Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

her hands and her sleeves and on the big brutal knife with which, it seemed to Sandy, she’d slit her wrists. The cuts weren’t made across the wrists, but were deep, lengthways slashes, almost up to her inner elbow. The sunlight continued to reflect from the knife blade and made a mockery of the earlier image he’d formed in his head.
    He couldn’t take his eyes off her face, the sight and shape of it were swimming in front of him. He realized he was about to faint and leaned forward, forcing himself to stay conscious. He turned away, then had to look back to check it wasn’t some awful nightmare. He couldn’t phone Perez until he was certain. Then he went back to the house to call the inspector’s mobile.
    Perez answered immediately, but when Sandy explained in a stuttering sort of way what he’d found, there was a complete silence.
    ‘Jimmy, are you there?’ Sandy felt the panic taking over. He couldn’t deal with this on his own.
    And when Perez did reply his voice was so strange that Sandy could hardly recognize it.
    ‘I was at Setter last night,’ Perez said. ‘I looked across the site, but not in the trenches. I should have found her.’
    ‘There would be nothing you could do.’
    ‘I persuaded myself that she’d gone out on the ferry,’ Perez said. ‘I should have been more careful, brought people out to do a proper search. She shouldn’t have had to be there on her own all night.’
    ‘She would have been dead by then,’ Sandy said, and again: ‘There would be nothing you could do.’ It seemed odd to him that he had to reassure his boss. Usually Perez knew what to do in every situation; he was the calm one in the office, never flustered and never emotional. ‘Will you come over? Or is there someone I should call?’
    ‘You’ll need to get a doctor to pronounce her dead.’
    ‘Oh, she’s dead,’ Sandy said. ‘I’m quite sure of that.’
    ‘All the same,’ Perez said. ‘We need it official. You know how it works.’
    ‘I’ll get Brian Marshall. He’ll be discreet.’
    ‘I’m on my way then.’ Just from the way the inspector spoke those words Sandy knew Perez was blaming himself for Hattie’s death and he always would. He wished Perez didn’t have to see the white face in the shadow of the trench, the long, deep cuts to the white inner arms, the blood that looked like tar. He would like to protect his boss from that sight.
    While they waited for the doctor to arrive, they stood by the edge of the pit that Sandy now thought of as Hattie’s grave. Perez was in control again, quite professional.
    ‘I recognize the knife,’ he said.
    ‘Does it belong to the girl?’ Sandy had assumed that it did. Surely if you were going to kill yourself you would use an implement familiar to you. You wouldn’t drag a stranger into your suicide by using someone else’s knife.
    ‘No, it’s Berglund’s.’
    ‘He must have left it here on the site,’ Sandy said. ‘They put all the equipment in the shed close to the house overnight.’
    ‘For the time being we treat this as a suspicious death,’ Perez said. ‘Keep everyone out. And I want the knife fingerprinted.’
    ‘But she killed herself.’ Sandy thought that was obvious: the posed position, the slit wrists. This was an overwrought lassie with a vivid imagination and a taste for the dramatic.
    ‘We treat it as suspicious death.’ This time Perez’s voice was loud and firm. Sandy thought it was the guilt getting to him. Hattie had asked the inspector for help and now he felt he’d let her down. Sandy couldn’t think of anything to say to make things better.
    Perez looked up at him. ‘How would she know to cut herself in that particular way? Most suicides fail because they make tentative slashes across the wrists.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Sandy said, almost losing his patience. ‘She was a bright lass. She’d look it up. There are probably sites on the internet.’
    There was a moment of silence then Perez turned away from the trench. ‘Your father was here last night,’ he said. ‘He was at Setter. That was one of the reasons I didn’t stick around. He looked upset.’
    Sandy didn’t answer that either. He knew his father would never hurt anyone and that Perez was feeling so bad about the girl’s suicide that he was looking for someone else to blame.

 
Chapter Twenty-four
     
    The Fiscal was wearing a soft suede jacket and a cashmere sweater in pale green. She’d put on wellingtons before coming on to the