Chapter Thirty-One

  PEREZ SPENT ALL MORNING IN STENNESS. He thought Johnson’s body would have to stay where it was for a while, perhaps even until after Christmas. When he’d first arrived there, he’d fancied the man looked like an ancient human sacrifice, lying on his back, positioned right in the middle of the stone circle. There must be some significance to the link, he’d thought, between all the crime scenes: the former dig at Noltland, Maeshowe and now the stones at Stenness. All major archaeological sites. The killer must be sending some message.

  As it got light and the image of a human sacrifice was corrupted by the scene tent and the lights and the team in their blue suits, hoods and masks, the idea of a killer obsessed with ancient stones seemed fanciful. Barbara Johnson and the couple’s vehicle had disappeared. The first priority was to find them. The woman might provide a far more prosaic explanation. If she were still alive. All the same, the connection with the past had been made and he couldn’t shake it. He phoned Paul Rutherford, and explained what had happened and where he was.

  ‘Any chance you could come along? I’m going slowly crazy here and I need some expert advice.’

  I need more than that, he thought. I need a sounding board, someone to bounce ideas off.

  Because Willow had left him to it. In addition, there were still no flights in from the Scottish mainland and it would take hours to bring in reinforcements by ferry, even if he could persuade the Glaswegians to make the trek. It occurred to him then that he should trust his team more. He’d been thrown by the death of a friend, but Ellie was sharp, and she wanted more responsibility. It was a weird kind of arrogance to think he could run the investigation on his own. When this was over, he’d arrange extra training for her, a new, enhanced role. But now the team were busy, and he had to do his best. Alone.

  He knew there would be excuses from his colleagues in the south: Orkney was a bugger to get to at the best of times, and even worse in midwinter. It was Christmas Eve. Did he know how much the overtime would cost? Best cover the body up and wait until the weather cleared and the holidays were over. None of that would be said out loud, of course – not to him, at least – but the mood he was in, he imagined it was what his colleagues in Glasgow would be thinking.

  Dr Grieve had only just returned home to Aberdeen and Perez couldn’t get hold of him. That added to his sense of isolation and his anxiety that the investigation was going nowhere.

  He tried to follow Willow’s advice and focus on routine policing. He spoke to his blue-suited colleagues:

  ‘Don’t contaminate the scene. Make a note of whoever comes through the cordon. Let’s try to trace Johnson’s movements since he left Westray. And we need to find his wife and their car.’ A pause. ‘Can we keep a look out for Nat Wilkinson too? He disappeared suddenly from Westray yesterday without any explanation.’

  It felt as if he was repeating these instructions as a mantra throughout the morning. That somehow the words were just about keeping him sane. But his mood lifted when Rutherford appeared at the edge of the cordon. A new face and a different perspective. Perez made his way across the cropped grass to join him.

  They sat in Rutherford’s car. He’d brought a flask of strong black coffee and a plastic tub of home-made mince pies. The sudden blast of caffeine and sugar made Perez jittery, light-headed.

  ‘So Tony Johnson’s dead,’ Rutherford said. ‘There won’t be many people in the field who’ll mourn him – he loved his celebrity more than his subject – but you wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And certainly not on his family.’

  ‘We can’t find his wife. As far as we know she’s still here in Orkney. We’re trying to track down his children too, to notify them of the death, and in the hope that they’ve heard from Barbara, but according to neighbours they’re both abroad for the holidays.’

  ‘I’m not sure how I can help.’

  ‘We think he was killed here.’ Perez couldn’t be certain about anything just now, but there’d been blood on the grass and no indication that the body had been moved. ‘It seems odd that all three bodies were found at sites of archaeological significance.’

  ‘And sites of significance to Johnson.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They were all featured in the TV series that he fronted. There were other places in Shetland, but those were the Orkney sites he visited. I was surprised that he didn’t decide to go to Papay, because the Knap of Howar there is so significant. It’s thought to be the oldest preserved stone house in Northern Europe. But Maeshowe, Noltland and Stenness were the ones where he stood looking handsome and moody, talking to camera. It could be a coincidence of course.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ Perez thought this turned his whole perception of the investigation on its head. He’d come to believe that Johnson had killed Archie and George to save his reputation. Now, Rutherford was suggesting that Johnson could have been the intended target all along. If that was the case, why had the other victims been killed? Some warped attempt at misdirection? Or collateral damage? ‘According to Miles, it was the television programmes that triggered George Riley’s anger and made him determined to expose Johnson.’

  ‘Yeah well, it made me pretty angry too. Seeing the man standing there, posing as the big expert, trotting out his stuff. I suspect that he didn’t go to Papay because he didn’t know so much about the subject. He had no information to steal.’

  ‘We’re still desperate to find the wife. We don’t know yet if she’s dead or alive. You say there was no other site featured on the television programme?’

  Rutherford shook his head. ‘Not in Orkney.’

  So that didn’t help very much.

  It seemed though that Rutherford was having second thoughts. ‘There was a quick piece about the Ring o’ Brodgar, but it was in the same episode as the Stones of Stenness, so it slipped my mind.’

  ‘Did he do a piece to camera from there?’

  ‘Yeah, I think he did.’

  The Ring o’ Brodgar was very close to where they were now, on the same isthmus between the lochs of Harray and Stenness as the stone circle where Johnson’s body had been found. The team had already driven slowly along the road, looking for the Johnsons’ vehicle, but Perez wasn’t sure that anybody had walked into Brodgar. Not since it was light. If Barbara Johnson was lying anywhere, it might be there.

  Rutherford seemed unaware of the impact of his words. ‘Is that all? Only I promised I’d get the kids out of the way, so my wife can finish wrapping the presents.’

  ‘Sure.’ Perez drew his attention back to the archaeologist. ‘It was good of you to come out.’

  He watched Rutherford drive away and looked at his phone. There was still no news on Barbara Johnson. He tried to call Willow, but it clicked straight through to voicemail. He wondered briefly if she was wrapping presents too but couldn’t quite imagine it. She could have made it to North Ronaldsay. He had to push his way through a line of gawpers to get back inside the cordon. He wanted to shout at them: Don’t you have anything better to do on Christmas Eve?

  At the scene he left a message with one of his team. ‘I’m just heading over to Brodgar. Probably a wild goose chase, but that’s where I’ll be if anyone wants me.’

  Then he walked away, along the empty road, with water on both sides of him, glad to be alone for a while and to let the facts of the case churn around his mind.

  Brodgar was a completed circle. Massive stones perfectly formed. Tourists came from all over the world to marvel at it. He paused for a moment before leaving the road, aware of the tension in his muscles, his limbs and his face tight and strained. The sun was well up now, the shadows dark and sharp on the grass. He imagined Neolithic people coming to the monument with a sense of wonder and awe. Perhaps they’d been here seeking answers too.

  Usually, there’d be traffic moving behind him, but because they’d closed the road, everything was still. He could see the work going on at the crime scene at Stenness, but he was too far away for any noise to reach him. A curlew flew calling across the hill. He followed the footpath, walking slowly, looking for any indication that someone had been here before him. There was nothing. Not even a scrap of litter or an empty beer can.

  At the edge of the circle, he paused again. His shadow was thrown in front of him, as if he was one of the stones. He thought he heard a movement behind him, but when he looked there was nothing there. His imagination running wild. The sun was covered by a bank of cloud, so the colours faded, and everything seemed shady, gloomy. He walked into the centre of the ring of stones.

  Nothing. An anticlimax. No woman’s body. He quartered the space, to be sure that he hadn’t missed anything, coming to terms with his shattered theory. In his head he began describing the incident to Willow, turning it into a story, mocking himself for believing in the drama. He walked back to Stenness, guilty because he was a little disappointed that there’d been nothing to find.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  BACK IN HARRAY, WILLOW STILL COULDN’T settle. There’d been a missed call from Perez when she was in the plane. She phoned him back and explained about her trip into North Ronaldsay.

  ‘Nat Wilkinson definitely didn’t kill his father. I don’t know what brought him out of Westray yesterday, but I’m struggling to believe that it was to stick a knife in Tony Johnson. Mima did make an interesting point though . . .’

  Even to Willow, the seeds of an idea around Nat Wilkinson’s addiction seemed vague and not rooted in reality, but Perez listened intently.

  ‘Important do you think?’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ He paused. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Did you learn anything from Paul Rutherford?’

  ‘Only that all our crime scenes were places featured in Johnson’s TV programme,’ Perez said.

  ‘That could be significant.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Perez sounded unconvinced by the theory. ‘Best to keep an open mind at this stage though, I guess.’

  Willow felt like cheering. Perez sounded more confident, more like his old self.

  She wanted to ask about Barbara Johnson, but he’d have told her if there were any news about the woman.

  Instead, she phoned the police station and spoke to Ellie who was coordinating the search from there to get the details. Willow knew she was acting the control freak again but couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nah.’ Ellie sounded defeated. ‘No sign yet of the car, or the woman – alive or dead. But we’re so thin on the ground. All this space. All these islands. It was hard enough searching even before Johnson’s body was found, sucking in all our available manpower.’

  ‘I might just take a drive out,’ Willow said. ‘I’ll be another pair of eyes at least. Maybe I’ll head down towards the ferry terminal in South Ronaldsay. As you and Jimmy first thought, that’s the most accessible route back to Scotland if you don’t want your movements traced.’

  Alison had phoned earlier to ask if she could keep James all day – they were having so much fun – and Willow thought that anything would be better than sitting here worrying at a question that had no answer.

  She was preparing to leave the house when there was a knock on the door. Tentative. Uncertain. She opened the door to Nat Wilkinson. A van, scratched and dented, was parked in the drive. She supposed it belonged to him and he’d taken it in from Westray with him.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you.’ He was stumbling over the words. ‘You’d left a couple of messages on my phone. Then I heard about the body in Stenness, and I thought I should speak to you. I know I shouldn’t have come to your home, but I couldn’t face the police station. It has memories. When I was using and in a bad place, I got taken there.’

  ‘Come on in.’ Willow wasn’t going to make a fuss about his turning up on her doorstep. She wanted to speak to him, after all. Seeing him standing there, looking lost and vulnerable, she could understand why Mima had felt the need to protect him. She didn’t ask how he knew where she lived. Of course he would know. It was impossible to keep anything hidden in Orkney. ‘What brought you out of Westray in such a rush?’

  She took him into her kitchen, settled him into a chair by the table.

  ‘I’m a recovering addict.’ He looked up at her. ‘But you’ll know that. You’ll have seen the records. A friend of mine from the fellowship is going through a tough time. He lives in Kirkwall. His woman left him yesterday and took their little boy with her. He was worried he’d relapse. I wanted to be there for him and came out as soon as I could. I spent all day with him and stayed over at his place last night. He has other pals with him now.’ A pause. ‘You can check if you need to.’

  Willow shook her head. ‘Did you see the Johnsons on the ferry?’

  ‘Aye, I did. We sat below in the cafeteria. None of us had had breakfast.’

  ‘How did they seem?’

  ‘The wife was quiet. Subdued. Even a bit scared of the guy maybe. He was in a dreadful temper, shouting at the lass behind the counter, making a fuss over some little thing. His wife was trying to calm him down.’

  ‘Did they tell you why they were leaving in such a hurry?’

  Nat shook his head. ‘I sat at a different table with my back to them, and then I went up on deck. I had enough on my mind about my friend. I didn’t need the hassle.’ He looked across at her. ‘Johnson said he’d sort everything out. The wife just had to trust him. He said he’d make everything right again.’

  There was a moment of silence while she tried to process the information.

  ‘Did you see which way they went when they left the ferry?’

  ‘Aye. My van was behind their car. They headed for the town centre.’

  After Nat left, she drove south, not into Kirkwall where the Johnsons had first been heading. Even if the Johnsons had gone into the town from the ferry, she thought, if Barbara was still there surely someone would have seen her. Instead, Willow stuck to her original plan to make for South Ronaldsay. She didn’t take a direct route, but used the smaller side roads and headed east across the Deerness peninsula before even hitting the Churchill Barriers.

  There was a wonderful freedom in driving down the empty tracks. Some routes were entirely new to her, and others took her to remote houses where friends and colleagues lived, places she’d been to dinner or taken James for play dates. She felt a moment of guilt because she was enjoying this meandering road trip so much. Another man had died. She hadn’t liked Tony Johnson, but perhaps she should grieve a little at his passing.

  Everywhere, she came across spectacular views. She’d grown up on an island, was familiar with the huge skies, but here it was the vista of land and water and more land and more water spreading out to the horizon, that made the landscape so special. The weather had changed. It was mild and breezy, with the knowledge that from now on the days would get a little longer. The distant smell of spring. Gusts of wind blew cloud-shaped shadows across the lochs.

  The Johnsons had been driving a blue VW, just a year old. She had the registration number in her memory. She slowed at every smallholding and cottage that might house an Airbnb or take in paying guests. She could have knocked at doors, asked if the Johnsons had stayed the night after they ran away from Westray, but she needed to know where Barbara was now, not where she’d been the day before. Besides, she was taking so much pleasure in the drive that she couldn’t quite stop. And all the time, her mind was running through information gleaned from Mima, creating possible scenarios. She knew that Perez would be doing the same.

  The first barrier took her to the island of Lamb Holm, where Italian prisoners of war had turned two Nissen huts into a beautiful ornate chapel. Willow had visited it, at first on her own, and then taking friends who’d come to stay. All the decorations were hand-painted, and the materials to transform it had been scavenged. It was dedicated to peace, during a time of war. Today she drove on. There were no cars parked outside. Crossing the next barrier, she was aware of the waves from Scapa Flow lapping against the concrete, the westerly breeze behind them. In a gale and with a high tide, sometimes the road was impassable. A flock of geese rose into the air as she passed.

  As she arrived in to South Ronaldsay, she looked down to see that the Pentland ferry was moving away from the pier in the attractive village of St Margaret’s Hope. This was the first sight many visitors had of Orkney, and many stayed, buying up the pretty houses, inflating prices, only realizing too late that in winter the gales closed the barriers, and that the restaurants and shops that had appealed to them were closed.

  So, Willow thought, if Barbara is on the ferry, I’m too late. I should have driven straight here. She’ll be on her way to the mainland.

  But although the crossing to Gill’s Bay in Caithness was the quickest route there was, it still took more than an hour, and there would be time to have an officer waiting at the other end. Willow knew she should be regretting her leisurely drive south, but she couldn’t quite do it. She’d needed the space and the time to think.

  She saw the Volkswagen as soon as she drove into the car park at the pier and thought that Barbara must have got on the ferry as a foot passenger. There would be no photo ID needed and the woman might have paid in cash. A way of slipping south unnoticed. Willow felt a moment of triumph on Perez’s behalf. He’d been right. The car hadn’t been here when his officers had checked the day before. Barbara must have found somewhere to stay overnight, but this was the route she’d decided to take.

  Willow climbed out of her car and made her way towards the terminal and ticket office. Someone there might remember a big Englishwoman. But she took a detour past the VW on her way, and saw that Barbara was still inside, in the driver’s seat, with tears streaming down her face. Willow tapped on the window.

  Barbara looked up and seemed almost glad to see her. She reached across to open the passenger door, and Willow got in.