Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

here, bringing up her two boys, keeping the family together while Joseph was working for Duncan Hunter. It couldn’t have been easy for her struggling over the finances, watching Jackie Clouston and the other fishing wives with so much money that they didn’t know how to spend it, knowing that if she’d been born into a different family, or married into one, she’d have been wealthy too. He knew there were times when she brooded about it.
    ‘There’s tea made,’ she said. Then with a frown, remembering, ‘Or would you prefer coffee? I can easily do that. The kettle’s not long boiled.’
    ‘Tea’s fine.’
    He poured the tea and helped himself to a bowl of cereal, found a clear corner of the table.
    ‘Would you be able to phone that nice Inspector Perez today, sort out when we can fix a day for the funeral?’
    So Michael can arrange to get up here , he thought. So she can show her fine eldest son off to the whole island, with his fancy suit and his hand-made shoes . And it occurred to him then that his relationship with his mother was troubled because she cared so much more for Michael than she did for him. I’m jealous , he thought, astounded. That’s what all this is about. How could I have been so dumb that I didn’t realize?
    ‘Perez might come to Whalsay,’ he said. ‘It depends what the Fiscal said.’
    ‘You mean he could be here to arrest Ronald?’
    Sandy shrugged. She didn’t have to sound so pleased at the prospect. But she’s jealous too , he thought. Jealous of Jackie and the flash house on the hill and the new BMW every year and the trips to Bergen on the boat. After Andrew’s illness you’d have thought she’d have realized there was nothing to be jealous about, but she just couldn’t help herself. She doesn’t really want Ronald prosecuted, she only wants Jackie’s nose put out of joint.
    ‘Where’s Dad?’
    ‘He’s gone over to Setter. That cow still needs milking and the hens and the cat need feeding.’
    ‘I’ll wander over. See if he needs a hand.’
    He thought she was going to say something to stop him. Perhaps she wished the two of them got on as well as Sandy did with his father. But she stopped herself. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘The rain’s stopped and the mist has lifted. It’s a fine day for a walk.’
    By the time he reached Setter, his father had finished with the animals. Sandy found him standing in the kitchen. He waited in the doorway and looked in. His father looked lost in thought and it seemed like an intrusion to blunder in, but he felt kind of foolish just waiting outside. At last Joseph saw him.
    ‘It’s hard to think of this place without her,’ the older man said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll come up behind me, full of mischief and gossip.’
    ‘How did she keep track of everything that was happening in the island?’ Sandy had wondered about this before. His grandmother knew about his friends’ escapades and love affairs before he did. No wonder Evelyn had talked about her as a witch. ‘She didn’t go out so much towards the end.’
    ‘She made it to the Lindby shop every couple of days,’ Joseph said. ‘People were always coming to visit her. Cedric called in every Thursday to chat, but it wasn’t only her own generation who liked her company. Besides, she could smell a scandal like other folk smell rotten eggs.’ He looked around the room, seemed to be scoring the details on to his memory. The postcard from Michael and Amelia’s last foreign holiday propped on the dresser, the religious sampler which perhaps she’d stitched as a child, that seemed out of place in any room where Mima had lived, the enormous television, the dirty glasses by the sink. The photograph of Joseph’s father that had been taken during the war, looking young in his Norwegian jersey. They both knew Evelyn wouldn’t rest until everything had been dusted and scrubbed and tidied away.
    ‘Do you still think of this house as your home?’ As soon as he’d spoken Sandy thought that was a daft sort of question. Joseph had lived in Utra since he’d married. Utra had been in Evelyn’s family and had been a tumbledown wreck when they’d moved in. Joseph had made a home almost from nothing.
    But his father considered before speaking and then it wasn’t a direct answer. ‘It wasn’t easy growing up here,’ he said. ‘My father died while I was still a baby and Mima was never the sort of island wife to have a meal on the table when I got in from school