Ann Cleeves: Thin Air

His phone buzzed. A text from Mary with the answer to his questions. The words seemed domestic and normal in this wild setting.

Then he heard footsteps. Heavy. Someone wearing boots on the rocky path. Perez moved into the corner formed by two walls so that his silhouette wouldn’t show up against the lightening sky. There were still occasional flagstones on the floor, with cotton grass growing between them. He crouched in the corner and waited, feeling slightly ridiculous, reverting to childhood and hide-and-seek with his cousins. Around him suddenly there was movement. It was as if the wall was alive and shifting. There was a murmuring, the softness of wings against the air. Storm-petrels, bat-like and gentle-eyed, which had nested in cracks in the wall, were flying out towards the sea.

The footsteps got closer and now Perez saw torchlight. Very faint, as if the battery was low. No other sound. No one was shouting out for Polly. If this was a searcher, then perhaps they’d lost heart. Perhaps. Still there wasn’t enough light to make a positive identification.

Standing in the shadow, Perez was thinking about all the people he’d met since he’d come to Unst the week before, and in his head he saw them moving around as if they were actors on a giant stage. But now he’d lost control of their moves. He knew they were scattered around Meoness, on the cliffs and the shore, but didn’t have precise positions for them and that made him nervous. He was a director whose players were taking no notice of him. He’d lost control of the action.

The figure moved on down the path towards the settlement of Meoness and paused briefly to look over the loch, where Eleanor had been lying in her smart silk dress, pointing the torch around the grassy banks as if looking for something specific. It was impossible to tell if the walker was male or female, but they were fit and moved easily down the steep path. Perez waited for a while, indecisive. He still thought Polly might come this way. The fog had cleared above him and, in the last of the darkness, the sky was suddenly filled with stars. He saw the Milky Way as defined points of light and all the space made him feel giddy, made him forget for a moment what he was doing there. Then he came to his senses and followed the figure further down the path.

On the road leading towards the Meoness community hall the torch was switched off. Perez found it more difficult to track the person then. If they stopped in the shadow, he might get too close and he didn’t want to give away the fact that he was following. Utra, the house where Sarah Malcolmson had grown up, appeared as an indistinct silhouette beside the track. Perez stopped and listened. Nothing. Now the footsteps were so far ahead that he could no longer hear them. There was another moment of indecision. Should he run on and try to catch up, or go inside? Polly was the most important person in all this. He still wasn’t sure whom he’d been following. This place was central in the Peerie Lizzie story, and Polly might have been attracted inside for another look. He pushed open the door.

In the old house the darkness felt viscous, like melted tar. Perez imagined that he would have to wade through it to get beyond the lintel. He turned on his torch and walked past the scullery to the bigger room and a smell of damp and decay. He was distracted, remembering his last visit to the house and the feral cat that had shocked Willow, the way her arm had felt under his hand, how the touch had been like an electric shock all the way to his shoulder. Then they’d both been disturbed and he thought they hadn’t searched the place properly. He was torn, aware that the figure he’d been following would soon be lost to him altogether, but curious. Something here had pulled in Polly Gilmour and Charles Hillier. He shone his torch into the corners. The room seemed quite bare. He opened the stove, which stood in one corner. A piece of half-burnt peat. Then as he was leaving he saw, caught on a sharp corner of the metal stove, a scrap of cloth. White. Like the dress worn by Peerie Lizzie every time she’d appeared. The dress, at least, was real and not imagined. In the dust on the floor he saw two long, thin rectangular shapes. Something had been placed here. Or lain here.

In the distance there was the sound of a car engine. Perez went outside, saw the headlights just before they were switched off and thought he could place them in Meoness with some accuracy. He ran down the track and away from the ruined house. As he was running his phone rang. He slowed to take it from his pocket, but continued walking fast.

‘Jimmy!’ Sandy had his panicky I’m out of my depth voice. ‘I’m just on my way back to Sletts and I heard a scream.’

‘From inside the house?’ He didn’t need to ask which house. He knew now where the focus of the investigation should have been from the start.

‘I’m not quite sure. From near the house at least.’

‘I’m on my way.’ He paused. ‘Sandy, don’t go inside. Wait for me.’

Outside, after the dense darkness of Utra, it seemed that dawn had arrived. There was that cold, grey sky and the stars had disappeared. Birds were singing. Perez ran on. He’d been infected by Sandy’s anxiety and by the thought that he’d misjudged the situation. He’d been following the wrong person all the time and hadn’t considered that he should be looking out for a car.

Sandy was waiting for him, curled into the hillside, so well camouflaged that when he moved, unrolling his body until he was standing, Perez was startled.

‘Willow’s on the beach.’ Sandy’s voice was low, a whisper, though from inside the house surely nobody would hear. ‘With David Gordon. I saw them from the hall.’

Perez nodded. One less thing to worry about. ‘What did you hear?’

‘A scream. A shriek. High-pitched.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Woman, I think. But hard to tell. And because we’re looking for Polly Gilmour, I assumed it must be her.’

‘Of course.’ Expectation altered perception. That was how magicians could so easily confound their audience. ‘That’s natural-’

He didn’t finish his sentence. There was another scream. Terrified, and still impossible to identify as male or female. Perez found it unbearable. ‘Wait here. Stop anyone who leaves. Whoever it is. And don’t let anyone else in.’

Bent double, he ran round Voxter, past the hen house and the shed where George Malcolmson kept his old tractor. The man’s car was parked outside. Perez touched the bonnet and felt that it was still warm. From this side of the house he had a view into the kitchen through a small window in the back door. There was no sign of George.

Inside stood Polly Gilmour. She looked pale, but strangely calm. Even with an arm around her neck and a knife to her throat. Even when she opened her mouth and screamed again, her nerve cracking and tears running down her cheeks.

Inside the Voxter kitchen Polly thought she was melting at the edges. She decided she must look as Eleanor had done when she’d sat on the deck, the last night of her life, when the mist had eaten into her and made her slowly disappear. If Eleanor had come inside then, after sharing those silly stories about Marcus, everything would have been well. Her friend would still be alive. The malicious man from the hotel would still be alive. And Polly wouldn’t be here in this strange house by the sea, hardly able to breathe, a knife at her throat.

She thought again that this was like being in the middle of a terrible nightmare and soon she would wake up and everything would be well. As the arm tightened around her throat, she began to slip into unconsciousness and the events of the evening drifted through her mind, very slowly, like shadows in the fog. She watched the action as if from a great height, as if she was Eleanor filming it in a wide-angle shot for her show.