Ann Cleeves - Cold Earth

‘And he suggested Tain might be available for rent?’ Perez turned his back on the runway and leaned towards the desk where Sandy and Craig were sitting.

‘He was the same generation as Minnie Laurenson, who used to live there. I remember her. Always dressed in black, with a hooked nose, so she looked like a raven. She seemed ancient even when I was a peerie boy. She died a peerie while ago. She didn’t have any relatives left in Shetland. She’d never married. Tain was empty after she died. Magnus told me it had gone to a niece. Some kind of niece. The daughter of a cousin, maybe. You know what it’s like with Shetlanders, Jimmy. We’re all related, if you dig back far enough. Anyway this woman lived in America and Magnus said she might let me stay there. He could tell I was restless at home and needed my own space. “I lived with my mother for too long,” he said to me. “A man needs a house of his own.”’

‘Did Magnus give you the address of the owner?’

‘Yes, Minnie had written it down for him. She never trusted lawyers, apparently. She asked Magnus to write to the woman in America when she died, to tell her that Tain was hers. He did that and they’d been in touch ever since.’

Was that why she was in Shetland? Perez wondered. Because she knew that Magnus was dying and she wanted to meet him before it was too late. And then perhaps she intended to go to his funeral. But she never made it to the kirk because she was killed.

‘What was her name?’

‘She called herself Sandy. I’m not sure what that was short for. Sandy Sechrest, her name was. I phoned her and asked if I could stay in the place. I told her I’d do it up for her a bit, so at least it would be fit for her to stay in, if she came over. She said if I was prepared to do that, I could have it rent-free. Just pay for any fuel I used. I hadn’t offered the work for any return. But I get bored easily. And when I’m bored, I get into bother.’ He shot another quick grin in Sandy’s direction.

‘Did you ever meet her?’

Craig shook his head. She talked about coming over, but in the end something got in the way. Work, I think.’

‘What did she do for work?’

‘She was a publisher. Based in New York.’

‘Did you ever see a photo?’ Because Perez was struggling to reconcile the dark-eyed woman he’d imagined with a publisher from New York.

‘No! Why would I?’

‘I don’t suppose you know if she was planning to visit Shetland this winter?’

Again Craig shook his head. ‘We only spoke a couple of times on the phone. Once before I moved in, and again just before I left for the Middle East. I did email her a couple of photos, to show her how the work on the house was going.’

‘We’ll need her email address.’

‘No problem.’ Craig took his iPhone out of his shirt pocket and pressed a few buttons, before handing it to Perez. The address was on the screen: A.Sechrest@mullion.com. ‘I think Mullion is the name of the publishing company, so that’s probably a work email. She didn’t give me a personal one.’

The publisher’s name seemed familiar, but Perez couldn’t quite remember how he knew it. He thought they had the woman pinned down now. Her employer would know whether she’d taken holiday to visit Shetland. But if she’d only been in the islands for a few weeks, how had she managed to become so friendly with local people? There was the man who’d picked her up from the Co-op in Brae, in the car with the Shetland bumper sticker, and the smart man in the suit who’d been drinking with her in the bar in Mareel. These could be the same person, but if so, why hadn’t he come forward to say that he’d known her? There had been publicity all over the islands. It occurred to Perez that if they could identify the man, perhaps they would have found their murderer. The case might not be so complicated after all.

Sandy and Craig had already stood up to go. Perez went with them into the busy terminal and watched them walk outside. For an awkward moment they were crushed together in the revolving door and then they disappeared from view.

Willow’s plane was early. Perez hung back from the scattering of people waiting for relatives to emerge through the narrow door into the arrivals area. She was one of the last passengers to appear and walked out with Vicki Hewitt, the CSI; the two of them were sharing a joke. He couldn’t hear Willow’s laugh from where he was standing, but he saw her throw back her head and turn to her colleague. Her wild hair was loose. She wore blue cord trousers, frayed a little at the bottoms, big boots and an anorak. Perez had taken in all these details within seconds. He couldn’t have described Vicki at all.

Willow caught a glimpse of him and waved and he went to join her at the luggage belt.

‘We should stop meeting like this, Inspector.’ Her accent was mongrel, a mix between gentle Western Isles – she’d grown up in a commune in North Uist – and posh English, inherited from her educated, dropout parents.

He was never sure what to say to her. He couldn’t quite match her lightness of tone and her banter. ‘Welcome back to Shetland.’ He paused. ‘You’ve brought some better weather with you, at least.’

‘I always aim to please, Jimmy. You know that.’

In the car, Willow sat next to him. Vicki was small and slight and used her short legs as an excuse to go in the back. Perez drove away in silence, passing the Sumburgh Hotel and the Jarlshof archaeological site, before pausing at the crossing at the airport perimeter because the lights were flashing.

‘So what have we got so far, Jimmy? Tell me about your mysterious dark woman.’

The approaching plane landed, the lights stopped flashing and Perez drove carefully across the edge of the runway. ‘I’m not sure she’s so mysterious any more. We think she was probably the owner of Tain, the croft where we found her body.’ He described the conversation they’d had with Craig Henderson. ‘I’m assuming the Sandy Sechrest he emailed is the same as the Alis of the letter. One name with two diminutive forms. Her email address is “A dot Sechrest”. It must be the same woman who booked onto the ferry.’

He thought Willow might congratulate him on making a probable identification, but she only nodded in agreement.

‘It’s still very early in the US, even on the East Coast,’ Perez said. ‘I’ll call her employer’s office as soon as we get back to the station. If I email them the drawing of our victim, we should have a confirmed ID by the end of the day.’

There was another silence. Vicki asked a question about the scene.

‘It’s a total mess,’ Perez said. ‘When we first found the body we put her death down as accidental, caused by the landslide, and the fire officer’s first thought was to check that there wasn’t another body in the house. It didn’t occur to any of us that we should be preserving a crime scene. The local farmer was called in to help too, so there are tractor tracks and footprints everywhere. Because the landslip picked up debris on its way through, it’ll be hard to tell which of the objects actually originated at the site.’

‘A challenge then.’ He saw Vicki grinning at him in the driver’s mirror.

‘It’s certainly that.’ He’d come to a queue of traffic ahead of them and slowed down. ‘Only one lane is open from here to beyond the croft. They’re still working to make the hill secure.’

The cloud had rolled back in from the sea, dense, grey and straggly like a carded fleece. He thought Willow had been lucky that her flight managed to land. An hour later and it might have been forced to turn back. The cars inched forward. At last they came to the track cut by the fire service down to Tain and he pulled out of the queue of traffic and parked by the ruined house. Everything was still covered in mud, and below them they could see the path of the landslide right down to the coast, a black scar in the brown winter hillside.