Cold Earth

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Sandy Wilson pulled into the Sumburgh Airport car park. The traffic had been heavy all the way from Lerwick and there were still lights controlling the single-lane stretch close to the landslide. It was ten o’clock, but the low cloud meant it was barely light. In the terminal building disgruntled passengers were waiting for the weather to lift and for the delayed flights to take off. Sandy felt as if this was a wild goose chase, as if he’d been sent to go through the motions while the exciting part of the investigation was happening elsewhere.

He went into the shop to buy coffee and a bacon sandwich. He’d overslept and left without time for breakfast. He recognized the woman behind the food counter, but struggled to remember her name. She was big-boned and red-faced, and he thought she’d once worked in the chip shop in Lerwick. A few years ago, before he’d met Louisa and had tried to get in better shape, he’d been a regular customer.

‘Hi there!’ She’d recognized him too, greeted him like an old friend. ‘Where are you off to?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m here on work, not away on holiday.’

An announcement over the PA system called passengers for the Glasgow flight through to security. There was a similar call for people for Aberdeen and the shop emptied, as if by magic.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Those murders…’ An excitement in her voice, hoping for details that wouldn’t be known to the general public. He remembered that she’d been a terrible gossip.

‘I don’t suppose you saw Tom Rogerson on Sunday? He was supposed to be flying off to Orkney, parked his car here, but never arrived. You did know Tom Rogerson?’

‘Oh aye. And Mavis, his wife. He led her a merry dance, you ken.’

The woman’s name came back to him. Susan. He’d never known her surname.

‘Were you working on Sunday?’

‘Aye, it was another day just like this. Flights cancelled and delayed. Lots of passengers around, just waiting for the visibility to improve. I was rushed off my feet.’ Susan hauled herself onto a stool behind the counter to make her point. She had short, stubby legs and calves shaped like upturned bottles.

‘Did you see Tom Rogerson? He was a sociable kind of guy, wasn’t he? He’d be buying coffee for anyone he knew, sitting at one of the tables there, chatting. I doubt if you’d miss him.’ Sandy took a bite of the bacon sandwich. He’d already paid for it and there was no point in letting it get cold.

‘I did see him, but he wasn’t here for long. Maybe he thought it wasn’t worth hanging around, because the flights were obviously delayed, and he’d come back later. I saw him chatting to one of the lasses at check-in. He probably wanted to get the latest news on the planes.’

‘Did he come into the shop at all?’ Sandy wasn’t sure why he asked that, except that he was trying to picture Rogerson’s movements.

Susan paused for a moment before answering. ‘Yes, he did come in. The newspapers had arrived in with the first flight and he bought one of the fat London ones. You know what they’re like at weekends. A pile of magazines and adverts tucked inside them.’

‘Did he come into the shop before he spoke to the people at check-in or after?’

She pondered again. Sandy thought it was helpful for him that Susan took such a great interest in people. He would have taken no notice at all in the random movements of the passengers, and he’d be a terrible witness.

‘After,’ she said. ‘He went to check-in almost as soon as he came into the terminal. Then he made his phone call and then he came into the shop. I was on the till at the door then, not doing the cafe. We had a very busy patch soon after that, and I didn’t see what happened to him after he’d paid for the newspaper.’

Sandy was thinking about the phone call. He assumed Perez would have put in a request to Rogerson’s service provider to get a list of his calls, but it might be more urgent to see the details now. There had been no phone on Rogerson’s body, and no mention had been made of one at his house or office, but Mavis would have his personal and business numbers. It should be easy enough to track down the call history.

‘Did you hear anything of his phone conversation?’ Because he knew Susan would be interested. She already had Rogerson marked down as a philandering bastard and she’d be looking out for more evidence.

She shook her head sadly. ‘He was out there in the lounge and I was in here behind the till. I saw him make the call, but there was no way I could have heard a word.’

Sandy had a sudden thought. ‘Are you sure he made the call out? He wasn’t answering one? You might not have heard it ringing, if the airport was crowded and noisy.’

She considered the idea. ‘You’re right. I just assumed that he was calling out, but I don’t think I saw him press the buttons. It could have been either.’

Sandy waited in line to speak to the officials on check-in. He didn’t want any aggro by pushing to the front of the queue, and anyway it wasn’t too long; planes were arriving in from the south now and turning round very quickly. The woman he spoke to was English, young and bright. He showed her his warrant card and he could tell she was impressed. If he’d come across her in the past, he would already be chatting her up with a view to asking her out. Now he concentrated on Tom Rogerson.

‘He was booked onto a flight to Orkney on Sunday morning,’ he said, ‘but he never took it.’

She pressed a few keys on her computer, muttered under her breath because the system was so slow.

‘Were you working on Sunday?’ he asked while she waited to retrieve Rogerson’s booking.

‘Yes. On the early shift. I finished at two.’

‘Maybe you remember talking to him then? He had a kind of flirty way of speaking to the ladies.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Late middle age? Had hand-luggage only. A small rucksack. Talked like something from that cop show set in the Seventies. Life on Mars.’ Dismissive.

‘Aye, that sounds about right.’ Sandy gave her a smile. He thought that since Louisa, he’d changed his style; he felt good about that, a bit superior.

She looked at the screen in front of her. ‘Rogerson, Thomas. Booked on the ten-thirty flight to Kirkwall. He checked in on time and was told that the flight would be delayed and he should listen out for announcements. Then he came back and said that because of the severe delay, he’d miss his meeting and he might as well cancel. Because he only had hand-luggage there was no problem, but he lost nearly two hundred quid, because the return flight was automatically cancelled too.’

Sandy tried to think that through. Missing the meeting was obviously a bollocks excuse, because the fishery conference wasn’t going to start until the Monday morning. So what had happened between checking in for his flight and coming to the desk to cancel? Tom Rogerson had spoken to someone on the phone. If they could find out who the caller was, they might know the identity of the killer. Sandy thanked the young woman and moved away from the counter.

He was about to phone the police station in Lerwick to tell Jimmy Perez what he’d discovered when he remembered that his boss was working at home all day, looking out for comings and goings at the Hays’ farm. He thought it would be just as easy to call in on Jimmy on his way back to town, and that his boss might even provide a spot of lunch.

But when he arrived at the house in Ravenswick, Perez seemed preoccupied. He was sitting at the window with a pair of binoculars on the sill, staring down towards the valley where the Hays lived. In the distance there was the scar in the hill left behind by the landslide. The ruin of Tain was just out of sight.

‘Get back to the station and chase up those phone calls,’ Perez said. ‘You’re right. We need to know who Tom spoke to in the airport that morning. We know he phoned his brother-in-law in Orkney, but that would have been after he changed his plans.’

‘Anything happening here?’ Sandy still had hopes of lunch.

‘Jane Hay drove north with a passenger. The youngest lad, I think. She could have been taking him to school. Then she turned down towards the headland and I lost sight of her. She wasn’t away long and she’s home again now.’ Perez looked at Sandy. ‘This feels like a serious waste of time.’

‘Just give it a day.’ Sandy didn’t know how else to respond. ‘Isn’t that what Willow said?’

‘Aye.’ Perez lifted his binoculars and stared out once more. ‘That’s what she said.’

Sandy was reminded for a moment of the Jimmy Perez who’d lost Fran in a stabbing on Fair Isle. The Jimmy who brooded and snapped and refused to tell anyone what he was thinking. Sandy said goodbye, but he didn’t get any response, so he let himself out of the house and drove back to Lerwick.