Ann Cleeves - Cold Earth

‘Jane saw a woman in Brae Co-op the day before the landslide. Lunchtime. Her description matches our Alis. Go up and chat to the staff, Sandy. See if she’s a regular. That might mean she was working in North Mainland: at Sullom Voe maybe or one of the hotels there. She wasn’t on her own. A guy picked her up in a car. A local car with a Shetland flag on the bumper. Jane saw her buying a bottle of champagne. I’ve asked the manager to check credit-card sales for the day, to see if we can confirm a name.’

Sandy had just left the office when the phone rang again.

‘Jimmy.’ James Grieve had worked in Aberdeen for years but hadn’t lost his west-coast accent. ‘We might have a bit of a problem.’

‘What sort of a problem.’ Perez was still worrying over identification; he was thinking of the children in the photo, who might be older now but had probably lost a mother and needed to be told. And of elderly parents who’d lost a child without knowing.

‘Your woman didn’t die by accident. The knocks to the head and the contusions on the face happened post-mortem.’

‘If she didn’t die in the landslide, what killed her?’ Perez wondered why he wasn’t more surprised. The strangeness of her dress, perhaps. The exotic look that was so out of place in Shetland. It seemed fitting that her death should be dramatic too. He was imagining a grand, almost operatic suicide.

‘She was strangled. The ligature mark was hidden by the damage caused by the slide.’

‘She didn’t hang herself?’ The melodramatic gesture of suicide had remained with him.

‘No!’ The retort was furious and explosive.

‘I didn’t see any petichiae.’ Perez remembered the dark, staring eyes. He hadn’t noticed any burst blood vessels.

‘No? Well, maybe the light wasn’t so great when you saw her and there was a lot of muck over her face. You’re not questioning my judgement, I hope, Inspector.’ His voice was faintly mocking, but the tone was firm enough for Perez to realize he was on dangerous ground. James Grieve was good at his job and knew it. He was accustomed to having his opinions accepted immediately.

Perez tried to think back to his first sight of the dead woman, thrown up against the wall at Tain. The professor was right. It had been raining so hard that visibility had been atrocious. Was the image he carried round in his head a fiction, idealized? Had he become obsessed by the victim, just because he hadn’t seen her clearly? ‘What else can you tell me?’

‘The ligature was narrow and hard. A leather belt perhaps. That sort of width, though no sign of a buckle mark. There were some indentations; maybe the belt was embossed. You might find a match.’ The pathologist paused. ‘Her clothes have gone for analysis. It’ll be pretty near-impossible to separate the filth from the landslip from anything that might have been there previously. The same for under her fingernails, I’d have thought, though there might be scraps of skin beneath the mud. Possibly her own skin, if she was trying to pull the ligature away from her neck.’

‘Any idea what time she was killed? It’d be useful to know how long she had been dead before the landslide hit the house.’

‘You are joking, I hope.’ James Grieve was always scathing about colleagues who claimed any sort of accuracy around time of death. ‘It was almost two days before I saw her, Jimmy, and it would have been impossible, even if I’d been called straight to the scene.’

Jane Hay claimed to have seen the woman in Brae at lunchtime on the 12th. If that information was right, she must have been killed between then and the landslide on the afternoon of the 13th. Not such a long gap. ‘We still don’t have a definitive ID,’ Perez said. ‘Anything you can give me to help with that?’

‘She’s had some dental work, but nothing recent. If she’s just moved to Shetland or she’s a visitor, that’s not a lot of use to you. She’s never had a child.’

So who were the children in the photo? The boy and the girl. The girl older, with a mind of her own. The boy a charmer. Perez looked at the image he’d pinned to the board in his office.

At the other end of the line the pathologist was still talking. ‘Her last meal was lamb, stewed with spices. Couscous.’

With a jolt, Perez remembered again the meal he’d cooked for Fran on Valentine’s Day. The odd synergy between him and the murdered woman was unsettling him. He tried to push her image from his mind, to concentrate on the matter in hand and stay detached.

‘Alcohol?’

‘Not enough to be significant.’

So why had she been buying champagne? If the woman in Brae was indeed the murder victim.

‘I’ll get a full report to you this afternoon,’ the professor said. ‘You’ll want to get started on the investigation, I expect. Let Inverness know, so they can get their finest onto a plane.’

‘There’s not much of the crime scene left for the CSI to work on. The firefighters had to clear it, to check there hadn’t been other fatalities.’ But Perez was already thinking of another woman. Chief Inspector Willow Reeves, who was as different from the victim as it was possible to be. Strong as a Viking with wild, tangled hair. A vegetarian who’d never eat lamb, even with cumin and couscous. Brought up in a commune in the Western Isles, she’d seen joining the police as a form of rebellion, but she still practised yoga every morning. Like the dark-eyed victim at Tain, Willow troubled and distracted him.

All the same she was the first person he phoned when he ended his call to James Grieve. She sounded distant and a little bored when she answered.

‘Reeves. Serious Crime Squad.’

‘Willow, it’s Jimmy Perez.’

There was a pause. He didn’t know what to make of that. Was she pleased to hear from him? Irritated?

‘Jimmy, how can I help you?’ Colleague-to-colleague friendly, but very professional.

He explained the situation. ‘We assumed it was an accidental death. Nothing to suggest otherwise at the time, though maybe I should have picked up the petichiae.’

‘You’re a detective, not a scientist, and in those conditions I doubt the professor would have done any better.’

He found himself smiling. Willow always managed to make him feel better about himself. ‘You know the patch now. I was hoping you might take it on as SIO. If you’re not tied up with anything important.’

Another pause. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing, if he should have made a more formal request, or made it clear that he valued her competence as well as her experience of the islands. He hated to think he might have offended her. He held his breath and realized how much he wanted Willow Reeves to be in Shetland with him. He couldn’t imagine running the investigation with any other officer.

‘Just you try and stop me, Jimmy Perez.’ Suddenly she sounded like a child offered a day off from school. ‘I’ll be on the first plane north.’

‘No!’ He had to speak quickly before she replaced the receiver. ‘Wait until tomorrow. At least one lane of the road north from Sumburgh should be clear by then. Just now all the flights are coming into Scatsta and there are terrible delays. If you want to get started on the case, we still haven’t identified the victim. There was a letter in the house addressed to an Alis. A. L. I. S. An unusual name. Obviously an abbreviation. Maybe you could get your people onto the ferry company and the airline, see if that fits with any of their passengers. It would be terrific if we could find a surname for her. I’m assuming she’s an outsider and travelled up relatively recently. All my officers are tied up here in the aftermath of the disaster. There are still people cut off. No electricity. And that sort of enquiry takes time.’