Cold Earth

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jimmy Perez parked by the gate of the Ravenswick school. It looked very similar to the school he’d attended in Fair Isle: a single-storey building with whitewashed walls, surrounded by a playground with a climbing frame and hopscotch squares painted on the concrete. It was quiet. The children were still working. His tension grew. He hated this – telling relatives of an unexpected death. He knew how the news would change their lives, shift their perspective and make everything seem different.

A bell rang and there was a clamour of children’s voices. They’d be leaving their classes and moving to the dining hall for lunch. He got out of the car.

He found Kathryn in her classroom. She taught the older primary children and she was collecting exercise books from the tables. The sun streamed in through the long windows. Perez tapped on the door and let himself in.

‘Jimmy.’ She seemed pleased to see him.

‘Will we be disturbed here?’ He didn’t want a child to burst in and see that she was upset. Or to be interrupted by a staff member with a frivolous question.

‘No, everyone else is at their lunch. I’ve brought a salad. I’d be the size of a horse, if I ate Mary’s dinners every day.’ She sat on one of the small tables. ‘What is it, Jimmy? You look very serious. Do you want to talk about Cassie? Has she been having those nightmares again?’

He perched on a table next to her. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said, ‘about your father.’

‘He’s in Orkney. Some council business.’ She looked up, curious about his interest, but with no premonition of bad news.

‘He’s dead, Kathryn.’ There was no gentle way of saying this, of making it easier for her. ‘His body was found on that shingle beach close to Tain. Kevin Hay found him, when he was out checking his ewes this morning.’

He saw that she couldn’t take it in. ‘No, I’ve told you, Jimmy, he’s in Orkney.’ Her voice was implacable. Hanging onto that fact like hope.

‘Your father had a flight booked, right enough.’ He realized that he was talking to her as he did to Cassie, when she woke in the night screaming for her mother. ‘But he never got onto the plane. We’ve spoken to Flybe. I’ve seen him, Kathryn. It was his body on the beach this morning.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Now she was shouting like a confused child responding to her fears with a tantrum. He could imagine her drumming her heels on the floor and lashing out at him. ‘You have to show me, Jimmy. I have to see him.’

He didn’t reply immediately, but gave her a few moments to collect herself. ‘I can’t take you to see him yet. Not on the beach. A little while and he’ll be in Annie Goudie’s funeral parlour in Lerwick. You and Mavis will see him then.’ A pause. Some of the children had already finished their meal and were running into the playground. ‘You have to trust me about this, Kathryn. Now, we’ll need to talk to your colleagues and ask them to cover your class for this afternoon and I’ll take you home.’

Perhaps it was talk of her work, but suddenly she seemed to grow up, to become herself again. Confused still and full of questions, but not an angry child any more. ‘They’ll be in the staffroom. We can talk to them there.’ At the door she stopped. ‘He wasn’t a perfect man. But he was such a good dad. Fun, you know. He could turn even the boring things into an adventure.’ Only then did she ask the question that he’d been expecting since he’d walked into the classroom. ‘How did he die?’

‘We can’t know for sure,’ Perez said. ‘But I don’t think it was an accident.’

Again she looked at him as if she didn’t understand the words, so he spoke again.

‘I think it was murder.’

Morag was waiting with Mavis Rogerson in the big, gloomy house in Lerwick. The sunshine was muted by the stained glass in the front door, so the hall seemed so dark after the police officer had let them in that it took some time for Perez’s eyes to get used to it. They sat in the kitchen and Morag made tea. Mavis hadn’t moved from the table and seemed hardly to notice their presence until Kathryn went up to her and put her arms around her.

‘Are you up to answering some questions?’ The kitchen was at the back of the house and in shadow. Perez wished they could go outside to talk, but there was no question of moving them.

The women looked up.

‘What do you need to know?’ It was Mavis. Her face was puffy and the colour of putty, but she wasn’t crying.

‘I need to understand why Tom didn’t get on that flight to Orkney. Was there a last-minute change of plan?’

‘I thought he was there,’ Mavis said. ‘It was all arranged. He gets on very well with my brother. He still lives in Kirkwall, and they were going to meet up on Sunday night.’

‘Did your brother contact you? To say that Tom hadn’t turned up?’

She shook her head.

‘Could we have his contact details? So we can check what happened. Or would you like to phone him?’

‘Oh no!’ The answer was immediate. ‘I can’t talk to anybody.’ A pause. ‘I don’t have the strength.’ It was an odd phrase, but Perez thought that was just how he’d felt after Fran’s death. He’d been too weak with grief to carry out even the simplest of tasks.

Mavis got her phone and found her brother’s number. Perez scribbled it into his notebook and passed it to Morag. The police officer slipped out of the room. While the three of them sipped tea, they could hear her muffled voice from the hall. At least she’d managed to get through first time. Morag came back into the room and they all stared at her. It was as if she was an actor appearing onstage and the attention seemed to make her a little flustered.

‘Tom phoned your brother on Sunday to cancel.’ Morag directed her words to Mavis. ‘Tom told him that something unexpected had turned up and that he’d be delayed. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to make the Orkney conference. He gave the impression that it was council business.’

‘Ah.’ Mavis sounded sad rather than angry. ‘That was always the excuse he used.’

‘Excuse me?’ Perez could guess what she meant, but he needed her to explain.

‘Tom had other women, Inspector. It was hardly a secret.’

Perez shot a look at Kathryn, but he couldn’t tell if this was news to her or whether she’d known about the affairs. She sat now, unmoving. Perhaps that was what she’d meant when she’d said her father wasn’t perfect. The room seemed very stuffy. It was as if everyone was in a slow-motion film, and Perez found that it was taking him a long time to put together his questions. He leaned across the table towards Mavis.

‘Did you have any suspicion that he wasn’t going to Orkney as planned this time?’

She lifted her head. ‘None at all. He liked visiting my family. He liked the conferences. He was a very sociable man. I always loved that about him.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We were happy, Jimmy. I knew what he was like when we married. Tom needed to be admired. It was a kind of addiction – the sex. It was clear very soon that I couldn’t meet all his needs. But I wanted to be with him. I could live with the fact that he strayed. I wish he’d been faithful, but he loved his family and the home we had here. I was his rock. He always said that. He wouldn’t have been the man he was, without me.’

The room was suddenly so quiet that Perez could hear the purring of the cat that was lying on the windowsill. He turned to Kathryn. ‘Did you know that your father had affairs?’

‘Of course. At first it all seemed just a bit of fun. My dad was a ladies’ man. He flirted at parties and weddings. He was a little bit mischievous, but everyone said there was no harm in him. As he got older and the women he chased got younger, it became embarrassing. He gained a reputation as a bit of a pest. I’m not sure there had been other women recently. Or only in his dreams. Single women would know they could do better – and that he would never leave his wife – and there aren’t that many women in Shetland willing to cheat on their partners. My father had become a bit of a laughing stock. You wouldn’t want to be seen out with him. It was all a bit sad.’

‘He was still an attractive man!’ Mavis cried. ‘You can’t talk about him like that.’

There was another silence. Perez thought it strange that the woman would prefer to think of her husband as a sexual predator than an embarrassment. It was an odd kind of loyalty.

‘Was Tom seeing anyone just now?’ He was thinking of the woman who’d been with Rogerson in the Scalloway Hotel. Sandy had thought that might be a business meeting, but he might not have been reading the situation accurately.

‘As I’ve just said, Jimmy, I don’t think he’d been seeing anyone for a while.’ Kathryn’s tea must have been cold by now, but she sipped from the mug.

‘There was some business deal that was taking up a lot of his time,’ Mavis said. ‘He was out some evenings, but he wasn’t with a woman. I could always tell when he’d been with a woman: he’d come back to me and he’d be kind of tender.’

‘Was it legal business?’ Perez asked. ‘Or something to do with the council?’

‘Maybe something to do with the oilies.’ Mavis was wearing a big hand-knitted cardigan, but despite the heat in the room she still seemed to feel cold. She pulled the garment around her. ‘Tom said he couldn’t tell me about it just yet, but it would make us money.’

‘Was money important to Tom?’

‘Not for its own sake,’ Kathryn said. ‘He couldn’t save. But he liked the things it could buy.’

Power? Perez thought. Influence. Women. But he wondered if the deals Tom bragged about were real or if they were fantasies, as were, according to his daughter, his relationships with young and beautiful women.

‘When did you last see Tom?’

‘Early Sunday,’ Mavis said. ‘Then he drove down to Sumburgh to get the morning plane.’

And he had done that. His car had been found in the airport car park. So what had happened between arriving in Sumburgh and checking in for his flight?

‘Who knew that he’d be going to Orkney?’

‘Everyone who reads The Shetland Times.’ Kathryn allowed herself a little smile. ‘There was a big article about the fisheries conference and about how Dad was going to fight for Shetland’s fishermen.’

‘But they wouldn’t know that he was leaving on Sunday morning.’

‘No. Just that he’d be in Orkney for the meeting on Monday morning.’

Perez thought Rogerson must have intended to go to the conference. Otherwise he wouldn’t have driven to Sumburgh and he wouldn’t have encouraged all that publicity. They’d need to question the check-in staff and other passengers. Perhaps there’d been a chance meeting in the airport that had made him change his mind. Or had someone been waiting for him there?

He turned his attention back to the women. ‘What were you up to over the weekend?’ He tried to keep his voice chatty and light.

Mavis stiffened and her voice was suddenly bitter. ‘Do you think I killed him, Jimmy? Because he’d been making a fool of me with other women? I’d have done that years ago, if I’d wanted him dead.’

‘I have to ask, Mavis. You must understand that.’

The women looked at each other. For a moment Perez suspected they were preparing to lie, but perhaps they just wanted to check the accuracy of the details they were about to give.

‘We had breakfast,’ Kathryn said, ‘and then we went to church.’

‘Here in Lerwick?’

‘No, in Ravenswick,’ Kathryn said. ‘We like the minister there.’

So they were in Ravenswick on the Sunday. Perez couldn’t work out the significance of that.

‘And after the service?’

‘We treated ourselves to Sunday lunch in the Ravenswick Hotel.’ Now Kathryn sounded almost defiant. She must understand the implication of Perez’s questions, even if Mavis didn’t. ‘Then later the weather cleared a little and we went for a walk in the hotel gardens. But we didn’t go anywhere near Tain, Jimmy, and we didn’t go to the beach.’

He nodded and waited for her to continue.

‘On Sunday night we were here. Together. I had marking to do, and my mother was watching television in the same room. I arrived at school at about eight this morning. It was icy and I’d allowed time in case there was a tailback from the traffic lights by the landslide. I didn’t see my father. Not over the weekend or this morning. As far as I knew, he was in Orkney.’

Perez stood up. They were back to where they’d started when he’d first met Kathryn in the school, and he didn’t want to be in this overheated room any longer. He left Morag with the women, shut the kitchen door behind him and stepped out into the sunshine.