Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

body.
    ‘Well, Jimmy, are you coming home with us?’ He could never tell what his father was thinking. There always seemed to be an element of recrimination or challenge in his words. Now Perez wondered if he was implying that he didn’t get home often enough. Or that he had an easy sort of job if he could decide on the spur of the moment to spend a few days with the family. He told himself he was being ridiculous and his father had meant neither of those things. He was just asking a question. Perez was always too sensitive where his father was concerned.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m picking someone up from the airport and I’m early.’
    ‘You should get home more often,’ his father said. ‘Bring your new woman to see us.’
    Perez had avoided taking Fran to Fair Isle. His parents had met her, but only when they came to Lerwick on their way south. Perez was worried that she’d be frightened off by their expectations, their desire that he should have a son to carry on the family name. Without a boy, he would be the last Perez in Shetland.
    ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Maybe I will. Not over the summer. Fran will be busy with an exhibition. We’ll come in the autumn.’ It wasn’t something he could put off much longer than that. Looking at the men he’d grown up with, laughing together as they passed the boxes and the mail sacks from the pier to the boat, he had a pang of regret. That could have been him. He’d had the opportunity to take up a life on the island but he’d turned it down. Now it seemed a simple and tempting alternative to the evening ahead of him.
    He stood and watched the boat until it was out of sight. The water was calm but there was a bank of cloud on the horizon and soon that swallowed up the vessel. It became blurred like a ghost ship and then it disappeared. It would take the Shepherd more than three hours to get home. Fair Isle wasn’t like Whalsay. There was no roll-on-roll-off ferry every half hour. It was the most isolated inhabited island in the UK. They’d been taught that at school. He still thought of the place as home.
    When he got to the airport Sandy was already there. Early too. scared of messing up the task of collecting Hattie’s mother. He looked grey and tired, sitting at one of the tables outside the shop clutching a mug of coffee. Perez bought a coffee and a sandwich and joined him.
    ‘I can’t make sense of it all,’ Sandy said. ‘You ken there’s that saying about skeletons in cupboards. A family’s past coming back to haunt it. That’s what it means, right?’
    Perez nodded.
    ‘This is about bones in the land. Old, red bones. But I don’t understand how they matter after all these years.’
    ‘Red?’ Perez had a fanciful picture of bones steeped in blood.
    ‘My mother says that’s the colour they go when they’ve been in the earth for a long time.’
    ‘They’re like the stories you heard as a child and which stay at the back of your mind,’ Perez said. ‘Hard to forget.’
    They went to the big glass window near Arrivals and watched the plane come in, the people walking down the ladder and on to the Tarmac. Fran and Cassie were among the last off and Perez felt the quiver of anxiety in his stomach. Perhaps she wasn’t there. Perhaps at the last minute she’d changed her mind and decided the city suited her better.
    ‘That’s Gwen James,’ Sandy said. And although he couldn’t remember ever seeing her on the television, Perez thought he would have picked her out from the rest of the passengers. She wore a long black coat almost to her ankles, black boots. She carried a leather holdall and it seemed she had no other luggage, because she walked straight past the carousel to Sandy and held out her hand.
    Perez had spoken to her the evening before and wanted to introduce himself, but at that point he was distracted by the sight of Fran and Cassie getting off the plane. Fran was grinning and waving like crazy. He waved back, tried not to beam like a madman. There was something about her not quite as he remembered. A different haircut, a new pair of baseball boots, pink and covered with sequins. He wondered if she’d wear them when he took her to Fair Isle and what his father would make of them.
    ‘This is my boss,’ Sandy was saying. ‘Jimmy Perez.’
    ‘We’ve talked on the phone.’ Gwen James had the same jazz singer’s voice that Perez remembered.
    ‘Are you sure you’re happy with everything we have planned?’ Perez couldn’t