Cold Earth

Chapter Six

Back in his office, Jimmy Perez phoned the Co-op in Brae and asked to talk to the manager.

‘I’m interested in a purchase made a couple of days ago. February the twelfth. A bottle of champagne.’

‘Moët and Chandon was on special offer.’ A pause. ‘Along with our own-brand chocolates. It was the run-up to Valentine’s Day.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Perez was thinking back to his first Valentine’s Day with Fran. He’d invited her to his house on the water in Lerwick and cooked for her. Nothing special, but he could remember every mouthful. He’d used some of the Fair Isle shoulder of lamb he had left in the freezer and made a Moroccan dish with dried apricots. He’d found the recipe online and followed it slavishly. They’d talked about how they might go to North Africa one day, had daydreamed about spice markets and deserts, as the Bressay ferry criss-crossed the Sound outside the window. Flashes of memory like that weren’t as painful as they’d once been, but they still unnerved him, threw him off-track.

‘We sold a fair few bottles.’ The manager’s voice was English and broke into the daydream. ‘I’m not sure my staff would remember every purchase.’

‘Would you be able to check a credit-card sale, if I gave you an approximate time? I’d like the name of the card-holder.’

‘That should be possible. It might take a while, though.’ The manager sounded less than enthusiastic about the effort it would take to trace the sale. ‘Can I call you back?’

‘I’ll send someone up to talk to your staff,’ Perez said. ‘They’ll be there in an hour. It would be good if you could have the information ready by then.’ He couldn’t help being sharp. James Grieve would have started the post-mortem by now. He’d promised to do it as soon as the body arrived in Aberdeen from the boat. Perez hated the idea of his dark-eyed lady being cut open as an anonymous corpse.

Sandy stuck his head round the door. ‘I’m still trying to track down a contact for the owner of Tain. The landslide’s been all over the national news and you’d think they’d get in touch, just to start things moving with their insurers.’

‘No joy?’

‘I’ve talked to Stuart Henderson. His son Craig leased it for six months last year. Craig’s in the oil business and he’s on contract in the UAE, but his time is up. He’s travelling back just now and he’ll be home at the weekend. At least we’ll have a contact then. The lettings all seem to have been done on a private basis. I haven’t seen the house advertised anywhere, either through the estate agents or as a holiday let. Promote Shetland didn’t know anything about it.’ Sandy moved into the room and landed on the other side of Perez’s desk. ‘Was Jane Hay any help?’

‘Jane saw a woman in Brae Co-op the day before the landslide. Lunchtime. Her description matches our Alis. Go up and chat to the staff, Sandy. See if she’s a regular. That might mean she was working in North Mainland: at Sullom Voe maybe or one of the hotels there. She wasn’t on her own. A guy picked her up in a car. A local car with a Shetland flag on the bumper. Jane saw her buying a bottle of champagne. I’ve asked the manager to check credit-card sales for the day, to see if we can confirm a name.’

Sandy had just left the office when the phone rang again.

‘Jimmy.’ James Grieve had worked in Aberdeen for years but hadn’t lost his west-coast accent. ‘We might have a bit of a problem.’

‘What sort of a problem.’ Perez was still worrying over identification; he was thinking of the children in the photo, who might be older now but had probably lost a mother and needed to be told. And of elderly parents who’d lost a child without knowing.

‘Your woman didn’t die by accident. The knocks to the head and the contusions on the face happened post-mortem.’

‘If she didn’t die in the landslide, what killed her?’ Perez wondered why he wasn’t more surprised. The strangeness of her dress, perhaps. The exotic look that was so out of place in Shetland. It seemed fitting that her death should be dramatic too. He was imagining a grand, almost operatic suicide.

‘She was strangled. The ligature mark was hidden by the damage caused by the slide.’

‘She didn’t hang herself?’ The melodramatic gesture of suicide had remained with him.

‘No!’ The retort was furious and explosive.

‘I didn’t see any petichiae.’ Perez remembered the dark, staring eyes. He hadn’t noticed any burst blood vessels.

‘No? Well, maybe the light wasn’t so great when you saw her and there was a lot of muck over her face. You’re not questioning my judgement, I hope, Inspector.’ His voice was faintly mocking, but the tone was firm enough for Perez to realize he was on dangerous ground. James Grieve was good at his job and knew it. He was accustomed to having his opinions accepted immediately.

Perez tried to think back to his first sight of the dead woman, thrown up against the wall at Tain. The professor was right. It had been raining so hard that visibility had been atrocious. Was the image he carried round in his head a fiction, idealized? Had he become obsessed by the victim, just because he hadn’t seen her clearly? ‘What else can you tell me?’

‘The ligature was narrow and hard. A leather belt perhaps. That sort of width, though no sign of a buckle mark. There were some indentations; maybe the belt was embossed. You might find a match.’ The pathologist paused. ‘Her clothes have gone for analysis. It’ll be pretty near-impossible to separate the filth from the landslip from anything that might have been there previously. The same for under her fingernails, I’d have thought, though there might be scraps of skin beneath the mud. Possibly her own skin, if she was trying to pull the ligature away from her neck.’

‘Any idea what time she was killed? It’d be useful to know how long she had been dead before the landslide hit the house.’

‘You are joking, I hope.’ James Grieve was always scathing about colleagues who claimed any sort of accuracy around time of death. ‘It was almost two days before I saw her, Jimmy, and it would have been impossible, even if I’d been called straight to the scene.’

Jane Hay claimed to have seen the woman in Brae at lunchtime on the 12th. If that information was right, she must have been killed between then and the landslide on the afternoon of the 13th. Not such a long gap. ‘We still don’t have a definitive ID,’ Perez said. ‘Anything you can give me to help with that?’

‘She’s had some dental work, but nothing recent. If she’s just moved to Shetland or she’s a visitor, that’s not a lot of use to you. She’s never had a child.’

So who were the children in the photo? The boy and the girl. The girl older, with a mind of her own. The boy a charmer. Perez looked at the image he’d pinned to the board in his office.

At the other end of the line the pathologist was still talking. ‘Her last meal was lamb, stewed with spices. Couscous.’

With a jolt, Perez remembered again the meal he’d cooked for Fran on Valentine’s Day. The odd synergy between him and the murdered woman was unsettling him. He tried to push her image from his mind, to concentrate on the matter in hand and stay detached.

‘Alcohol?’

‘Not enough to be significant.’

So why had she been buying champagne? If the woman in Brae was indeed the murder victim.

‘I’ll get a full report to you this afternoon,’ the professor said. ‘You’ll want to get started on the investigation, I expect. Let Inverness know, so they can get their finest onto a plane.’

‘There’s not much of the crime scene left for the CSI to work on. The firefighters had to clear it, to check there hadn’t been other fatalities.’ But Perez was already thinking of another woman. Chief Inspector Willow Reeves, who was as different from the victim as it was possible to be. Strong as a Viking with wild, tangled hair. A vegetarian who’d never eat lamb, even with cumin and couscous. Brought up in a commune in the Western Isles, she’d seen joining the police as a form of rebellion, but she still practised yoga every morning. Like the dark-eyed victim at Tain, Willow troubled and distracted him.

All the same she was the first person he phoned when he ended his call to James Grieve. She sounded distant and a little bored when she answered.

‘Reeves. Serious Crime Squad.’

‘Willow, it’s Jimmy Perez.’

There was a pause. He didn’t know what to make of that. Was she pleased to hear from him? Irritated?

‘Jimmy, how can I help you?’ Colleague-to-colleague friendly, but very professional.

He explained the situation. ‘We assumed it was an accidental death. Nothing to suggest otherwise at the time, though maybe I should have picked up the petichiae.’

‘You’re a detective, not a scientist, and in those conditions I doubt the professor would have done any better.’

He found himself smiling. Willow always managed to make him feel better about himself. ‘You know the patch now. I was hoping you might take it on as SIO. If you’re not tied up with anything important.’

Another pause. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing, if he should have made a more formal request, or made it clear that he valued her competence as well as her experience of the islands. He hated to think he might have offended her. He held his breath and realized how much he wanted Willow Reeves to be in Shetland with him. He couldn’t imagine running the investigation with any other officer.

‘Just you try and stop me, Jimmy Perez.’ Suddenly she sounded like a child offered a day off from school. ‘I’ll be on the first plane north.’

‘No!’ He had to speak quickly before she replaced the receiver. ‘Wait until tomorrow. At least one lane of the road north from Sumburgh should be clear by then. Just now all the flights are coming into Scatsta and there are terrible delays. If you want to get started on the case, we still haven’t identified the victim. There was a letter in the house addressed to an Alis. A. L. I. S. An unusual name. Obviously an abbreviation. Maybe you could get your people onto the ferry company and the airline, see if that fits with any of their passengers. It would be terrific if we could find a surname for her. I’m assuming she’s an outsider and travelled up relatively recently. All my officers are tied up here in the aftermath of the disaster. There are still people cut off. No electricity. And that sort of enquiry takes time.’

He realized that sounded like an excuse for his own inaction. Again he wondered if he’d overstepped the mark. It wasn’t his place to tell a superior officer from the mainland what to do.

‘Of course, Jimmy. I’ll get a couple of my team onto it. Anything else you’d like me to do, while I’m idling my time here at HQ?’

He knew she was teasing him.

‘Could you see if Vicki Hewitt is free to come up with you? It’s a nightmare of a scene. The landslide went straight through the house and then they had to bring in heavy machinery to clear a path and dig out a lot of the interior. And it’s still raining. But I’d like her to look at it. At the interior of the house and at the debris trapped behind the wall where we found the body.’

‘Can you email me the photos, Jimmy?’ She was in work mode now. Efficient. Buzzing with energy. ‘And anything else that you have.’

‘Book yourself onto the first plane into Sumburgh tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at the airport to meet you.’

‘I’ll pack a bottle of that island malt you like.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Anything else I can fetch you from the civilized world?’

He almost said something soppy. Just you – that’ll be enough for me. But he caught himself just in time. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘a change in the weather. Before the whole island washes away.’