White Nights

Chapter Thirty-nine

Kenny heard the news about the bones in the Pit o’ Biddista on Radio Scotland while he was washing up the breakfast dishes. Edith had already left for work. Now the gathering of the people on the cliff the night before made sense to him, and since hearing the radio report he’d been waiting in the house all day for the police to turn up. Because the bones must belong to Lawrence, mustn’t they? That would explain his sudden disappearance. Lawrence might have told Bella that he was leaving the islands, but something had happened before he could get on the ferry or the plane. Not an accident. Lawrence had grown up on the cliffs, had been more sure-footed than any of them. Nor suicide. Kenny knew Lawrence too well to believe that. But an act of violence. That would explain his absence, the years without a letter or a phone call.

Kenny was almost pleased that the body had been found. Thinking that a few bones, like the carcase of a sheep in a ditch, was all that was left of his brother made him feel ill, but still it was a kind of relief. What had hurt most since Lawrence had disappeared was thinking he hadn’t cared enough about him to keep in touch. He’d pictured Lawrence in a strange town, a strange country even, with a new family. A blonde wife, because Lawrence liked blondes, two sons. He’d be older, his hair grey but still thick and curly. They’d be sat together at the supper table, laughing at one of Lawrence’s silly jokes, not thinking at all about the family back in Shetland. But if Lawrence had died without leaving the islands there had been no perfect family, no laughter.

By ten o’clock he’d still not heard from the detectives working the case. Kenny phoned the police station in Lerwick and asked to speak to Jimmy Perez. A young woman said he was out. Could another officer help? Kenny tried to imagine talking to someone else about Lawrence, that big Englishman for example, but the idea horrified him. He asked the young woman to tell Inspector Perez to call him back as soon as possible. He gave her his phone number in Skoles and his mobile number, made sure she repeated them.

‘It’s urgent,’ he said. ‘Tell him it’s urgent.’

By midday there was still no word from Perez. Kenny had gone out briefly to finish singling the second field of neeps, only because he knew there was mobile reception there, and he could see the road right to the end of the valley. He thought Perez might drive out to talk to him, rather than phone. If they’d found out that the bones belonged to Lawrence they would want to tell him in person. Kenny couldn’t quite explain the excitement he was feeling. It was different from when he’d asked to see the body of the hanged man. He’d known deep down that person wasn’t Lawrence and, even if it had been, he would still have to live with the thought of his brother abandoning him. This time he thought there really might be an end to the waiting and to the feeling he’d been rejected for all these years.

He went to the house, intending to phone the police station again, but instead he found himself phoning Edith at the care centre. She answered with her calm, businesslike work voice.

‘Edith Thomson speaking.’

He could picture her in her office, behind her desk, with the photo of Ingirid and Eric on the windowsill behind her. The photo of him which she said she liked the best, pushing his boat into the water.

Now, he wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘I wondered if you might like to have lunch with me.’ Suddenly he wanted to see her. He felt like a young man asking a woman out for a date, all shaky and nervous. He’d felt a little that way around Jimmy Perez’s mother.

‘What’s happened?’ Her voice was alarmed. He had never before offered to take her out to lunch when she was working. Not even on her birthday or their anniversary. He knew she liked to eat with the people who used the centre. She said it kept her in touch with how things were going there.

‘Have you not heard the news on the radio?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve been very busy today. I’ve hardly moved out of the office.’ He could imagine her, frowning with concentration, tapping away on her computer.

‘There’s been another body,’ he said. ‘An old one.’

There was a pause at the end of the line.

‘And you think it might be Lawrence?’

‘I think it must be.’

‘I can’t get away,’ she said. ‘You can come here if you like, though. Of course you must come here.’

But just having spoken to her had calmed him. ‘Maybe later. I know you’re busy at lunchtime.’ He replaced the phone, thinking there was nothing after all to be anxious about. Nothing had changed, except his idea of what might have happened to Lawrence. He looked in the fridge for something to have for his lunch, but there was nothing there that he wanted to eat. He thought he would go to the shop and buy something. A pie or a burger, and a cake. Aggie didn’t close until one and he would get there just in time. It would do him good to get away from the croft, even if it was only for a while.

The shop was empty and Aggie sat reading, just as she always did if she was on her own. She was surprised to see him.

‘Kenny. What can I do for you?’ They’d known each other since they were babies and yet she always kept her distance from him. A certain formality. Had she been that way even when she was a child?

‘I fancied something tasty for my dinner,’ he said. ‘Edith buys all the healthy food. Today I thought I’d like something a bit different.’

‘Comfort eating,’ she said, and smiled.

He knew then that she’d been thinking exactly the same thing as him about the bones the police had found.

She looked at her watch. ‘There’ll be no one else in the shop now. Why don’t you come next door with me? I could do you sausage, egg and chips. Would that suit you?’

The invitation shocked him. She’d come to Skoles when they’d had a bit of a party at Christmas or New Year, but she’d never invited them into her house. Aggie and Edith had got on well enough when they were young, but the women had never been great friends, at least not since Lawrence had gone. Lawrence had seemed to hold the whole of Biddista together.

‘I’d like that very much,’ Kenny said. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Not at all.’ She smiled, and he saw that she had quite a pretty face. ‘I like comfort food myself.’

She brought up the subject of Lawrence while she was cooking the chips. She cooked them the old-fashioned way, with oil in a big pan and a basket, so there was the noise of them frying. She had her back to him, so it was hard to tell what she was thinking. The sausages were in a frying pan and they smelled very good. She’d made him a big mug of tea as soon as they got into the kitchen and he sat with his boots off at the table, drinking it. He was just thinking it was a pity she’d never remarried when she started speaking.

‘Have the police been in touch with you?’

‘About the bones in the Pit? No. I phoned Jimmy Perez this morning but he was out.’

‘You think it’s Lawrence?’

‘I think it was too much of a coincidence for it not to be.’

‘I suppose they’ll be able to tell,’ she said. ‘All those things you read about. Forensics.’

‘I just want to know,’ he said.

She cracked three eggs on the side of the pan and added them to the sausages, lifted the chip basket so it rested just above the oil, then turned round to him.

‘I felt that way when Andrew drowned,’ she said. ‘But sometimes I think hope is better.’

‘Do you remember that summer when Lawrence disappeared?’ he asked. ‘I wasn’t here. I was away in Fair Isle, working.’

She took two plates from the warming oven at the bottom of the Rayburn, carefully lifted out the eggs – two for him and one for her – and the sausages, then shook the oil from the chips and tipped them on to the plates.

‘I wasn’t here then. I was in Scalloway.’ She pushed a knife and fork across the table to him. He couldn’t tell what she made of the question. He didn’t know what she was thinking at all. ‘Eat up while it’s hot.’

‘But you’d hear what was going on. What were folks saying?’

‘Just what they’ve been saying ever since. That he asked Bella Sinclair to marry him and she turned him down, so he took a great temper on him and left the islands.’ She picked up a chip with her fingers and blew on it before putting it into her mouth. Then she frowned. ‘He did have a temper, Kenny. You know he did. You remember when we were children, him scrapping in the schoolyard. The teacher having to pull the boys apart. He always had to be the best, the strongest. Always in competition, even with you.’

Kenny thought of the two of them racing to finish singling the neeps. Lawrence was the quickest, but his own rows were the neater. He wasn’t sure there was much of a competition, but it was true that Lawrence always wanted to win.

‘You never heard anything else? That he’d picked a fight over work? Fallen out with anyone?’

It occurred to Kenny that he might have to apologize to Bella when all this was over. Perhaps she’d had nothing to do with his brother’s disappearance after all.

‘No,’ Aggie said. ‘I heard nothing like that.’