Ann Cleeves - Cold Earth

He’d turned back to the room quickly to hug her and apologize, but she’d heard the wistfulness in his voice. She’d told herself then that the outburst was to do with Kevin feeling middle-aged; he was looking back to his youth with nostalgia. Now, driving back towards the farm, she wasn’t so sure. For the first time in years she felt the compulsion to drink. Tesco’s was still open. She could buy a bottle of wine and sit in the furthest corner of the car park, where nobody would see her. If it had a screw top, she’d have no problem opening it. She imagined the sensation of the alcohol in her bloodstream. It would relax her. The tension in her back would disappear. The jangling nerves would quieten. She wouldn’t need to drink it all – just enough to make her forget the anxieties of the day. She would drive home, be more pleasant to Kevin and the boys, and she would sleep more easily than she had for weeks. Nobody need ever know.

At the roundabout on the edge of Lerwick she signalled to turn into the supermarket car park and then at the last minute changed her mind, causing the taxi driver behind her to hit his horn and mouth obscenities about women drivers. She took no notice and continued on the road south towards Gilsetter.

Kevin was waiting for her. He’d lit the wood-burner and some candles. There was the smell of real coffee, beeswax and peat.

‘What’s all this about?’ She was shaking off her coat, pulling off her boots at the living-room door. This was her favourite room in the house, but they spent most of their time in the kitchen. He’d been sitting in front of the television, but zapped it off when he stood up to greet her. She thought he’d been dozing. He had that tousled little-boy look that he had when he first woke up.

‘It’s Valentine’s Day. I thought I’d remember it, for once.’

She walked towards him and was aware of the contrast of polished floorboards and sheepskin rugs on her bare feet.

‘And I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘That was just crass. I don’t know why I said it. Frustrated about the weather maybe, and needing someone to blame.’ He was going to say more. Jane knew what it would be: how he couldn’t manage without her. The sort of things you might say to a housekeeper or a mother, though with a little less emotion. She put a finger to his lips to stop him talking and took him into her arms.

Jane had just got the boys out to the bus the next day when Jimmy Perez arrived. She’d waved her sons out of the house just as she had done when they were tiny. Andy had left school the year before, but he still went into town each day. He’d started at university in Glasgow on an English course. She’d thought he’d adore it; he was the sparky one, always full of adventure, telling her about his reading, the films that he watched. But when he’d arrived back at Christmas he’d announced that he wouldn’t be going back. No reason given, and not open to persuasion. He’d found a job in the bar in the Mareel arts centre in Lerwick and it seemed to suit him; he was working with other arty young people and he didn’t mind doing the late shift, if there was music.

Michael, the younger son, had never had ambitions to leave the island. He was doing his Highers, but they all thought he’d join the family business when school was over. They’d always known he was more practical than academic and, besides, he had Gemma to hold him here. They’d been seeing each other since they were fifteen and they already seemed like a settled married couple. Jane thought it might not be too long before she became a grandmother.

So when Jimmy Perez arrived, the house was quiet. Kevin had been out for a while, contracted by the council to work on clearing the road. He was happy. He’d felt he’d put things right between them and he hated an atmosphere. Watching through the kitchen window, Jane saw that the inspector had his small daughter with him.

‘Sorry about this.’ Perez nodded towards the child. ‘The school’s closed until after the weekend. Kathyn Rogerson’s offered to mind her, but I thought I’d come here before heading off to Lerwick.’

‘Have you got time for a coffee?’ She was pleased that she’d already loaded the dishwasher with the breakfast plates. Jane hated mess. She was proud of this house. When she’d first moved here with Kevin, soon after their marriage, his parents had only recently moved out to a modern bungalow in town. The farmhouse had been modernized by Kevin’s father in the early Seventies and not touched again until Kevin and Jane moved in; it had had loud orange wallpaper and clashing carpets, both mostly hidden by mounds of clutter. She and Kevin had extended it, and Jane had designed it to her taste.

‘Why not?’ Perez smiled at her, and she thought how handsome he was, dark like a storybook pirate.

She found crayons and paper for Cassie and sat her at the table. ‘What can I do for you, Jimmy?’

‘We’re trying to identify the woman who was living at Tain, the one who was killed in the landslide. You phoned in, to say you might have seen her.’

‘Yes.’ Jane had called the police station on impulse when she’d heard the description on Radio Shetland, before going out to her meeting. Kevin had come into the kitchen while she was making the call and, when she’d described the woman she’d seen, he’d frowned.

‘I was with Jimmy at Tain yesterday,’ he’d said.

‘You didn’t say!’ It had seemed such a huge thing, to have seen a dead woman thrown up by the tide of mud, like flotsam on a beach. She couldn’t believe that Kevin hadn’t told her.

‘I walked away before he found her,’ he’d continued. ‘I didn’t know anything about it, until the ambulance turned up. I helped clear a way for them. Besides, it’s not something you’d want to remember.’ Looking back, it seemed that their argument of the night before had started there, with Kevin brooding about the imagined picture of a dead woman, holding it to himself as if it was something he couldn’t bear to share.

Now she saw that Jimmy Perez was waiting for her to describe her meeting with the strange woman and she tried to remember the encounter in detail. ‘I was in Brae,’ she said. ‘I was up there chatting to Ingirid Eunson. I’m hoping she’ll help me out with the business this year. They have a couple of polytunnels too. She might grow some stuff for me. I’m running out of space.’

Jimmy nodded. ‘How’s the business doing?’

‘Really well!’ Once the boys were at school, Jane had developed her own enterprise on the croft. She grew herbs, fruit and salads under polythene and, after a slow start, things were going well. She supplied most of the hotels and restaurants in the islands and had been approached about exporting her products to mainland Scotland and beyond. Now she had three giant polycrubs on the land closest to the house. She’d chosen a sheltered position for them but, even so, at this time of year Kevin helped her to cover them with fishing nets, pegged into the earth to stop the tunnels from blowing away.

Jane returned to her story. ‘I stopped off at the Co-op just to pick up a couple of things for my lunch, and I saw the dead woman there. I’m sure it was her. She was buying champagne.’ She still noticed what people bought to drink. That never left her. She paused, distracted by a sudden thought. ‘If she lived in Tain, why would she be all the way north in Brae doing her shopping? There’d be more choice in Lerwick, and it’d be much closer to go there.’

‘Can you describe her?’ Perez’s voice was quiet. At the other end of the table Cassie didn’t seem to have heard him speaking.

‘She was very dark and exotic,’ Jane said, ‘with beautiful black hair.’

‘Age?’ He looked up from his coffee.