the car anyway and drove up the single-track road to Meoness. Outside George Malcolmson’s croft he paused again and thought that he was being distracted and should concentrate on the present investigation. Then he opened the car door and went to the house. Grusche was in the kitchen ironing. In the laundry basket were clothes that obviously belonged to her son and daughter-in-law.

‘Are you looking for Lowrie and Caroline, Jimmy? They’re away south to Vidlin. They’ve put in an offer on a house there and want to measure up some of the rooms.’ Her eyes were shining.

‘So they’re coming home?’

‘Isn’t it exciting? I couldn’t let myself believe that they might come back here.’

‘It was George I was after.’

She looked up sharply, but didn’t ask what he might want with her husband. ‘He’s out on the croft somewhere. This time of year he can’t bear to be inside. It’s like a disease for him. A sort of claustrophobia. Maybe it was all that time he spent in the lighthouse. On a rock station you’d be cooped inside for most of your shift. Having to get on with the other men. Sometimes I think it’s given him strange notions about things, made him almost compulsive.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, nothing harmful, Jimmy. Nothing that would lead to murder. He always sits in the same chair, uses the same knife and fork and gets put out if I give someone his mug. If we go into town he has to check three times that the hens have been shut away. In the lighthouse everything was routine. Perhaps there’s a thin line between that and ritual. Superstition. It gets worse as he gets older. Sometimes I think I should get him to see a doctor.’

Perez didn’t know what to say and Grusche seemed not to expect an answer. He just nodded at her and went outside.

George was working in his vegetable garden just like David. Like everyone in the islands with a bit of land at this time of year. He was hoeing between lines of plants, his movements easy and regular and seeming to take no effort.

‘Aye-aye.’ He stopped and rested the hoe against the fence.

‘I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘You’re not doing that, Jimmy. I was ready for a rest.’

‘These stories of Peerie Lizzie. It was your niece who was supposed to have seen her.’

‘Vaila,’ he said. ‘She was last in the line when they were handing out the common sense. Not a bit of malice in her, but she was always kind of daft, even as a bairn.’

‘You don’t believe in the ghost then.’

He didn’t answer for a moment. ‘I was brought up to go to the kirk every Sunday,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure I believe in miracles, either. Only in what I can see with my own eyes.’ But he turned away as he was speaking. Perez remembered what Grusche had said about his superstition and wasn’t sure that he was telling the truth.

‘You’ll have been brought up with stories of Peerie Lizzie too,’ Perez said. ‘Was it one of your relatives who was supposed to have been minding the girl when she wandered off to the shore? I was told she was a Malcolmson.’

‘She was my Aunt Sarah, my father’s older sister.’ He paused. ‘She was only a girl herself when Elizabeth Geldard was drowned. Fifteen years old, taken into the big house to mind the child.’

‘Did she talk about what had happened?’

‘She left the islands soon after the accident,’ George said. ‘When she came back she was an old woman, very frail, and that part of her life was forgotten. There’d always been folk who claimed to see Peerie Lizzie, but by the time she came home nobody realized that she’d been involved.’

‘Why did she leave?’ Perez thought that sudden accidental death couldn’t have been so uncommon in those days in the islands. Not sufficiently rare to force a young girl to flee.

‘The Geldards blamed her,’ George said. ‘And they had money and influence. It would have been hard for her to stay. She went to work for a family in Inverness and married a boy down there. The relationship didn’t last very long, but it seems that she had a child nobody had known about. A woman turned up to her funeral, claiming that my Aunt Sarah was her mother. You can imagine the gossip it caused here.’ He gave a sudden grin. ‘Every woman in the family wanted to invite her into their home to get the full story, but she was very dignified. She drove straight back to Lerwick and got the last plane south. We never heard from her again.’

He took up his hoe and began to push it between the seedlings.

But Perez followed him along the strip of grass left between the beds. ‘Did Eleanor Longstaff contact you about all this? She’d been doing some research into Peerie Lizzie.’

‘She never talked to me about it.’

‘Lowrie then? She might have asked him. As they were such old friends.’

‘If she did, he never mentioned it. You’d need to talk to him about it.’ And George walked away to show that the subject was closed.