Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

away to make his coffee.
    Cedric appeared just as Perez was finishing the meal. He looked bleary-eyed and grey.
    ‘Paul Berglund didn’t go out on the early ferry, did he?’ Perez asked. He supposed he’d finished with the academic, for the moment at least, but he didn’t want the man slinking away without his knowing.
    ‘No, he’ll be down later, I’m sure. He doesn’t usually get up so early.’
    ‘Did Mima have a good send-off?’
    ‘I suppose she did. I didn’t stay long at Utra. All those people sitting round saying fine things about her. They had little enough good to say about her when she was alive. I came back here to have a few drams to her memory in peace. I’ll miss her.’ Cedric looked up at Perez. The flesh around his eyes was soft and creased like folded suede. ‘It seems a strange thing, two bodies on an island this size. What are you doing here, Jimmy? What’s going on?’
    Three bodies , Perez thought. There are the bones they found on Setter too .
    ‘I’m working for the Fiscal, enquiring on her behalf into the sudden death of Hattie James.’
    ‘Aye, right.’
    ‘Is there anything you can tell me, Cedric? Anything I need to know about Mima Wilson and Setter? Anything strange been happening there?’
    ‘Not these days, Jimmy. Not for sixty years at least.’
    ‘What happened sixty years ago?’
    ‘These are old men’s tales. You don’t have time for these.’
    ‘Try me.’
    Cedric paused, then he seemed to make up his mind to speak.
    ‘Three men from Whalsay were involved in the Shetland Bus.’ He looked at Perez to check the inspector knew what he was talking about. ‘You know it was mostly the Scalloway men that kept the boats repaired and in good order to put to sea. But when Howarth, the naval officer in charge, decided the Norwegians needed small boats to be dropped off with the agents, so they could make their own way up the fjords, he came to Whalsay to get them made. It was skilled work; the inshore boats had to pass for Norwegian. Men’s lives depended on it. There was young Jerry Wilson, who was just a schoolboy, too young to get called up into the services but the best sailor of his generation. My father, who was called Cedric Irvine like me. And old Andy Clouston, the father of Andrew.’
    ‘So Mima’s husband, your father and Ronald’s grandfather?’
    ‘Exactly that. Though Jerry hadn’t married Mima then. They were walking out together but too young to wed.’
    Perez said nothing. Cedric would want to tell the story in his own way and Perez had told him he’d have time to listen. He tried not to think of the nurse’s phone number scribbled on the pad in his room or to speculate about what he might have to say.
    Cedric began to talk. ‘There have always been tales about Setter. There were odd kind of bumps in the land where the dead lass started digging. Crops never did well there. The bairns thought it was a trowie place and even the grown-ups believed Mima was something of a witch.’ He paused, closed the flaps of skin over his eyes.
    ‘What did that have to do with the Shetland Bus?’
    ‘They say there’s a Norwegian man buried there. That was the story I grew up with, though my father always denied it. An agent who’d passed information to the Germans and got some of his people killed.’
    ‘And the Whalsay men meted out their own form of justice?’
    ‘That’s what people say. One of the men that died was a close friend of Jerry Wilson. He was in a Whalsay-built boat when he was captured. My father would never speak of it, but there were rumours when I was growing up.’ Only now Cedric opened his eyes very slowly. He paused a moment before continuing. ‘I did hear they found some bones at Setter. The piece of a skull, I heard, and others besides.’
    ‘Those were old bones,’ Perez said. ‘Older than that.’ But are they? he thought. I don’t really know that. Sixty years is a long time. Would we be able to tell the difference? Wo uldn’t bones from a body buried during the war look just the same as ones buried hundreds of years ago?
    ‘There you are then,’ Cedric said, suddenly becoming jovial. ‘Like I said, they were all just stories.’
    ‘How did Jerry Wilson die?’ Perez asked.
    ‘At sea. A fishing accident. He was taken in a freak storm. Mima was heartbroken. They’d been sweethearts since they were children.’ Cedric paused again. ‘She was wild even as a child. Setter was her house, not Jerry’s. She lived