Cold Earth

Chapter Five

Jane Hay settled on the wooden chair and nodded to the other people in the circle. There were fewer than usual this evening. There must be friends who couldn’t get to the meeting because of the landslide. She sipped tea, waited for the latecomers and was aware of the calm and gratitude that always accompanied her here on meeting nights. The community hall was heated by a Calor gas heater and the fumes caught in her nostrils and at the back of her throat, but she was so used to them that they had become a part of the experience.

Alf Walters spoke a couple of words of welcome and they started. Jane cleared her throat and there was a brief moment of tension as she waited for her turn. She’d been coming to meetings for more than eleven years, but she was still a little nervous.

‘My name’s Jane and I’m an alcoholic.’

She stayed behind for half an hour afterwards because she was sponsoring a young woman, an emergency doctor based at the Gilbert Bain Hospital, and wanted to see how she was doing. Rachel had been coming to meetings for three months, but she was still struggling. After a stressful day at work, her colleagues all turned to a glass of wine to help them relax. For Rachel one glass, or one bottle, would never be enough. She still occasionally phoned Jane in the early hours of the morning, either very drunk or needing support and reassurance: ‘I’m sorry. I’m such a failure.’ Jane could tell she was sobbing.

Jane understood what she was going through and was always patient. ‘You’re not a failure at all. This is a disease and the treatment is brutal. If you were going through chemo for cancer, you wouldn’t be so hard on yourself.’

Kevin was less tolerant of the late-night calls. ‘Is that one of your alkie pals, pissed again?’

He thought Jane’s attendance at meetings was a form of masochistic indulgence. Tonight he’d had a go at her as she left the house. ‘You’ve been sober for years. Since just after the kids started school. Why do you still need all that nonsense? It’s not so convenient, you disappearing up to town two nights a week. And I’ll be worried about you being out on a night like this.’

Usually she let it go. She couldn’t change him, just as he couldn’t change her. But she’d been tense all day. The rain and the background noise of the machinery at the landslide had stretched her nerves. The boys had been moody too, sniping at each other over the supper table, answering their parents in monosyllabic grunts. They were such different characters that usually they got on fine, but that evening she’d sensed an underlying animosity between them, something bitter and brooding. She’d felt the stress as a tightness in her arms and spine, in the twitch of a nerve in her face.

‘Would you rather I was drinking?’ They’d been on their own in the kitchen. The boys had disappeared to their rooms, to relieve their own tension by killing people on separate computer screens. Or so she supposed. She’d felt herself trembling, could hear the shrill voice that was almost out of control. ‘You’d rather I was disappearing off into the night and coming back bladdered in a taxi in the early hours of the morning? Not knowing where I’d been, not being able to care for the bairns and a total mess.’

He’d stared at her without speaking for a moment. ‘You know what?’ He’d turned away to look out of the window into the dark, so she couldn’t see his face. ‘You were a lot more fun in those days. At least we could have a bit of a laugh.’

He’d turned back to the room quickly to hug her and apologize, but she’d heard the wistfulness in his voice. She’d told herself then that the outburst was to do with Kevin feeling middle-aged; he was looking back to his youth with nostalgia. Now, driving back towards the farm, she wasn’t so sure. For the first time in years she felt the compulsion to drink. Tesco’s was still open. She could buy a bottle of wine and sit in the furthest corner of the car park, where nobody would see her. If it had a screw top, she’d have no problem opening it. She imagined the sensation of the alcohol in her bloodstream. It would relax her. The tension in her back would disappear. The jangling nerves would quieten. She wouldn’t need to drink it all – just enough to make her forget the anxieties of the day. She would drive home, be more pleasant to Kevin and the boys, and she would sleep more easily than she had for weeks. Nobody need ever know.

At the roundabout on the edge of Lerwick she signalled to turn into the supermarket car park and then at the last minute changed her mind, causing the taxi driver behind her to hit his horn and mouth obscenities about women drivers. She took no notice and continued on the road south towards Gilsetter.

Kevin was waiting for her. He’d lit the wood-burner and some candles. There was the smell of real coffee, beeswax and peat.

‘What’s all this about?’ She was shaking off her coat, pulling off her boots at the living-room door. This was her favourite room in the house, but they spent most of their time in the kitchen. He’d been sitting in front of the television, but zapped it off when he stood up to greet her. She thought he’d been dozing. He had that tousled little-boy look that he had when he first woke up.

‘It’s Valentine’s Day. I thought I’d remember it, for once.’

She walked towards him and was aware of the contrast of polished floorboards and sheepskin rugs on her bare feet.

‘And I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘That was just crass. I don’t know why I said it. Frustrated about the weather maybe, and needing someone to blame.’ He was going to say more. Jane knew what it would be: how he couldn’t manage without her. The sort of things you might say to a housekeeper or a mother, though with a little less emotion. She put a finger to his lips to stop him talking and took him into her arms.

Jane had just got the boys out to the bus the next day when Jimmy Perez arrived. She’d waved her sons out of the house just as she had done when they were tiny. Andy had left school the year before, but he still went into town each day. He’d started at university in Glasgow on an English course. She’d thought he’d adore it; he was the sparky one, always full of adventure, telling her about his reading, the films that he watched. But when he’d arrived back at Christmas he’d announced that he wouldn’t be going back. No reason given, and not open to persuasion. He’d found a job in the bar in the Mareel arts centre in Lerwick and it seemed to suit him; he was working with other arty young people and he didn’t mind doing the late shift, if there was music.

Michael, the younger son, had never had ambitions to leave the island. He was doing his Highers, but they all thought he’d join the family business when school was over. They’d always known he was more practical than academic and, besides, he had Gemma to hold him here. They’d been seeing each other since they were fifteen and they already seemed like a settled married couple. Jane thought it might not be too long before she became a grandmother.

So when Jimmy Perez arrived, the house was quiet. Kevin had been out for a while, contracted by the council to work on clearing the road. He was happy. He’d felt he’d put things right between them and he hated an atmosphere. Watching through the kitchen window, Jane saw that the inspector had his small daughter with him.

‘Sorry about this.’ Perez nodded towards the child. ‘The school’s closed until after the weekend. Kathyn Rogerson’s offered to mind her, but I thought I’d come here before heading off to Lerwick.’

‘Have you got time for a coffee?’ She was pleased that she’d already loaded the dishwasher with the breakfast plates. Jane hated mess. She was proud of this house. When she’d first moved here with Kevin, soon after their marriage, his parents had only recently moved out to a modern bungalow in town. The farmhouse had been modernized by Kevin’s father in the early Seventies and not touched again until Kevin and Jane moved in; it had had loud orange wallpaper and clashing carpets, both mostly hidden by mounds of clutter. She and Kevin had extended it, and Jane had designed it to her taste.

‘Why not?’ Perez smiled at her, and she thought how handsome he was, dark like a storybook pirate.

She found crayons and paper for Cassie and sat her at the table. ‘What can I do for you, Jimmy?’

‘We’re trying to identify the woman who was living at Tain, the one who was killed in the landslide. You phoned in, to say you might have seen her.’

‘Yes.’ Jane had called the police station on impulse when she’d heard the description on Radio Shetland, before going out to her meeting. Kevin had come into the kitchen while she was making the call and, when she’d described the woman she’d seen, he’d frowned.

‘I was with Jimmy at Tain yesterday,’ he’d said.

‘You didn’t say!’ It had seemed such a huge thing, to have seen a dead woman thrown up by the tide of mud, like flotsam on a beach. She couldn’t believe that Kevin hadn’t told her.

‘I walked away before he found her,’ he’d continued. ‘I didn’t know anything about it, until the ambulance turned up. I helped clear a way for them. Besides, it’s not something you’d want to remember.’ Looking back, it seemed that their argument of the night before had started there, with Kevin brooding about the imagined picture of a dead woman, holding it to himself as if it was something he couldn’t bear to share.

Now she saw that Jimmy Perez was waiting for her to describe her meeting with the strange woman and she tried to remember the encounter in detail. ‘I was in Brae,’ she said. ‘I was up there chatting to Ingirid Eunson. I’m hoping she’ll help me out with the business this year. They have a couple of polytunnels too. She might grow some stuff for me. I’m running out of space.’

Jimmy nodded. ‘How’s the business doing?’

‘Really well!’ Once the boys were at school, Jane had developed her own enterprise on the croft. She grew herbs, fruit and salads under polythene and, after a slow start, things were going well. She supplied most of the hotels and restaurants in the islands and had been approached about exporting her products to mainland Scotland and beyond. Now she had three giant polycrubs on the land closest to the house. She’d chosen a sheltered position for them but, even so, at this time of year Kevin helped her to cover them with fishing nets, pegged into the earth to stop the tunnels from blowing away.

Jane returned to her story. ‘I stopped off at the Co-op just to pick up a couple of things for my lunch, and I saw the dead woman there. I’m sure it was her. She was buying champagne.’ She still noticed what people bought to drink. That never left her. She paused, distracted by a sudden thought. ‘If she lived in Tain, why would she be all the way north in Brae doing her shopping? There’d be more choice in Lerwick, and it’d be much closer to go there.’

‘Can you describe her?’ Perez’s voice was quiet. At the other end of the table Cassie didn’t seem to have heard him speaking.

‘She was very dark and exotic,’ Jane said, ‘with beautiful black hair.’

‘Age?’ He looked up from his coffee.

‘Not young. Late thirties maybe. Forties and well preserved? No grey in the hair, but that doesn’t mean anything these days, when we can get it in a bottle.’

‘Did you hear her speak? It would be helpful if we had some idea of her accent.’

Again Jane tried to imagine herself back in the shop in Brae. It had been busy, two tills open. She’d been standing next to the woman in a different queue, squinting across because she was curious about her. ‘Not Shetland,’ she said now to Perez. The woman hadn’t said much to the guy on the till, but there’d been an exchange about the champagne. He’d asked if she was celebrating.

‘English?’

‘Maybe. She didn’t have a strong accent, but I’d say she was from the south.’ Jane paused. ‘I couldn’t swear to anything, though. She only said a few words and there was a lot of background noise. She could have come from anywhere in the world.’ Almost repeating Sandy’s comment about the photo, the night before.

‘Did she pay by cash or credit card?’ Perez’s voice was measured, but she could tell this mattered.

Jane shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I was paying then myself. I didn’t notice.’

‘Did you see where she went when she left the shop?’

Jane replayed the events in her head again. There’d been a sudden downpour, the rain dramatic after a morning of persistent drizzle. She had stood in the entrance of the shop hoping it would pass. She’d only walked from the shop’s car park, but she would be drenched in the time it would take to run back to her vehicle. Had the dark woman been there too?

‘There was a car waiting for her.’ She saw it very clearly: a car driving up almost to the door of the shop and the dark woman, politely pushing her way through the other waiting customers, then running through the downpour to climb into the vehicle.

‘Someone else was driving?’ Perez had started making notes. He looked up.

‘Oh yes, she got in the passenger door. The rest of us were jealous. We knew we’d get wet, even running to the car park.’

‘Did you see the driver at all?’

Jane shook her head. ‘He was furthest away from us. He’d driven, so the passenger door was closest to the shop.’

‘But you think it was a he?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I just made that assumption. Because of the champagne. Because it was running up to Valentine’s Day.’

Jimmy Perez smiled to show he understood the way her mind had been working. ‘Can you tell me anything about the car?’ He set down his pen and gave her his full attention.

She shut her eyes for a moment in the hope of fixing the image. ‘Dark,’ she said. ‘A medium-sized family saloon. But the rain was so fierce, Jimmy, and the light was so bad that any colour seemed washed away. And I couldn’t tell you the make. I’m not interested in cars. I couldn’t even start to think about a registration number.’

‘I didn’t expect that for a minute.’ He grinned, but she could tell he was disappointed.

‘It had a Shetland flag stuck on the back bumper!’ The memory shot into her mind. ‘The white cross against the blue was caught in the light from the store and seemed bright in the gloom. And I thought it was odd, because I’d decided the woman wasn’t local.’

She was rewarded by a sudden smile that lit up his face. She remembered Jimmy smiling a lot like that when Fran was alive. It was as if the artist had given him permission to be silly. More recently he’d become grave and responsible again.

‘Had you seen her round here?’ Perez looked up from his coffee. ‘You’d have been her nearest neighbour. Perhaps you noticed the same car at the house?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a car. And you can’t quite see Tain from here. It’s hidden in that dip in the hill and by the trees.’ She paused and tried to remember. ‘I saw lights in there one day. I’d been out for a walk to the shore and took a shortcut back to the house.’

‘When was that?’

‘About a month ago. Between Hogmanay and Up Helly Aa.’ She pictured the scene. It had been about four o’clock and already dark. She’d been hurrying back because it was a meeting night and she’d wanted to start cooking tea, so that she could get into Lerwick on time. Then she’d seen the lights spilling out from the croft. She’d been grateful to have the path lit up, but embarrassed too, because she’d been in effect walking through someone else’s garden.

‘Did you see anyone inside?’

‘Yes.’ She’d hurried past the window, hoping the person inside wouldn’t turn round. ‘A woman.’

‘Could it have been the woman you saw in Brae?’

Jane nodded. ‘She had dark hair, certainly. Long dark hair. I only saw her back, not her face.’ She was about to continue, but really, what else was there to say?

‘That’s very helpful,’ he said. ‘Really. Thanks. And for the only decent cup of coffee I’ll get all day.’

She walked with him and Cassie out into the yard. She was brooding about the woman in Tain, then her mind switched direction and she thought Jimmy Perez would make a fine husband for someone one day.