Ann Cleeves: Thin Air

‘Not if you were innocent,’ Sandy said. ‘You’d have nothing to fear, if you told us the truth.’

She turned back to face him. Her words shot towards him like the rain on the window. ‘Really? When I was a student I was assaulted by a lecturer. I went to the police that time. They believed a respectable lecturer over an unconventional art student and threatened that I could be charged with wasting police time if I didn’t withdraw the allegation. I wasn’t prepared to take the risk now.’

The room went very quiet. Behind the counter the coffee machine hissed.

‘Let’s go back to that meeting at the Hay’s Dock,’ Perez said. ‘Did you take photographs afterwards?’

‘Yes, Eleanor wanted some publicity images that we could release to the media before the show.’ Monica looked up. ‘She was already planning features in the broadsheets. How four metropolitan thirty-somethings believed that they’d seen a ghost .’

‘And one of the pictures was of her and Lowrie?’

‘Yes, Lowrie asked if he could have it. I emailed it to him. Why? Is it important?’

Perez didn’t answer. This was the photo that Lowrie had been staring at when Grusche went into his room before the party. The photo that had triggered Eleanor’s murder. ‘Tell me what happened the night of the party.’

‘Grace and I went into Unst on the ferry.’

‘You were seen by the Meoness teacher.’ Sandy seemed to wake briefly, then to settle back with his arms on the table. They’d all been awake all night. He looked like a nursery child ready to take a nap.

Monica ignored the interruption. ‘We left our car at the hall. There were so many vehicles parked there that nobody would notice. Then we camped out in the old house, Utra. Lowrie had told us we could use it, and Grace got changed there. For her it was just a game. Staying up late. Putting on a party frock. Dancing on the beach. She’s like all the women in our family – given to exhibitionist tendencies. I met Charles on the beach. We had a smoke and watched the performance. Afterwards Grace and I lit a fire and rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor, just waiting until it was time for the first ferry to Yell. Early the next morning I dropped Grace at Jen’s and drove on south.’

‘Polly thought she saw the girl on the beach and in the house at other times.’ It was Sandy again. Perez could tell that he thought this artist, with her paintings of dead women, her camping out all night in a ruined house, wasn’t fit to have care of a child.

Monica shrugged. She seemed fidgety and uncomfortable. Perhaps Sandy reminded her of the cops she’d met in the Met. Perhaps she just wanted to go outside to smoke. ‘Maybe Jen took her and the boys to play at their father’s house. He lives with his new wife in Spindrift, that hideous bungalow in Meoness. They’ve been divorced for a while, but it’s all quite amicable. The boys like to see the new baby.’

Or maybe, Perez thought, Polly conjured her own ghosts out of the air. She’d been told that her lover was having an affair with an older woman and she was emotionally frail to start with. He could imagine that she might be haunted by dreams and demons.

‘Who sent the email saying the group wouldn’t find Eleanor alive?’ Willow broke into his thoughts.

‘The plan was for Eleanor to write it, and for me to take her phone and find somewhere with a good signal to send it,’ Monica said. ‘Grace was fast asleep, so I slipped out of Utra and sent the message. We’d arranged that I’d leave the phone in the planticrub, where Eleanor could pick it up later.’

‘And then Eleanor was supposed to disappear?’

Monica nodded. ‘Charles was waiting with his car. He was going to take her back to Springfield House. There was a small room waiting for her.’

But Eleanor kept being interrupted. First by Polly, who’d joined her straight after the men went to bed. Then by Grusche. And in the end Hillier went back to the hotel alone. When Eleanor’s body was discovered, he remembered seeing Grusche coming back from the cliffs alone and knew who must have killed her.

Monica was on her feet. ‘I’m going to fetch Grace and take her home. I thought this was a good place for her to spend part of the year, but I think perhaps London is safer after all.’ At the door she stopped and turned back to Perez. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘I met you here,’ he said. ‘At a party for the opening of your exhibition.’ He paused. ‘My partner was an artist. Fran Hunter.’ He was pleased with himself because the words came easily.

Monica nodded as if she recognized the name and then she left.

Later they ended up in Lerwick, in the house by the water that Perez hadn’t quite got round to letting out. He’d arranged for Cassie to stay one more night with her father. Perez wasn’t sure exactly what time it was. Or even what day. He’d be glad to be back in Ravenswick with just Cassie’s chat as the background to his thoughts, and the routine of getting her to school and himself to work to keep him straight. But now they were drinking coffee, and Willow had managed to find an unopened bottle of single malt from the top of her bag. There were fulmars sailing past the window and no trace here in the town of fog. And then he saw the Hjatland , the big ferry to Aberdeen, pass down the Sound and so he knew it was just past seven o’clock in the evening. In twelve hours the three visitors from Sletts would be back on the Scottish mainland. He wondered how things would be between Polly and Marcus. Would the man give up his glamorous older woman, and would the timid librarian be able to forgive him? She seemed to have a knack of seeing the world as she wanted it to be. He thought it would be easier for Ian Longstaff to come to terms with his wife’s murder now that there was some resolution.

‘That scheme of Eleanor’s seems an awful lot of bother to have gone to.’ Willow was sitting on the floor and her long hair fell over her knees.

‘She was desperate,’ Perez said. ‘As Monica said, her company was on the verge of bankruptcy. She needed something new and dramatic to make the show a hit. Persuading a group of graduates that they’d seen the ghost of a child who’d died in 1930 would do that. And maybe Eleanor saw the hoax as a kind of retribution. She thought that Ian had been unfair in the way he treated her after losing the baby.’

‘They must have had a weird kind of relationship.’ Sandy seemed dreamy and lost in thought. By now the lack of sleep was catching up with them all. Perhaps he was thinking about his Unst school teacher and planning another meeting with her.

‘It makes a kind of sense to me,’ Willow said. ‘They both liked a drama – the fights, the falling out, the reconciliation. I can understand how Eleanor would have enjoyed the challenge of convincing Ian that something supernatural was happening in Unst. She’d be able to mock him for the rest of their life together. And her whole existence was a theatrical production, so she’d have relished setting up something like this.’ She paused. ‘In her documentary I guess she wanted to prove that we need to believe in something other than the everyday world, to show that we’re looking for an explanation for random events. It doesn’t seem too daft, as theories go. Folk were always turning up at my parents’ commune searching for answers.’

Perez thought this story had started with a deception and it was all about illusion and distorted perception. Strange shadows and half-spoken lies. ‘I was never convinced when Lowrie said Eleanor hadn’t discussed the project with him. That defied belief. She knew he’d do whatever she asked him to. He was Eleanor’s champion, her knight in shining armour, charging to the rescue of her failing company.’