‘Why would he think you’d agree to do that?’

  Miles shook his head. ‘I don’t know. As I’ve said, he was beyond reason. Desperate. It was as if he believed that George had been deliberately vindictive or had some personal grudge, that he’d exaggerated Johnson’s fraud for his own purpose. Johnson stood on the doorstep making wild threats, yelling and swearing. He was a bully. He said that if I didn’t comply with his demands, he’d ruin George’s reputation, that the truth would come out in the end.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what he meant by that?’

  ‘Not at all, and he wasn’t specific. The fact that George was a teacher in a gay relationship? That might have been a threat fifty years ago, but certainly not now.’

  It seemed to Perez that Johnson had been so desperate to clear his name and establish his future that he’d been throwing out random threats to whoever stood in his way. Perhaps his public image, his standing as an academic, was all he had. And as that started to crumble, so did he. He was almost losing his mind; his reason was shredding little by little as the days passed.

  ‘Did you let him into the house?’

  Miles had already finished his beer. He crushed it in his fist and threw it into a bin. ‘Certainly not! He tried to push his way in, but I’m stronger than he is. I shut the door on him. He might still be there now, yelling all my misdeeds to the wind and the sky, but a visitor turned up. Paul, the island archaeologist. He thought I might need company. Johnson must have recognized Paul, because as soon as he got out of his car, the professor left.’ There was a mocking emphasis on the word professor. ‘Very quickly and quietly.’

  Miles went to the fridge and took out another can. ‘What exactly was on the news? Have you arrested Johnson? I’d be happy to make a statement and share all the information about the plagiarism I had from George.’

  Perez didn’t answer directly. ‘What time did Johnson get here yesterday?’

  ‘Early evening. At about this time. It had been dark for a while.’

  ‘How long did Paul stay with you?’

  ‘Most of the evening. I fed him and we had a few drinks together. More than a few. I offered to make up the spare room for him, but he said he had to get back to his family. He got a taxi home and must have arranged a lift to pick up his car early this morning. It had already gone when I woke up. With a monster hangover.’

  Perez considered that. It was hardly a cast-iron alibi, and he’d have to check with Rutherford. But after ‘more than a few’ drinks it hardly seemed likely that Miles would have lured Johnson to an ancient monument, driven there and stuck a knife in his back.

  ‘Johnson hasn’t been arrested. His body was found early this morning in the middle of the Stones of Stenness. He’d been murdered.’

  There was a moment of silence. Then Miles threw back his head and laughed.

  Perez was shocked. It seemed to him in that moment that everyone involved in the investigation was on the verge of insanity. The reaction was embarrassing, almost unhinged, especially from the upright man, with his formality and gentleman’s accent. And perhaps Miles was embarrassed too, because the noise stopped as suddenly as it had started. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. That was unforgivable. But in my head, I’d been willing Johnson’s death, imagining how it would be. Knowing I’d never have the courage to do it, you understand, but finding some comfort in the planning. I really believed that he’d murdered George, you see. I still do, though his death complicates matters. When he turned up here, shouting his foul accusations, he convinced me of his guilt. In one of the scenarios I’d created for his demise, he was lying in the middle of the Stones of Stenness. That was where he’d been standing, during that dreadful television documentary. Pretending to the world what an expert he was.’

  ‘How had you killed him? In this fantasy murder?’ Perez expressed only mild curiosity.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t batter him to death with an ancient artefact. That would have connected him to George and Archie, and he wasn’t worthy of that. I stabbed him with a common kitchen knife. Ours are very sharp. George and I both loved to cook.’

  Perez took a sip of his beer but said nothing.

  It wasn’t a kitchen knife, he thought. But you’re pretty close.

  ‘I suppose,’ Miles said at last, ‘you have no evidence that Johnson committed murder. Not now. He might have been a victim of the same killer. It might not have been a matter of revenge.’ He looked at Perez, his eyes very sharp. Probing.

  Perez wondered again what exactly the man had been doing in the Foreign Office. He could imagine him as a spy in an alien world, pretending to be a junior diplomat, lying for his country. He might not have killed as part of his work, but he could have ordered another person to. Or turned a blind eye. Perez wondered if there was some way to find out. But he might be creating fantasy scenarios too.

  ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’ he said.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Miles sounded vague. ‘Ah, of course, Christmas Day.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘George was a great fan of Christmas. We made our own traditions. A feast that very definitely didn’t include turkey. I might not bother with all the food, but I’ll probably excuse myself from the “no drinking alone” rule.’

  ‘Was the Ba’ one of those traditions? You do know that George wrote the definitive history of the game.’

  ‘Oh, of course we went along to that. How could we not?’ He smiled again, this time self-mocking. ‘As you say, George was a leading light, helping with the organization, though he never played. Besides, all those athletic young men, rolling around in the mud, jumping into the water. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

  Perez couldn’t think where there might be mud on the Ba’ route, but he understood the sentiment and was relieved that Miles seemed calmer now, brighter, not taking himself so seriously, at least for the moment.

  ‘I understand that there’ll be a tribute to Archie and to George before the start.’

  ‘They’ve asked me to speak,’ Miles said. He looked up at Perez again. ‘And to throw up the boys’ ba’. To honour George’s role as a teacher. I agreed in a moment of weakness. Or perhaps in a moment of strength. George would have loved that. Me, standing there in front of all those people, telling the great and the good of Orkney what a wonderful man he was.’

  ‘Have they asked Vaila to speak too?’

  ‘I believe so and hers will be the more important speech of course. She and Archie being old Orcadian, and Archie being so important to the game. I imagine she’ll be talking after the main game in the afternoon. Maybe handing over some kind of trophy. That’s as it should be. My speech will be very short. But even just being there will be difficult enough for me. I dislike any form of attention. I’ll do it, imagining George laughing at me.’ Again, he crushed the beer can and threw it with impressive precision into the bin. ‘You should go, Inspector. If you stay, I’ll use you as an excuse to drink more. And if I do, my willpower will be weak, and I might continue all night again. Besides, I think you have a family. It’s Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Would you like company? I’m sure there are friends of George who would gladly spend some time with you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d rather be on my own tonight. There will be people enough tomorrow. I’ll watch an old film and sleep. I might even dream of happier times.’

  When Perez got home, it was already past James’s bedtime, but his son was still up, sitting beside Willow on a video call to Cassie in Shetland. Perez joined in. In the background, he saw Duncan Hunter’s sitting room, and he was reminded vividly of the house where he’d spent time as a boy. Duncan had been his friend, and at weekends, when he might have been stranded in the school hostel in Lerwick, Perez had been invited to the large crumbling house in the north of Shetland mainland, treated almost as Duncan’s brother. It was as different from his own ordered and respectable home on Fair Isle as it was possible to be – rambling, cluttered, full of relics of the family’s grand past. It had seemed to Perez that there were dusty rooms where the family never ventured.

  He’d even stayed there one Christmas Day, when a storm had blown up and the Fair Isle mail boat, the Good Shepherd, had failed to make the trip to Grutness, and the small planes had been cancelled for more than a week. They hadn’t eaten the Christmas meal until late in the evening, and Duncan’s raffish parents had both been drunk before they’d sat down. They’d all played hide-and-seek in the freezing attics until, exhausted, the boys had taken their own decision that it was bedtime. In the morning, they’d woken to a blizzard and no electricity, because the generator had been allowed to run out of fuel.

  Now, behind Cassie’s excited face, in the room Perez recognized for its cavernous fireplace, there was an enormous tree, elaborately decorated, with wrapped presents at its foot. Celia’s work. Duncan wouldn’t have the patience. Perez had worried that the girl might feel abandoned, even though it had been her decision to accept the invitation to stay in Shetland, but she was clearly loving every minute.

  ‘Have an early night,’ Perez said. ‘Or Santa won’t come.’

  ‘Aye, right.’ A standing joke. Even when she was a youngster, Cassie had never believed in Santa, had always thought she was being conned. She laughed, blew a kiss at them and the screen went blank.

  There was no tree in Willow and Perez’s house, but Willow had made some effort after she’d got home from dropping Barbara at the hotel and speaking to Vaila. In a big glass vase there was a huge stem of teasels, sprayed silver. She’d bought baubles from Rosalie Greeman on her visit to Westray, and they hung now from the teasel heads, along with James’s gingerbread men. She’d strung decorations made by Cassie in previous years over the mantelpiece.

  ‘Our Christmas weed! We picked it from the garden. James and I decorated it this evening. More eco, we thought, than cutting down a tree.’

  ‘What about the aerosol in the paint?’

  She laughed and pretended to hit him. James didn’t understand but joined in the mock fight. Willow made hot chocolate for the boy in an attempt to calm him, and then Perez carried him upstairs, with his mushroom-coloured moustache, bathed him, read him stories and put him to bed.

  When Perez came down, Willow was in the kitchen. ‘I took a veggie chilli from the freezer. From my domestic goddess days. Before Archie got killed.’

  ‘Have we got something to eat for tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course! I bought a chicken from Asda for you and James. And all the trimmings.’

  ‘What about you? No vegetarian treat?’

  ‘Nah, the trimmings will be fine for me.’ She turned away from the stove. ‘Your work phone rang, I answered it.’

  ‘Oh?’ There was always a moment of stress when the phone went off. Tonight, he just hoped it didn’t mean going out again. He wanted to be here. To be quiet for what remained of the evening. No bodies. No demands on his time.

  ‘A woman called Belinda. Loud voice. She said she met you at the Maeshowe car park by the old mill.’

  Belinda Thorne the dog-walker, who’d seen George Riley just before he’d been killed.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘For you to call her back. She’d remembered something. Probably not important but . . . Blah blah blah. You know the sort.’ Willow rolled her eyes. She, like him, had been hoping for an evening without interruption.

  He nodded. He knew the sort. ‘I’ll ring her now. Get it over with.’

  He went into the sitting room.

  ‘Good evening, Inspector. Sorry to bother you on Christmas Eve. And so late. But better today, I thought, than tomorrow. I won’t keep you for long. This is so obvious and I’m sure you’ve thought of it.’ Her voice was so loud that he had to move the phone away from his ear. She was as good as her word. She didn’t keep him for long. He imagined that she was hosting a party because he could hear distant voices in the background, one burst of laughter. They’d be people like her who served on committees, ran charities, did good works for the community. When she’d finished speaking, his thoughts were circling, spinning like water moving slowly down a drain. She’d been right. It was obvious, but he hadn’t considered its implication. This changed his thinking, and ideas that had seemed isolated and unconnected were gathered together into an almost coherent theory. The spark setting fire. There was no proof though. And proof was what they needed now.

  Back in the kitchen he shared his ideas with Willow, who listened with intense concentration. After the meal, Perez went upstairs to fill the stocking that lay on James’s bed with tiny gifts. Willow stacked his bigger presents under the Christmas weed. When he returned to the kitchen, Willow had suggestions of her own. A way perhaps to find the proof that they needed. At midnight she had a small glass of wine with him, to see in the day.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  THEY WERE WOKEN BY JAMES, BOUNCING on the bed. It was early, but not outrageously early. Perez insisted on making coffee first, and herbal tea for Willow, then they sat back in bed, watching their son open the small presents from his stocking. He took the unwrapping slowly and carefully, and lined up the objects – the clockwork train, the sugar mouse, the bag of Shetland puffin poo (an outrageously sugary coconut sweetie that he adored), the wooden jigsaw puzzle, the Lego, the gloves knitted by his Fair Isle grandmother – along the duvet. He was, Willow thought, very like his father. He liked his world ordered. He didn’t even start eating the puffin poo until he’d been to the window, lifted a corner of the curtain and looked outside.

  They’d left the outside light on, so he could see a circle of the garden, close to the front door. He was shocked and disappointed that there was no snow. There was always snow on Christmas cards and in the films. He’d assumed that everywhere would be white, had imagined snowball fights and building a snowman.

  ‘But those were stories,’ Willow said. ‘Not real.’ She thought it was like this investigation – there was a lot that they’d imagined, tales they’d created. She got him dressed and they went downstairs. It was still Northern Isles midwinter dark.

  ‘Breakfast,’ she said. ‘A huge breakfast because we don’t know when we’ll be back from the Ba’.’ Soon the kitchen was full of the smell of frying bacon, and she made pancakes too, and scrambled eggs.

  ‘Do we need to be there all day?’ Perez said. ‘Won’t James be bored? We could work it in shifts. One of us could stay here with him. Or we could skip the boys’ Ba’ altogether and I’ll just go myself in the afternoon.’

  She thought about Perez’s words, wondering how the idea might work. They’d decided that they’d take no action against the killer during the day. They’d watch and wait and let the Ba’ run its course. They’d gather their proof. They couldn’t believe that anyone else was in danger. But James jumped in, his mouth full of pancake.

  ‘I want to go this morning. Iain and Lawrie will be there.’ His chin, sticky with syrup, was thrust forward. He was ready for a battle.

  The Stout boys were his heroes. The last time they’d been together, Lawrie had just decided he’d take part in the Ba’, his final chance before he was considered an adult – and without really understanding, James had cheered him on. Then he’d worked out how many years it would be before he was old enough to be a part of the game. The Ba’ was an Orkney tradition, a legend as potent as anything on the story stones. Some of the locals liked to believe that it dated as far back as that. James, it seemed, was becoming a true Orcadian, and born in the islands, he’d have every right to become a Ba’ player.

  ‘What about all those presents under the weed?’ Willow said. ‘If we stay in this morning, we’d have a chance to open those.’

  But James was having none of it. ‘One of you could bring me home this afternoon. We can open the presents later before tea.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Willow said. ‘I could do that. Get the meal ready.’ She looked at Perez. ‘You’ll need to be there for the speeches around the adult game, I suppose. Just in case something kicks off. You can bring other officers in for that. Most of them will be there anyway. Phil might even be playing.’ She would have liked to be in Kirkwall all day – missing a part of it felt like a sacrifice or a dereliction of duty – but she had James to think about, and the baby. She knew that Perez would handle it fine by himself. It was a kind of presumption to believe she needed to be there with him.

  Outside, it was getting light. The air was milder, a little spring-like. The green spears of snowdrop leaves were pushing through the soil. The earth had tipped past the solstice. In the town, families were already gathering for the boys’ game. The throw-up would take place at the Merkit Cross on the Kirk Green at ten o’clock, and people wanted a good view, to be seen to support their sons and grandsons.

  When they arrived outside the cathedral, Perez carried James on his shoulders, so he’d see what was happening. The boys in the teams were swaggering, full of macho bravado, shouting to their pals. If they were anxious about the fray, they couldn’t show it. Willow tried to imagine an older James there, a teenager, surrounded by friends, loud and sweary, and wondered how she’d feel. A mix of anxiety and pride, maybe, though she knew Perez would only be scared for the boy. He might even try to persuade him not to take part. But that would be years away and by then James could be a different lad altogether, quiet, nerdy, uninterested in sport of any kind.

  She wondered if women would ever be allowed to take part in the game. After all, they now took their place in the winter Up Helly Aa in Shetland’s main town of Lerwick, dressed as Vikings, marching with the Guizer Jarl and his squad. This was different though, a celebration of strength and speed, not only of tradition. Then she thought that island women were strong too. She’d seen Vaila, who seemed so slender and frail, hauling bales, carrying a propane gas cylinder in her arms when they were unloading the boat.