Red Bones Read online

  Evelyn seemed not to hear the last words, or perhaps she already had her own speech prepared in her head and nothing would stop it coming out. ‘Because if you are going to sell, I think we should approach the Amenity Trust. We need the money right enough, and I think they would give us a decent price. The coins the lasses found would give the place an even greater value, don’t you think?’

  ‘Don’t you listen to a word I say, woman? Setter is not for sale.’ It came out as a cry. Not so loud but much louder than he usually spoke, the words passionate and bitter. The sound was so shocking that the room fell silent. Even the knitting stopped. Looking around the room, Sandy saw Michael in the door, frozen and horrified.

  Sandy didn’t know what to do. Occasionally his father teased his mother about her projects and her meddling into other folks’ business but he never raised his voice to her. Sandy hated what was going on in his family. For the first time he began to think he would find it hard to forgive Ronald for killing Mima. He hoped Perez was right and someone else was responsible. Someone he would feel it was OK to hate.

  In the end it was his mother who put things right. She set down her knitting and went up to his father and put her arms around his shoulder. ‘Oh my dear boy,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  Over Joseph’s head she motioned to her sons to leave them alone. Sandy thought his father was crying.

  Embarrassed, Sandy and Michael stood in the kitchen. Sandy longed to get out of the house. ‘You’ve not been into Setter since you got back,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come? See the old place?’

  ‘Aye. Why not? Amelia’s asleep on our bed. She finds this sort of family occasion exhausting.’

  Sandy bit his tongue. Another sign of his greater maturity.

  They walked to Setter despite the wind, which made it feel like winter again, and the sudden showers of rain. Sandy felt more awake than he had all day. The range was still alight in the kitchen. Sandy brought in peat from the pile outside and set it beside the Rayburn to dry for later. Without thinking he poured a dram for both of them.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Mother tells me you don’t drink any more.’

  Michael smiled. ‘Oh, don’t believe everything she tells you. I make an exception for special occasions.’

  ‘It seems so strange in here without Mima, don’t you think so?’

  ‘When I was growing up,’ Michael said, ‘there was one time when I believed Mima was a trowie wife. Did you ever hear those stories?’

  Sandy shook his head. The trows were part of Shetland folklore, but he’d never believed in them, even when he was a peerie boy.

  ‘Maybe it was before you started school. It was one of those crazes that start suddenly then disappear. They said she was a trowie wife and she’d put a spell on her husband and made him die. For a couple of weeks I wouldn’t come here on my own. Then the kids had something else to talk about and I forgot all about it. Until now.’

  ‘Are you saying it was a trow killed Mima?’

  Michael laughed out loud. ‘A trow named Ronald? I think he’s kind of large, don’t you?’

  Sandy was tempted to tell Michael that maybe Ronald wasn’t the culprit but things between the men seemed easy now and he didn’t want to spoil that.

  ‘Mother’s right about Setter,’ Michael said. ‘Father should sell it.’

  ‘He’ll never do that.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll have any choice,’ Michael said. ‘How much do you think he makes from the crofting? I doubt Duncan Hunter gave him a pension plan and he’s not getting any younger.’

  ‘They manage OK.’

  ‘Do they? I don’t understand how.’

  They sat for a while in silence. Sandy offered Michael another dram but he shook his head. ‘I should get back and see how Amelia’s getting on.’

  Sandy would have liked to ask about Amelia. What possessed you to take up with a woman like that? But what good would it do? They were married with a bairn. Michael would have to make the best of it. ‘Will you find your way back?’ Michael laughed again. ‘Oh, I think I’ll manage.’ The first thing Sandy did when he was on his own was to change out of his suit. Then he began to think of what Michael had said about their parents’ income and the implications of it. It kept him up late into the night. Once he got up to make coffee, but the rest of the time he sat in Mima’s chair, thinking. He would have liked to discuss his thoughts with Perez. Perez would likely reassure him that he wasn’t on the right track at all. He was Sandy Wilson and he always got things wrong. But Perez must have thought Sandy would want to be on his own on the evening of his grandmother’s funeral and he never turned up.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Perez woke the next morning to the sound of his phone ringing. Again his first thought was of Fran and Cassie and their safety in London. The voice was English and female, and at first he didn’t recognize it. Suddenly he lost control of his imagination; gothic images of spilled blood and smashed limbs flashed into his head. The woman was a nurse in accident and emergency, he thought. Or a cop, specially trained to break bad news.

  ‘Inspector Perez, I’m sorry to call you so early.’

  He struggled to sit upright in the bed and to clear the nightmare pictures from his mind.

  ‘This is Gwen James, inspector. You asked me to contact you if Hattie had been in touch with the psychiatric nurse who looked after her when she was ill at university.’

  At last he felt he had a grip on the conversation. ‘And had she?’

  ‘Not recently, I’m afraid, but the nurse thought you’d find it interesting to talk to him. He didn’t feel he could discuss Hattie’s case with me.’ Her voice was tight, clipped. Perez thought she’d had a battle over that. She’d demanded information and the nurse had stood up to her. A brave man.

  She waited impatiently while he found paper and pencil to write down the man’s number. The bedroom was cold. He’d found it stuffy and airless after his discussion with Berglund the night before and had switched the heating off. Shivering, he got back into bed to complete the call. Despite her apparent impatience, in the end Gwen was reluctant to end the conversation.

  ‘Did you find Hattie’s letters useful, inspector?’

  ‘Thank you. Very. We will get them back to you as soon as we can.’

  ‘When you have news about the circumstances of Hattie’s death, you will tell me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ He switched off the phone before she could ask any more questions.

  It was too early to contact the nurse. He’d wait at least until nine o’clock. In the dining room Jean was just laying the tables for breakfast. ‘Could you not sleep?’ she said as she snipped the top from a carton of juice and poured it into a jug. He wondered when she had the chance to rest. She was still behind the bar when the last customer left at night and the place always looked clean in the morning. ‘Cedric is still in his bed. He stayed up last night drinking to Mima. He was always very fond of her.’

  ‘Did he ever go to visit her at Setter?’

  ‘Aye, every Thursday afternoon. To talk over old times, he said. To flirt, more like. Mima was a dreadful old flirt.’ She hurried away to make his coffee.

  Cedric appeared just as Perez was finishing the meal. He looked bleary-eyed and grey.

  ‘Paul Berglund didn’t go out on the early ferry, did he?’ Perez asked. He supposed he’d finished with the academic, for the moment at least, but he didn’t want the man slinking away without his knowing.

  ‘No, he’ll be down later, I’m sure. He doesn’t usually get up so early.’

  ‘Did Mima have a good send-off?’

  ‘I suppose she did. I didn’t stay long at Utra. All those people sitting round saying fine things about her. They had little enough good to say about her when she was alive. I came back here to have a few drams to her memory in peace. I’ll miss her.’ Cedric looked up at Perez. The flesh around his eyes was soft and creased like folded suede. ‘It seems a st
range thing, two bodies on an island this size. What are you doing here, Jimmy? What’s going on?’

  Three bodies, Perez thought. There are the bones they found on Setter too.

  ‘I’m working for the Fiscal, enquiring on her behalf into the sudden death of Hattie James.’

  ‘Aye, right.’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me, Cedric? Anything I need to know about Mima Wilson and Setter? Anything strange been happening there?’

  ‘Not these days, Jimmy. Not for sixty years at least.’

  ‘What happened sixty years ago?’

  ‘These are old men’s tales. You don’t have time for these.’

  ‘Try me.’

  Cedric paused, then he seemed to make up his mind to speak.

  ‘Three men from Whalsay were involved in the Shetland Bus.’ He looked at Perez to check the inspector knew what he was talking about. ‘You know it was mostly the Scalloway men that kept the boats repaired and in good order to put to sea. But when Howarth, the naval officer in charge, decided the Norwegians needed small boats to be dropped off with the agents, so they could make their own way up the fjords, he came to Whalsay to get them made. It was skilled work; the inshore boats had to pass for Norwegian. Men’s lives depended on it. There was young Jerry Wilson, who was just a schoolboy, too young to get called up into the services but the best sailor of his generation. My father, who was called Cedric Irvine like me. And old Andy Clouston, the father of Andrew.’

  ‘So Mima’s husband, your father and Ronald’s grandfather?’

  ‘Exactly that. Though Jerry hadn’t married Mima then. They were walking out together but too young to wed.’

  Perez said nothing. Cedric would want to tell the story in his own way and Perez had told him he’d have time to listen. He tried not to think of the nurse’s phone number scribbled on the pad in his room or to speculate about what he might have to say.

  Cedric began to talk. ‘There have always been tales about Setter. There were odd kind of bumps in the land where the dead lass started digging. Crops never did well there. The bairns thought it was a trowie place and even the grown-ups believed Mima was something of a witch.’ He paused, closed the flaps of skin over his eyes.

  ‘What did that have to do with the Shetland Bus?’

  ‘They say there’s a Norwegian man buried there. That was the story I grew up with, though my father always denied it. An agent who’d passed information to the Germans and got some of his people killed.’

  ‘And the Whalsay men meted out their own form of justice?’

  ‘That’s what people say. One of the men that died was a close friend of Jerry Wilson. He was in a Whalsay-built boat when he was captured. My father would never speak of it, but there were rumours when I was growing up.’ Only now Cedric opened his eyes very slowly. He paused a moment before continuing. ‘I did hear they found some bones at Setter. The piece of a skull, I heard, and others besides.’

  ‘Those were old bones,’ Perez said. ‘Older than that.’ But are they? he thought. I don’t really know that. Sixty years is a long time. Would we be able to tell the difference? Wo uldn’t bones from a body buried during the war look just the same as ones buried hundreds of years ago?

  ‘There you are then,’ Cedric said, suddenly becoming jovial. ‘Like I said, they were all just stories.’

  ‘How did Jerry Wilson die?’ Perez asked.

  ‘At sea. A fishing accident. He was taken in a freak storm. Mima was heartbroken. They’d been sweethearts since they were children.’ Cedric paused again. ‘She was wild even as a child. Setter was her house, not Jerry’s. She lived there as a bairn with her grandmother. Her parents both died when she was quite young. Jerry moved in with them when they got married, and when the grandmother passed away they had the place to themselves. It caused some jealousy. Two young people with their own croft. Mima was never liked on the island, especially by the women. She never made any effort to fit in. Things were different then: folk had to work together to make any sort of living. The men went out to the fishing and the women were left to do most of the work on the crofts. Mima was strong and fit – she could cast peat and scythe hay as well as a man – but she was never what they’d call now a team player. If she didn’t feel much like working she’d stay at home in front of the fire.’ Cedric stopped to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot on Perez’s table.

  ‘Then when Jerry was drowned and she was single again she was a threat to all the island wives. She was a bonny young girl with her own house and her own land and they were scared their husbands would run off with her. She was still in love with Jerry though – with his memory, at least. She had plenty of offers but she never married again. She enjoyed her independence too much for that.’

  ‘I’m surprised so many people turned out for her funeral if she wasn’t so well liked.’

  ‘Oh,’ Cedric said, ‘folk wouldn’t want to miss it. She was a kind of celebrity in her day. And the young ones all liked her. It was her own generation who had the problems.’

  ‘How did she get on with Evelyn?’

  Cedric shot him a sharp look under the hooded lids. ‘Let’s say they never exactly saw eye to eye. After Jerry was drowned Joseph was all Mima had. She used to call him her peerie man. She wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone who stole him away. Mima should have married again. She didn’t have the temperament of a single woman.’

  ‘Were you one of the ones to propose to her?’

  Cedric laughed again. ‘I knew better than to ask her. She’d have thought I was a poor thing after her Jerry. Everyone in Shetland knew he was a handsome man.’

  ‘Do you think the things that happened all those years ago could have any bearing on Mima’s death?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Cedric said. ‘How could it?’

  Perez looked at him, not sure if he really meant what he said, but Cedric turned away and walked back into the kitchen.

  Mark Evans, the psychiatric nurse, said he needed to be sure Perez was who he claimed to be: ‘Mrs James is in the public eye. I don’t want her hassled by a load of reporters. You do understand?’ He had a soft, slow voice and an accent unfamiliar to Perez. Rural. Perez wondered if he’d grown up on a farm; that would give them a point of contact, but he didn’t feel he could ask. Instead he gave the man the number of the police station in Lerwick. ‘They’ll confirm my mobile number.’

  Then he waited, looking out over the harbour, for his phone to ring again. After the deserted feeling of the day before, the place was back to normal. There were cars queuing for the ferry and a couple of fishermen were getting a small trawler ready to go out to sea. He supposed Jerry Wilson’s Norwegian friend had sailed a boat of a similar size to Norway.

  His phone rang, interrupting daydreams of wartime adventures, grey seas and huge waves. He’d never been physically brave and he didn’t think he’d have had the courage to volunteer for the Shetland Bus.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear that Hattie’s dead,’ Mark said. ‘I remember her well.’

  ‘I wondered if she’d been in touch with you recently, but Mrs James said not.’

  ‘No. She might have contacted another professional though. Her GP should have records. Even when she was ill she was unusually self-aware. I think she’d have realized she needed help. If she was so desperate that she committed suicide.’

  Perez picked up an uncertainty in his voice. ‘Were you surprised to hear she’d killed herself?’

  ‘I was. She was a very intelligent young woman. I thought she’d taken on board the strategies for coping with her depression. And she understood that medication would help her. She never refused to take it. Was there an event that distressed her, something very serious that provoked the suicide attempt?’

  ‘Not that we know.’ Perez paused. ‘We’ve not ruled out the possibility of other causes of death. I’m looking into the matter for the Procurator Fiscal. I’m grateful that you’ve taken the time to talk to me.’

  ‘I thought you sh
ould know that four years ago Hattie was a victim of a criminal assault,’ Evans said. ‘It might not be relevant, but it seemed important to tell you.’

  ‘We have no record of that.’ As he spoke Perez hoped that was true. They had checked Hattie’s name against the criminal records. That was standard procedure but if she’d been a victim would that fact have come to light?

  ‘She never reported the matter to the police,’ Evans said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A number of reasons. She’d suffered a severe bout of depression a couple of years earlier. There had been occasions of psychosis. She didn’t think she’d be believed. Perhaps she even felt she was responsible. She wouldn’t even talk to her mother about it.’

  In his quiet, reassuring voice Evans described the incident, as he understood it had taken place. He was clearly angry. When he’d finished, Perez could understand why.

  ‘You realize there’s no proof,’ he said. ‘They might not have got a prosecution even then.’

  ‘I do realize that,’ Evans said. ‘I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s very unprofessional. I couldn’t discuss it with Mrs James. I just wanted you to know. After all, Hattie’s not here to tell you herself.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Sandy woke early. He was lying in Mima’s high double bed. His mother had given him clean sheets to put on it, but the blankets had belonged to Mima. They smelled of peatsmoke and damp like the rest of the house. The sheet was wrinkled uncomfortably underneath him. He’d never quite got the hang of making beds the old-fashioned way. He liked fitted sheets and a duvet.

  On the wall in front of him there was a photograph he hadn’t noticed before. Two women walking down a dirt track. It was taken on Whalsay but before any of the roads had been made up. On their backs they had the rush baskets or kishies that were used for carrying peat and they were so full that he could see the peat piled behind their shoulders. They were wearing old-fashioned bonnets and skirts below their knees, heavy boots. And as they walked they were knitting; the wool was held in apron pockets, their elbows were close to their bodies. They smiled towards the camera, poised for a moment, but you could tell the needles would begin clacking again as soon as the shot was over. Sandy wondered if they were knitting just for the fun of it, or because raising peat was boring, or because they were so busy that this was the only time there was in the day to provide clothes for their children. Or if they did it to make money. It was the sort of thing his mother might do, Sandy thought. Not exactly like the women in the old photo, but working at several things at once, because Evelyn liked to be active and because she needed to hold the family together.