He sat beside Ellie at the table, then wished he’d chosen a different seat. This felt too much like an interview, with Vaila sitting opposite to them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have more questions.’

  Vaila didn’t respond directly. ‘Is Archie still there?’ she asked. ‘Behind Grobust beach at the old dig site?’

  Perez nodded. ‘Dr Grieve, the pathologist, is with him.’

  ‘Can I see him? I still can’t quite believe he’s dead.’

  ‘Not there,’ Perez said. ‘It’s a crime scene. We have to be careful about contamination. You understand. But when he’s in Kirkwall. Before he goes south to Aberdeen for the post-mortem. I’m sure we can arrange something then.’ He thought Grieve would be open to that. He was the most compassionate medic Perez knew. He’d said once that his patient wasn’t the body on the table, but the grieving relative, and that his door was always open to them.

  He thought she might protest, insist on driving off and walking along the beach to see Archie at his last resting place in Westray, but she seemed overwhelmed by a kind of lethargy. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What questions do you have for me now?’ He sensed a bitterness in her voice and wondered if she’d guessed what was coming.

  ‘There have been rumours,’ Perez said, ‘about Archie’s relationship with a woman on the island. Rosalie Greeman.’

  ‘You know Orkney.’ Her face was grey with exhaustion. ‘There are always rumours.’

  ‘Sometimes, they have some basis in truth.’

  ‘You knew Archie too. He was given to wild infatuations.’

  That word again, Perez thought. Wild. That surely was the best word to describe Archie. He said nothing and waited for her to continue.

  ‘I knew it would pass,’ she said.

  ‘Did you talk to him about the woman?’

  She shook her head. ‘He would have lied. I could tolerate his flings, but not the lies.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Perez said, ‘that Archie had flings.’ Then he wondered if that was true. There had been times when the two of them had met for a drink in Kirkwall, and Archie had been high, not with drink or drugs, but some kind of excitement that had made him talk too much and laugh too much. Perez had suspected then that Archie might have come straight from a woman. But like Vaila he hadn’t asked. Not afraid of lies, but the truth. Archie was the sort of man who might have boasted about his conquests. To his best friend at least, and Perez would have hated that.

  Vaila leaned forward across the table. ‘It wasn’t the most important thing about him,’ she said. ‘His sordid encounters with women, I mean. He wasn’t at it all the time.’ She shook her head, as if the words hadn’t come out as she wanted, as if they were too crass. ‘He was easily bored, you know.’

  ‘What was the most important thing about him?’

  She looked up, straight into his eyes. ‘Us. Me and the boys. Whatever else was going on in his life, he loved us best and for ever.’

  Perez wanted to ask if Archie had loved any of his other women, if he’d loved Rosalie Greeman for example, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it and asked the question differently.

  ‘Was the relationship with the woman at Quoybrae just a fling too? Like all the others. Something that would pass?’

  There was a moment of silence, broken by the sound of sheep on the in-bye land next to the house and a plane coming in to land. Perez wondered if it were bringing reinforcements. Maybe some of his crime scene officers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vaila said. ‘Like I said he was infatuated. Less cautious. Probably because she didn’t fall for him straight away. He had to woo her, and he was always up for a challenge.’

  ‘If you didn’t talk about it, how do you know all these things?’

  ‘I’m his wife!’ It came out as a scream. ‘I’ve looked after him all these years, sorted out his scrapes. I knew him as well as I know myself.’

  ‘But this time,’ Perez said, almost to himself, ‘you couldn’t fix it.’

  ‘No. I wasn’t sure I could fix it. All I could do was wait. And hope that it would fizzle out like all the others. Or that she would tire of the island and him and move back to where she belonged.’

  Again, there was a silence. Perez could sense Ellie beside him, uncomfortable, because this wasn’t the way interviews should be conducted. This was too intense. Too personal. She shifted a little in her seat, and he was worried that she might intervene.

  ‘Tell me about the heritage centre,’ he said. His voice was normal now. More detective than priest. ‘Is it kept locked?’

  ‘Of course.’ Vaila seemed surprised by the change in tone, but grateful too. ‘There are valuable artefacts. The Westray Wife is famous. The oldest representation of a woman in Britain. We’re all fascinated by what the archaeologists found when they did their exploration.’

  ‘And there’s the Westray story stone.’

  ‘Stones,’ she said. ‘There are two of them – stones with a spiral carving. Why are you asking, Jimmy?’

  Because one of those stones killed Archie. It’s lying beside him, smeared with his blood and fragments of his scalp.

  But he didn’t answer. Instead, he asked: ‘Who has a key?’

  ‘All the committee members. I have one.’ She looked up at him. ‘Why?’

  The response, honest and open, made his heart sing. She couldn’t be guilty, could she? Then he thought of all the suspects he’d known who were liars. Brilliant liars.

  ‘You know I’ll have to talk to Miss Greeman.’

  ‘Mrs,’ Vaila said. ‘She took her husband’s name. They married just before he died.’ She paused for a moment before continuing: ‘We were friends when she first came. I was pleased. Someone of about my age bringing in a breath of the outside world. We got on so well. I loved art when I was at school. And history. There was a time when I thought I might go south to study. I was offered a place in the art school in Glasgow. We shared ideas. She took me seriously.’ Vaila was nearly in tears again. ‘I was almost angrier about Archie spoiling that friendship than about what he was doing with her. The cheating.’

  Perez nodded. He thought he understood. In a small community, it was often hard to find a soulmate.

  She looked at him. ‘What will happen now?’

  He was already on his feet and looked down at her. ‘We’ll investigate. And find out who killed Archie.’

  ‘I’ll need that.’ Her voice was desperate. ‘It’s not about revenge or justice, but I’ll need some sort of explanation to give the boys. And for me. I need to understand.’

  He thought again that he was crazy even to suspect Vaila of killing Archie Stout.

  ‘Are the boys back here? I’ll have to talk to them too.’

  ‘Lawrie’s out on the tractor. It’s as if he thinks he’s got to look after us all now and run the farm as Archie would have done. He’s grieving, Jimmy. He hasn’t cried since he was a toddler, but he was sobbing. He went outside so I couldn’t see. Iain’s upstairs, curled up and asleep. Maybe hoping it’s all a dream. Can it wait for another day?’

  Perez thought for a moment. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’

  Out in the yard, his phone rang. It was Annie from the hotel.

  ‘I’ve been in to the heritage centre, Jimmy. Both the story stones have disappeared.’ She rang off before he could thank her.

  He parked back in Pierowall and began walking up the road towards Quoybrae, curious now to meet the woman who had captivated both Archie and Vaila. He was lost in thought and the figure coming in the opposite direction towards him seemed to appear out of nowhere. The low sun was behind her, so he had to squint, and she was just a silhouette, but he knew her at once and broke into a run, excited as a boy. When he drew level with her, he took her in his arms and held her for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, that’s a nice way to talk to the mother of your children!’

  They still weren’t married. He liked the idea, but Willow had grown up on a commune in the Western Isles and he thought of her as a free spirit. He was worried that she’d laugh at him if he asked. Even after all this time together, he still didn’t feel that he entirely knew her.

  ‘I’m all there is,’ she went on. ‘There’s a technical fault on the plane that was going to bring the team from Glasgow, and besides, none of them fancy being stranded here just before Christmas if the weather closes in. The forecast isn’t great and they’re all city boys. I suspect they’ll make excuses until after the holiday.’ She laughed and his mood improved again. ‘James was very happy to stay with his Aunty Alison, who will of course fill him with sugar and let him stay up for most of the night, so here I am, on the scheduled flight from Kirkwall. Not really in an official capacity, but to provide a bit of oversight and feedback to Glasgow. I dropped my bag at the hotel. Bill said you had a room. And then I needed a bit of a walk to get a feel for the place again. You know how I work, Jimmy. It’s all about the place.’

  He nodded. He knew how she worked. ‘James will have a fine time.’

  Alison wasn’t a real aunt, but a friend and occasional childminder. James adored her.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ Perez put a hand on her belly, then quickly pulled it away. Willow hated any kind of sentiment.

  ‘Of course! I’ll leave the strenuous stuff like running after dangerous criminals and car chases to other people. My role is to listen in. And drink tea.’

  ‘Are you okay to sit in on an interview now?’

  ‘Of course. The old team. Back in action.’ She turned to him. ‘I’m so sorry about Archie, but it feels good to be back in the field again and not stuck behind a desk.’

  They walked slowly up the road, and he brought her up to speed. He sensed the intensity of her listening.

  ‘Tell me about the murder weapon.’

  ‘I recognized it,’ he said. ‘It came from the heritage centre, one of a pair of Neolithic stones. It had Norse writing on it. Apparently, that was added later. A kind of Viking graffiti.’ He paused. ‘I asked Annie to check. Both the stones have disappeared.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’ She stood still in the road. ‘A message? Premeditation?’

  He shook his head. He had no answer for her.

  Rosalie Greeman was sitting outside her house on a white bench, looking out over a small cove of sand and shingle. Perez had never been to this part of the island before, but he’d heard Archie speak of the house. Once Quoybrae would have been the grandest property on Westray, home to the laird. It had two storeys and thick stone walls. Since Perez had been visiting Westray, it had been rented out as a holiday let or short-term rental. He thought it was owned by a Shetlander, bought perhaps as some kind of investment.

  The woman was wrapped in a long fleecy coat and had her hands around a brown pottery mug. Perez could smell the coffee above the notes of salt and seaweed. She had cropped dark hair and big dark eyes.

  ‘I’ve just been for a dip,’ she said. ‘Sit here with me until I stop shivering, and then I’ll get you a drink.’

  ‘You’ve been in the sea?’ Perez was horrified. He might have grown up next to the water, but he thought of it as a dangerous place, full of treacherous tides and currents, not somewhere to play. Especially in the winter.

  ‘You get used to it. It’s become a habit. Good for the mental health, they say, and I was depressed, I think, when I first arrived in Westray. Usually, I get in early in the morning – it sets me up for the day – but today nothing is quite as usual.’

  Perez started to introduce himself, but she interrupted. ‘I know who you are. You’re just as Archie described you. Dark hair, he said, and olive skin. Descended from Spanish sailors rescued from an Armada shipwreck. Just like the Dons here in Westray. They were saved from another Armada ship that went badly astray. The Spaniards must have been crap navigators to get it wrong so often.’ She turned to Willow. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Willow Reeves. Jimmy’s boss. Kind of. On maternity leave at the moment, but here to keep an eye.’

  ‘Of course.’ Rosalie nodded and gave a little smile. Perez thought that Archie must have described Willow too. She’d understand their relationship.

  The woman got to her feet. ‘Come in. There’s still coffee hot and I’m sure you’ll have questions.’

  Perez wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. There was no sign of grief and her response to two detectives turning up on her doorstep was matter-of-fact. She’d not even broken her routine of a daily swim in the sea. It seemed cold and hard-hearted. It came to him that Archie had deserved better, but he pushed away the thought.

  Inside, the kitchen was a blast of colour. He thought this was Rosalie’s work. A rental landlord would have played it safer. One wall was painted a deep red. There was art on the others, big paintings, abstract splashes of yellow and orange. Autumn colours. Autumn colours if you lived in the south, at least. Perez was reminded of Fran, the artist who had once been the centre of his life. She’d have enjoyed this room. He’d taken Fran to Fair Isle to celebrate their engagement, and she’d died there. It occurred to him in that moment that perhaps he hadn’t discussed marriage with Willow out of a strange kind of superstition. If he proposed to her, did he think that she would die too?

  Rosalie poured coffee from a filter machine. Willow shook her head at the offer. ‘I’m trying to avoid too much caffeine.’

  So here they were in another kitchen, talking again about a dead man and who might have killed him, to a woman who might have had a motive for wanting him dead.

  Willow had taken a seat in a rocking chair next to the Rayburn, leaving Perez and the woman at the table. It seemed that she expected Perez to lead the conversation.

  ‘We’re investigating Archie Stout’s death,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ Rosalie had shed her dry robe but her fingers were still a startling red, a response to the icy water. Her hands were flat on the table as if she needed to be steadied. ‘You’ll have heard that the two of us were friends.’

  ‘Friends? Is that all you were?’ It came to Perez that the Archie he’d known had always wanted more than friendship from a woman.

  ‘We weren’t even that at first. And perhaps we were more than friends at the end, but I never slept with him, despite what all the gossips here think.’ She looked straight at Perez, challenging him to doubt her word. He’d never met anyone with such dark eyes, such black eyebrows, such a pale face.

  ‘Vaila thinks you were lovers.’ He paused. ‘Why didn’t you tell her she’d got that wrong?’

  Rosalie turned away. ‘Archie loved me. Deeply. Better that she should believe we were having some sort of fling than that I tell her that.’

  ‘Yet you didn’t have sex with him?’

  She shook her head. ‘But I was close to it, and that was another reason for not explaining to Vaila. I think it might have happened in the end.’ A pause. ‘It’s rather flattering to be adored.’

  ‘I knew Archie,’ Perez said. ‘He was never a patient kind of man.’

  ‘You think he was putting pressure on me to have sex, perhaps even that there was some kind of sexual assault, or stalking, and so I killed him?’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘No, it was nothing like that.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’ Perez thought it was safer to move on to facts. He found this relationship impossible to fathom. He was glad Willow was in the room. She might understand it better.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. He was delivering wood and he called in. He wasn’t here for long.’ She hesitated. ‘He seemed troubled.’

  ‘Did he tell you what was troubling him?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not in any detail.’

  Perez was starting to lose patience. ‘But you were close. You must have had some idea.’

  She shook her head again. ‘I don’t think it was anything to do with us, with our relationship. Maybe it was an island matter. He had a sense of responsibility, you know, for Westray. His father had been a community leader, and since he died a couple of years ago, Archie felt he should take over the mantle. They were different men though. Archie was easily bored and couldn’t step easily into his father’s shoes, so there was a kind of frustration. Yesterday, he seemed weighed down with some problem, but he said he couldn’t discuss it with me. I had the sense that it was because I was an outsider and that I wouldn’t understand.’

  There was a silence, while Perez struggled to process that.

  ‘How about later? Yesterday evening? Did you see him then?’ Perez thought Archie might have parked at the hotel to give the impression that he planned to spend the evening there, then walked out to Quoybrae.

  She paused for a moment. ‘I was expecting him,’ she said. ‘We’d planned that when he called in earlier. But he didn’t turn up. I wasn’t surprised. This time of year, the family will always come first.’ There was no trace of bitterness in her words. ‘At any time of year, I think family would have come first for Archie. I believe that he loved me, but he wouldn’t have left his wife for me.’ She looked across the table at Perez. ‘He might have been unfaithful, but he had a great sense of duty.’

  Perez nodded. He would never have described Archie in that way, but he thought it was probably true.

  ‘And that didn’t make you angry? That you always had to come second?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Rosalie said. ‘I wasn’t ready for another intense, long-term relationship.’

  There was a moment of silence before she continued speaking in a voice so low that it was almost a confession.

  ‘I was lonely when I first came here. So lonely. My husband had just died. I’d spent months of my life knowing that he would die and just trying to make the end as good as it could be. Neither of us wanted company. I was happy to care for him alone. Then he was gone, and I had nothing. No purpose. I’ve no close family and no kids, and I’d lost touch with most of my friends. Besides, I couldn’t stand their sympathy, their pity, when they did get in touch. So I ran away here. Just by chance. There’d been a documentary about the place on the radio, and it sounded magnificent. I was only going to stay for a couple of weeks, but it felt like a fresh start. There were new people who made me welcome.’