Red Bones (23 page)
‘What about Hattie?’ Perez asked. ‘Did she really have to die? And like that?’
‘She guessed, worked it out in the days after Mima died,’ Ronald said. ‘Not all of it, but that the family was involved. She heard Mima talking on the telephone to my father about the bones. And we had to get her off that land. She was obsessed about the dig. While she was alive she would never leave it alone and some time the Norwegian’s body would be found. Then it would all come out. They’d identify him and remember the money, the kroner sealed in the tobacco tins.’
‘And you wouldn’t be the rich Cloustons of Whalsay any more.’
Ronald looked away, and continued to speak. ‘Hattie heard Mima talk to Andrew on the phone. She heard them arguing. It never occurred to her that I had anything to do with the old lady’s murder. I’d been to the university in the south. I’d been civilized by my contact with the academics, I read books and knew about history. She bumped into me after she’d had her meeting with her boss: “Can we talk Ronald? I wanted to let you know that I’ve phoned Inspector Perez. I know your father’s an ill man, but really I think he might have shot Mima. I just wanted to warn you . . .”’
‘Give me the details, please. How did you kill her?’
‘I walked with her back to Setter. I pretended to be interested. “So you think there might be a more recent body buried here alongside the ancient one?” Then she turned away from me and I hit her on the back of the head with a round smooth stone.’
‘Not hard enough to break the skin,’ Perez said. ‘But it knocked her out. I understand. That gave you the opportunity to fake her suicide. Why did you slit her wrists with Paul Berglund’s knife?’
‘Is that who it belonged to?’ Ronald looked back at the inspector, surprised. ‘I didn’t realize. It was there and it did the job.’
The matter-of-fact words made Perez feel suddenly sick. He leaned forward towards the man again. ‘How could you do it to her?’
Ronald considered, then took the question literally. ‘I’m used to blood. Gutting fish. Killing beasts. The girl was unconscious by then. It had to look like suicide.’ He was struck by a sudden thought. ‘You got Cedric to phone me tonight. And you made up the story of a witness. Anna told me about that when she got home from the party. Cedric was never there at all that afternoon.’
No
, Perez thought.
But he was involved all the same, in a roundabout way
. His father had worked with the Shetland Bus too. It had made sense for them to use Cedric to bait the trap, to say that he wanted his share of the money.
‘Two people were dead,’ he said. ‘We had to make it stop.’
He stood up and looked again out of the window. It was a beautiful morning. There was sunlight on the water.
That evening they met up at Fran’s house in Ravenswick. She’d cooked a meal and when it was over they sat around the table in the kitchen, drinking wine and talking. The dishes had been cleared but there was still a plate of cheese and a bowl of red grapes, like a still-life study, in front of them. It was late because Fran had wanted to get Cassie to bed first. Perez could tell that Sandy was nervous. This wasn’t the sort of social event he usually went in for. He drank less than they did, although Perez had already suggested he could get a taxi back to town. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself. All the same he was pleased to have been invited. Perez could tell that.
‘How’s Anna?’ Fran asked as soon as Sandy came in. He had stayed the night in Whalsay, taking statements.
‘In shock, of course. She’s going south to stay with her parents until she’s come to terms with what’s happened. She talks about coming back to Shetland but I don’t think she ever will. She tried very hard to fit in, but she was never really cut out to be a Shetland wife.’
‘What about me?’ Fran asked with a little laugh. ‘Am I cut out to be a Shetland wife?’
Perez knew what she was doing. Sandy had believed Ronald to be his friend. He still saw the Whalsay deaths as a personal betrayal. Fran was trying to lighten the mood. There was no more to her question than that.
‘Oh, you!’ Sandy said. ‘You’d fit in fine wherever you lived.’
‘Will Andrew and Jackie be charged?’ Fran reached out for a grape, cut another wedge of cheese.
‘Not Jackie,’ Perez said. ‘If she guessed that Ronald was involved in some way, she didn’t really know. And we’ve no evidence to suggest that she understood where the original source of wealth came from.’
‘If we go back far enough all the rich families in the UK got their money in a dubious fashion,’ Fran said. ‘The spoils of war, off the backs of the poor.’
Perez smiled but said nothing. After a few drinks she often believed herself to be a champion of the people.
Sandy shifted in his chair. ‘But surely we should have enough to charge Andrew? We know he was involved. He tried to focus our attention away from Setter by telling me they threw the Norwegian’s body into the sea. If we exhume Per’s body, get the forensic accountants to look at Andrew’s business records over the years, we should have enough to satisfy the Fiscal.’
Perez realized that Sandy was more comfortable believing Andrew to be a murderer than he was thinking of Ronald in that way. Sandy had been deceived by his old friend and they’d both been taken in by Ronald’s fine acting.
‘Aye,’ Perez said. ‘Maybe.’ He knew how long the investigation would take and he doubted whether Andrew would still be alive at the end of it. Maybe living in the giant house on the hill, with a heartbroken wife who’d lost her son to prison and her grandchild to his relatives in the south, would be punishment enough.
He looked down towards the lighthouse at Raven Head. It was very clear tonight. He thought there might be a frost, the last cold spell before the summer. Suddenly he remembered Paul Berglund. He turned to Sandy, smiling. ‘Berglund’s grandmother is Swedish, not Norwegian. Not any relation to Mima’s lover. A horrible man, but not a murderer.’
‘So I was wrong again,’ Sandy said. He seemed more relaxed, more himself. Perez saw that his glass was empty. He tipped some wine into it and poured himself another glass too. It seemed hours since he’d slept and it was only caffeine and alcohol that were keeping him going.
‘Bones in the land,’ Sandy said, half asleep now. ‘Skeletons in a cupboard.’ They sat for a moment in silence, then Sandy got out his mobile to call a taxi and Fran stood up to make coffee.
When they went outside to see Sandy off Perez gasped with the cold. There was a moon and the sea was silver. The beam from the lighthouse on Raven Head swept across the fields between the beach and Fran’s house. It was hypnotic, he felt he could stand here for hours just watching it. He forced himself to look up at the sky instead. There were no streetlights here and the stars were clear and sharp. Fran stood in front of him and he put her arms around his waist. Even through his thick jacket he could feel her body pressed against his.
Sandy’s taxi drove off, but still they stood there.
‘My friends in the city can never understand what this is like,’ Fran said. ‘I explain: no light pollution, no sound, but they can’t conceive it.’
‘You’ll have to invite them up and show them.’
She turned towards him. At first her face was in shadow, then she tipped up her head so the moonlight caught her eyes.
‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘that we could ask them to the wedding.’
Praise for the Shetland series
RED BONES
‘Ann Cleeves’ fellow crime fiction practitioners (from Colin Dexter to Peter Robinson) have been lining up to sing her praises, and it’s unlikely that there will be any blip in that chorus of praise on the evidence of
Red Bones
, which is quite as assured and entertaining as its predecessors’
Barry Forshaw
‘On an island shrouded in mist, amid a community with secrets, a visiting archaeologist uncovers mysterious human remains . . . This award-winning writer weaves an intriguing, chilling web’
Best Magazine
WHITE NIGHTS
‘Decades-old amorous betrayals resurface in a plot that makes much of the tension between incomers and islanders. Ann Cleeves’ intriguing mystery is tangentially energized by the “simmer dim”’
Financial Times
‘Cleeves deftly paints in the personalities and their relationships, as the police inquiries disrupt the close-knit community. It’s a good, character-led mystery, which displays the art of storytelling without recourse to slash and grab’
Sunday Telegraph
‘This is wonderful . . . Part of the wonder of this book is the domestic detail that becomes iconic within the novel . . . This is a very good author. This is an author that bears criticism’
Radio Four’s ‘Front Row’
RAVEN BLACK
‘
Raven Black
breaks the conventional mould of British crime-writing, while retaining the traditional virtues of strong narrative and careful plotting’
Independent
‘Beautifully constructed . . . a lively and surprising addition to a genre that once seemed moribund’
Times Literary Supplement
‘
Raven Black
shows what a fine writer Cleeves is . . . an accomplished and thoughtful book’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Ann’s characterization is worthy of the best writers in the field . . . Rarely has a sense of place been so evocatively conveyed in a crime novel’
Daily Express
‘A fine and sinister psychological novel in the Barbara Vine style. Cleeves is part of a new generation of superior British writers who put refreshing new spins and twist on the old forms’
Globe and Mail
RED BONES
Ann Cleeves
worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She now promotes reading for Kirklees Libraries and as Harrogate Crime-Writing Festival’s reader in residence, and is also a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel, for
Raven Black
. Ann lives in North Tyneside.
Red Bones
is the third novel in the Shetland series following from
Raven Black
and
White Nights
. The fourth,
Blue Lightning
is available now.
Also by Ann Cleeves
A Bird in the Hand
Come Death and High Water
Murder in Paradise
A Prey to Murder
A Lesson in Dying
Murder in My Backyard
A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy
Another Man’s Poison
Killjoy
The Mill on the Shore
Sea Fever
The Healers
High Island Blues
The Baby-Snatcher
The Sleeping and the Dead
Burial of Ghosts
The Vera Stanhope series
The Crow Trap
Telling Tales
Hidden Depths
The Shetland series
Raven Black
White Nights
Blue Lightning
Whalsay is a real island and one of the friendliest places I know. It doesn’t have a community called Lindby and all the people and places described there – including the camping bod where the students live – are fictitious. Symbister exists – it’s where the ferry arrives – but it doesn’t have a Pier House Hotel.
Lots of people helped with the writing of this book, but despite the collective expertise there are probably mistakes; they’re all mine. I’m grateful to Anna Williams and Helen Savage for their advice on archaeology, and to Cathy Batt and her colleagues at the University of Bradford for talking me through the Shetland excavations and showing me real red bones. Val Turner helped by reading the manuscript, putting me right on details of procedure and allowing me to use her name.
David Howarth’s excellent book
The Shetland Bus
provided information on the Norwegian resistance operation based in Lunna during the Second World War. While he describes the building of small boats for use in Norwegian inland waters, I can only guess that this might have taken place in Whalsay.
Once again Helen Pepper advised on crime-scene management. Sarah Clarke provided information on the possible complications of a difficult birth. Bob Gunn told me about rabbits and shotguns. Ingirid Eunson, Ann Prior and Sue Beardshall shared conversation and wine and ideas about the islands.
Thanks to our friends on Whalsay – to Angela and John Lowrie Irvine for their hospitality and sharing with me the photo of the knitting women, and to Paula and Jon Dunn for finding us a fantastic place to stay. I’m especially grateful to the Whalsay Reading Group for their honesty, their warmth and one of the most fascinating evenings of my writing career.
The Visit Shetland team and Shetland Arts officers have again provided support and assistance, and it’s always a delight to work with everyone at Shetland libraries.
Finally a huge thank you to Sara Menguc, Moses Cardona and Julie Crisp for their contribution to the book. Julie is every writer’s dream editor.
First published 2009 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2010 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-73968-0 PDF
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Copyright © Ann Cleeves 2009
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