Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

the cliff by the golf course. She was right about the note. Of course not all suicides left notes, but Hattie was a writer. If she were planning to kill herself she’d have written a considered letter to Gwen James explaining what she was doing. There wouldn’t have been a panicky phone call. Suddenly he wanted this over. Soon Fran would be home. He didn’t want her to arrive back in the middle of an investigation, to find him distracted and exhausted.
    In the end he ran himself a bath. His bathroom was thin and narrow, the bath old and deep with scarred enamel. The room filled with steam and condensation ran down the window. It didn’t matter. The house was damp anyway, what difference would it make? He lay back, trying to let go of the case, but the possible scenarios, the shifting relationships, swirled into his head and out again. He was half asleep. A Dance to the Music of Time. Who had written that? He saw the Whalsay folk past and present waltzing in and out of his consciousness. A Norwegian sailor and a screwed-up young archaeologist, an ambitious businesswoman and an old man disabled by a stroke. How did they all fit together? He shut his eyes and felt he was floating towards a solution.
    The phone rang. He wanted to leave it, to continue with his thoughts, but it could be Fran. He’d found it difficult to talk to her away from his own surroundings and now he was desperate to hear her voice. He climbed out and grabbed a towel – he always thought his house on the shore gave him privacy, but he’d been caught out before when a canoeist or sailor floated close to his window. The phone stopped just before he reached it. She would leave a message, he thought. And he’d call her straight back, before she rushed out to meet her friends at some experimental piece of theatre, some gallery opening or smart restaurant.
    But when he pressed 1571 to pick up the message he heard quite a different woman’s voice. It was Val Turner, the local-authority archaeologist. ‘Jimmy, I’ve got an initial report back on the Whalsay bones. I’ll be in the office for half an hour if you want to give me a ring.’
    He went back into the bathroom but now the water seemed grey and uninviting, his contemplations ridiculous. He pulled out the plug and got dressed.
    Instead of phoning Val back immediately he called Fran’s mobile. There was no reply and he left a message. When he rang Val, she picked up her phone straight away. ‘You’ve just caught me, Jimmy. I was just about to leave.’
    ‘Have you got time to meet up? I’d be happy to buy you dinner. A thank-you for rushing through the analysis of the bones.’ After all, he thought, he needed company. It would do him no good to sit in on his own, brooding. And he still had questions about the dig. The laundry could wait for another day.
    ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You don’t know the favours I’ve had to call in to get that done so quickly. I’ve never known it happen in under six weeks.’
    ‘I owe you, then. Shall we see if they can squeeze us into the museum?’
    ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Half an hour?’
    She was there before him in the upstairs restaurant, sat at a table for two looking over the water. It was only just starting to get dark; the nights were drawing out. She was sitting over a glass of white wine and there was another for him.
    ‘I didn’t get a bottle,’ she said. ‘I’m driving and I presume you are too. Is that OK?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Now, the bones . . .’ She grinned. She knew how much he needed the information.
    ‘Just tell me. How old are they?’
    ‘Most are old,’ she said.
    ‘How old?’
    ‘Given the unusual circumstances, I sent four pieces of bone for dating. Three of them returned dates that fell between 1465 and 1510, and it’s probably one individual, not several people. So they’re not contemporary. They can’t have anything to do with the recent deaths in Whalsay. The age fits in perfectly with Hattie James’s theory about the building. Fifteenth-century. Like the coins.’
    So not the dead Norwegian. Is that old story from Mima’s youth just a distraction?
    Val Turner was still speaking. ‘I wish I’d been able to tell her. Perhaps if she’d known absolutely that she was right about the age and the status of the house she wouldn’t have killed herself.’
    If she did kill herself , Perez thought. But he didn’t say anything. It would take one chance remark to start a rumour. It suited him fine for the time