Cold Earth

Chapter Eighteen

Sandy sat at his desk in the police station all morning, burrowing into the life of Alison Teal. He thought Jimmy Perez might be happier now that they had a name for her. Sandy had been hoping to meet Louisa for lunch at some point, but she’d decided to head back to Yell straight from the Scalloway Hotel.

‘It’s not that I don’t want to spend a bit more time with you, but my mother will be missing me and, besides, you might be held up at work.’

At one time Sandy might have been offended by that and seen it as a personal rejection. But he understood that Louisa took her responsibility for her mother seriously. And, after the night they’d had in Scalloway, he wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything. For the first half-hour at work he’d found it hard to concentrate on Alison Teal. He found himself grinning for no reason at all and wondering when he might ask Louisa to marry him. There was a slight awkwardness about that, because Jimmy Perez had not been engaged long when his woman was murdered. Sandy wouldn’t want to do anything to stir up those bad memories for Jimmy, who seemed to have emerged from the worst of the depression; and besides, he felt a strange superstition about it, as if by asking Louisa to marry him, he might put her in danger too.

Alison Teal had a website all to herself. It must have been set up when she was playing Dolly, the housemaid in the TV drama, because the photo was the same as the one Jimmy had found in Magnus Tait’s house. Nothing had been added to it for years; there was no information about recent roles. The website had the phone number of the actor’s agent, but when Sandy phoned it, the call went straight through to an answer machine. It was clearly an office number and the agent wasn’t working on a Sunday. Sandy left a message asking the woman to contact him urgently.

They still hadn’t found any of Alison’s relatives, and Jimmy Perez had told Sandy that was a priority: ‘It’s not just that they might have important information, but we need to inform them of Alison’s death. She might well have parents who are still alive.’ Sandy knew Perez had been thinking of the elderly people in the photo that Sandy had found in the box in Tain. It was obviously one of her treasured possessions. Sandy was distracted again now, thinking that he’d like a photograph of Louisa. A proper photograph, not just one taken on his phone to save on the computer. He turned back to the screen and continued his search.

Through Google he found an in-depth interview with Alison Teal in the Independent on Sunday. He printed it off, because he could tell it would be useful and Jimmy Perez preferred to have paper copies of anything he thought important. The interview had taken place a few months after Alison had disappeared and then been discovered in the Ravenswick Hotel. They’d fixed a date for the disappearance now: it had happened fifteen years ago. The journalist sounded almost like a psychiatrist, in the piece. Sandy wasn’t sure that he’d want such personal information made public and put into a newspaper for folk to read while they were eating breakfast.

There was a lot about the actress’s early life. Her parents had been junkies and she’d been brought up by her father’s parents, who lived in Cromer, a small town on the Norfolk coast.

‘Did you ever see your parents?’ the reporter had asked.

The reply had been almost matter-of-fact. ‘Not much. They’d turn up occasionally to bum money from Gran and Grandpa. But addicts don’t care about much, except getting the next fix, do they? I dreamed about them getting straight and having me back home, but deep down I knew it was never going to happen. And we were happy with Gran and Grandpa. It made us different from the other kids at school, but even then there were lots of single parents around. At least there were two adults in our family. I can’t really blame my screw-ups on an unhappy childhood.’

‘Did you have any siblings?’

‘A younger brother, Jono. Jonathan. He went into the army and we lost touch for a bit. I’ve seen more of him recently.’

The reporter pressed her on that, but Alison refused to go into more detail about her brother.

Sandy was already scribbling notes. Unless Alison had taken a stage name, she could have inherited the name Teal from her father, and so probably from her paternal grandparents. And now Sandy had the name of the Norfolk town where they’d all lived. Alison had been forty-two when she died, so it was just possible that one of the grandparents was still alive. He could get on the phone to the local force and see if they could trace them. If Jonathan Teal was still in the army, it would be easy enough to get hold of him too. Jimmy Perez would be delighted if they could inform a relative of her death – if they could find a person who’d been close to her and who might grieve for her. Sandy returned to the interview in the newspaper.

‘How did you get into acting?’ Sandy imagined the reporter as older than Alison, rather cool and sophisticated.

‘That was just luck! A friend was a member of a drama club and she dragged me along. I wasn’t that keen, to begin with. I couldn’t see the point of the warm-up exercises, all that prancing around and improvisation. But once they gave me a script, I was away. It was a chance to be someone else for a bit, I suppose. A kind of escape. My grandparents weren’t sure at first. They thought I should get a more secure job. But they could see how much I loved it and, when I got a place in drama school, they were as pleased as punch.’

‘Getting the part of Dolly in Goldsworthy Hall must have been your big break.’

‘Yeah! I mean, I’d done a bit of stage work and a few ads for telly, but I was only a year out of drama school when I got it, and I suppose it changed my life. It was weird walking down the street and having people shouting after me, as if I really was Dolly. I think it turned my head a bit too. All that recognition. Suddenly having money to spend. I got a bit wild and stupid. You’d have thought I’d know drugs were a mistake, after my mum and dad, but I guess it was a confidence thing. I didn’t feel I belonged in that life. Not really. And I needed something to help me face it. In the end, it all fell apart. It must have been some kind of breakdown. I found myself dreaming up better and better ways of killing myself. That became almost an addiction of its own. Then I was watching the weather on the telly one night and on the map I saw Shetland. Miles to the north, but still part of the UK. And I thought, Well, I’m right on the edge. What better place to go?’

Sandy was imagining himself in the role of the interviewer now. It was almost as if he was questioning Alison as part of the investigation. He would have fixed on the practical details and asked Alison about driving to Aberdeen, getting onto the boat. Perez always said that facts cemented a witness in reality. It stopped people creating stories and turning their lives to fiction. But the journalist skipped all that and had already moved on.

‘Were you aware of the response in the English media to your disappearance?’

‘Not at all. In my eyes, I hadn’t disappeared, had I? I knew exactly where I was. And I didn’t see any English papers when I was in Shetland. I never watched the TV news.’

‘You didn’t think of letting your family know? Or your colleagues on Goldsworthy Hall?’

Sandy pictured Alison pausing at this, thinking about the question and how best to answer it. Her response seemed very honest to him.

‘Not really, no. I was depressed, you see. And depressed people are very selfish. I could only think about my own feelings. I’d shut everyone else out. It was my way of making myself better.’

Outside the police station Sandy saw a group of women who must be on their way to the chapel further down the street. They were wearing waterproofs and the wind seemed to carry them down the hill, making them run with little footsteps, struggling to stay upright. He turned back to the printed paper on his desk and made another note. It might be worth talking to the woman who’d interviewed Alison. There could have been confidences that had never been printed. Sandy wouldn’t want to do that himself; he thought a London journalist would be intimidating, and anyway she would probably respond better to a more senior officer. The woman’s name was Camilla White and that seemed to fit in with the classy image Sandy already had for her. Her next question had been about Alison’s first stay in Shetland.

‘So you arrived into Shetland on the ferry. What were your first impressions of the island?’

‘It was winter, so it was dark and rainy and I couldn’t see much. I’d only packed a few things into a small bag. There was a taxi outside the ferry terminal and I asked him to take me to the best hotel on the island. He said that would be the Ravenswick, so that was where we went. When they asked me my name at reception, I didn’t want to tell them who I was. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me. So I called myself Susie Black. That was my mother’s name before she was married.’

Sandy made another scribbled note on the paper in front of him. If Alison’s mother was still alive, they now had her maiden name as well as her married name. It should be easy to trace her now. He thought how pleased Jimmy Perez would be to have all this information and found himself smiling again.

In the newspaper, Alison was describing her stay in the islands. ‘I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t explore very much away from the hotel. I walked for miles, though. The day after I arrived, the weather suddenly changed. It was clear and sunny, very cold. I’d wake up to frost in the hotel garden, and the sea was blue and still. I’ve always loved the sea, since Jono and I moved out to Norfolk. That weather made the island seem like a kind of magic place. All bright and glistening. They sold local knitwear in the hotel, so I bought a jersey to keep warm and just went out walking every day. I met some local people on my wanders. There was one elderly chap called Magnus, who took me into his house and told me stories about the islands. He had a raven in a cage. The stories were about little people who lived underground and played fantastic music. Looking back, it seems like a hallucination. I’m not even sure all that really happened.’

Oh yes, Sandy thought, it happened.

‘Then you were recognized?’ The question took them towards the bottom of the page, so Sandy could tell that the interview was about to come to an end. He read on quickly to find out Alison’s response.

‘Yeah, I suppose it was going to happen eventually. A local man, a lawyer, came into the hotel for a meal with his wife. I was in the restaurant eating dinner and could see him looking over at me. Then he’d start whispering to his wife. I could tell that would mean the end of my retreat. Because that was what it had been like, a kind of religious retreat. When I saw the man staring, it felt like the world had come back to get me. He came up to my table when he was on his way out and said I was all over the papers in the south and that they were making a great drama of it. They were making out that I was hiding away in rehab, or that I’d taken an overdose. He offered not to tell anyone, if I needed a bit longer to myself, but I realized I’d have to face them all in the end. I phoned my agent that night.’

Sandy thought the lawyer must have been Tom Rogerson. Who else would it be? But if that was the case, how had he not recognized Alison Teal when they’d circulated the drawing of the dead woman’s face? She’d certainly aged in the last fifteen years, but she hadn’t changed that much. And it would have been Tom Rogerson who had collected her from the Brae Co-op and sat with her in Mareel. He could see how Alison might have kept in touch with him over the years. He’d offered to keep her secret and she’d surely have been grateful for that. Had she asked for his help again? And if they’d got on so well together, what could be his motive for killing her?

Sandy set those questions aside. Willow and Jimmy would be the people to answer them. He put the printed article on Perez’s desk, returned to his own office and was about to start making the calls that would help them to trace Alison Teal’s relatives. But before he could lift the receiver, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a woman with a very loud voice. She announced herself as Genevieve Winter. This, it seemed, was Alison Teal’s agent, returning his call.