She took his hands in both of hers and then turned away. He watched until she walked around a corner and was lost from view.

  Back in his office, he looked at Vaila’s statement. There was nothing new – a list of facts and times, apparently accurate and precise. Perez supposed Phil had got what was needed, but now he regretted not talking informally to Vaila about the case when they’d been in the cafe. He could have asked about any of the conflicts within the island, the power struggles that Rosalie Greeman had mentioned. He wondered if he should have told Vaila that Archie hadn’t been having an affair with the woman, but he suspected she would have found her husband’s restraint harder to handle than any fling. Looking back, the whole encounter with Vaila had been unsatisfactory. He thought that Willow would have handled it much better.

  He phoned Willow again, but still there was no reply.

  Chapter Eight

  GODFREY LANSDOWN WAS WAITING FOR WILLOW in the residents’ lounge when she went downstairs. He still seemed nervous, but perhaps anticipating a meeting with the police could do that to you. The fire was already lit there. Annie looked in and asked if she’d like breakfast, but Willow shook her head. She’d stopped throwing up every morning months ago, but still couldn’t quite stomach anything but tea until later in the day.

  Lansdown stood up when she came in. She thought the gesture was an automatic response to a woman, not respect for her position. He seemed to belong not just to a different generation, but a different age. Willow suspected he’d be shocked that a pregnant woman was heading up the inquiry.

  He was still neat, but dressed now for outdoors in cord trousers, a jersey and thick socks. His boots and jacket would be in the flagstoned porch waiting for him. His binoculars were round his neck. Everything about him was tense. Perhaps he was shy, thrown by any contact with strangers. It occurred to her that birdwatching might attract loners.

  ‘Thanks for giving up your time. I know you just want to be out on the island.’

  ‘Of course I want to help. It’s such a tragedy. He was so young.’ There was a pause and he seemed to feel the need to explain. ‘My wife died three years ago. She was a little older than me and suffered a heart attack. Terrible for me – we’d been married for fifty years and had scarcely spent a night apart. We never had children and were everything to each other, but Mr Stout still had his life ahead of him, and a family depending on him.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Not really. I’d seen him in the bar. It would be hard to miss him. He’d be the life and soul of every party, I think.’

  ‘But you’re a regular here in Westray. You must have come to know the locals.’

  The challenge to his answer seemed to throw the man. He was silent for a moment, before speaking again. Upstairs there was the distant buzz of a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘My wife and I took early retirement. We were both civil servants with a decent pension, the mortgage all paid, and as I said, no dependants. We came to Orkney first on an island cruise. A retirement present to ourselves. There was just one day in Orkney, and that was on the mainland. We took the classic coach tour taking in the tourist sites, Brodgar, Stenness and Maeshowe. But we fell in love with the place and returned independently. Westray was our favourite island. We loved the beauty and the history of course, but more than that, we found it very friendly.’ He looked up at Willow, struggling to explain in more detail. ‘It’s such an optimistic and positive place. The people here seem open to new ideas, to starting new enterprises. Edith was a very positive woman, and she loved the islanders’ attitude. Her ashes were scattered into the sea at Grobust, close to where Mr Stout’s body was found. His murder feels somehow like a personal insult. A desecration.’

  Willow stayed silent. Through the window she saw a young mother walk past with a toddler in a pushchair. Godfrey still hadn’t answered her question. He hesitated for a moment, but then he continued, pleased perhaps to have the opportunity to talk about his wife.

  ‘Edith was much more outgoing than me. She loved a party too. People took to her. She was interested in them, and she made them laugh. One of the reasons we returned every year was because we felt the islanders had become friends. Some of them, at least. We knew Archie’s parents well enough to invite them to have dinner with us here, and we went to their house for a meal. The last night of each holiday. It had become a kind of ritual.’ He looked up again and there was a ghost of a smile. ‘We always boarded the ferry next morning with a terrible hangover. We weren’t big drinkers. But no, we didn’t really know Archie. He’d married and moved away from the family home by the time we first visited, though of course he’s back there now. He was of a different generation.’

  ‘Archie’s parents died too.’

  ‘Within a year of each other,’ Godfrey said. ‘Magnus first and then May. They were older than us and of course they’d had a harder life. Farming isn’t easy. Edith passed away soon after. I didn’t think I’d ever come back, but she’d always said that she’d like her ashes brought here, to the place where she’d been so happy. I couldn’t refuse her that last gift.’

  ‘And you kept coming back?’

  Lansdown nodded. ‘I’m an anxious man. Not brave like Edith. I couldn’t imagine travelling somewhere strange, but I needed to get away from my house occasionally. Birdwatching had always been a hobby, but it became something of an obsession. A distraction, I suppose. Something to take my mind off my loss. I’m writing a natural history of the island. It won’t be a book. Nothing so grand. A pamphlet for people who might be interested. It’s nearly completed. The heritage centre will take it and sell it. I don’t need to make any money from it, so they’ll keep the profit.’

  ‘You know the people who run the heritage centre?’

  ‘It’s run by a committee of islanders, I think. Annie, who owns the hotel, is a leading light. She’s my main contact.’

  Willow made a note of that, but she already knew that Annie and Bill had access to a key, and so to the stone that was the murder weapon. She turned back to the man.

  ‘I need to ask you your movements the evening that Archie Stout disappeared. You do understand. It’s routine. We’ll be asking everyone.’

  ‘Of course, Inspector.’ His voice was formal again, a little distant. Perhaps he regretted having told her so much about his personal life. ‘I was out on the island until it got dark. My work is almost finished, but I wanted to take photos so I could add some illustrations. The weather was wild and stormy, and there were some breathtaking waves breaking over the jetty. In the fading light, the scene was dramatic. Just what I wanted.’ A pause. ‘Edith always loved a good gale.’

  ‘And once it got dark?’

  ‘I came back here to the hotel. I had a shower and changed before coming down to dinner. I eat early these days. Then I went into the bar for a last drink, just as Vaila Stout came in looking for her husband. At first there was a lot of joking about where he might be. Now, that seems in rather poor taste. Later, I understand, everyone went out to look for him. I wasn’t a part of the search team. I’d already gone to bed.’

  ‘Did you have any contact with the other hotel guests, the Johnsons? Were you with them the evening before? The night Archie went missing?’

  ‘Ah, they’ve been very kind to me. They don’t like to see me sitting on my own and always join me if we’re in the bar together.’ He looked up at Willow and the smile returned briefly. ‘Honestly, I’d rather be left to read in peace. As I explained, I’m not a very sociable man, and we have so very little in common, but it would be churlish to ask them to leave me alone. I didn’t see them the night Archie went missing though. I’m sure they have more pleasurable things to do on a dark winter’s evening than making small talk to an elderly gent.’

  Willow smiled back at him. She found herself warming to him. There was something brave about his honesty and his determination to face the reality of his loneliness. The lack of self-pity. ‘That’s been very helpful,’ she said. ‘Did you see Archie at all on this visit? If you were close to his parents, you must have known him by sight.’

  ‘Only to wave to if I saw him on his farm or out on the tractor. A brief word when we bumped into each other in here.’ A pause. ‘I’m not sure that he and his parents entirely saw eye to eye about island affairs. I never quite understood the details. Magnus represented Westray on the island council, and there was an expectation that Archie might take over the role, but it never happened. Vaila’s father Tom was voted in instead. I suspect that May might have had something to do with that. Magnus died first.’

  Willow understood something of the complication of island politics. She’d grown up with them at home in the Hebrides. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I’ll know where you are, if I need to speak to you again.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ll be here for another couple of weeks, until after New Year. I come every year now.’ He paused. ‘It sounds ridiculous but it’s a way of spending Christmas with Edith.’

  Although it was already nine-thirty, she found the Johnsons still in the dining room. They hadn’t even ordered breakfast, though there was tea and coffee on the table. Annie was hovering waiting for them.

  ‘Oh, sorry! We slept in. And then we saw you were still chatting to Godfrey, so we thought we’d have something to eat before Annie stopped serving.’ Barbara smiled, as if she was sure Willow would understand. ‘The full breakfast for us both please, Annie.’

  ‘Would you like your baked beans hot or cold?’

  ‘Hot of course. Who on earth eats cold beans?’

  ‘Westray folk.’ Annie turned sharply away.

  Willow couldn’t help smiling to herself. Vaila had served her cold beans when she’d stayed over at Nistaben after a party, and she’d been about to comment when Perez had explained. Cold beans was a Westray thing. Almost a statement of identity and pride. An odd form of patriotism.

  Now, they were alone in the place and Willow thought this would do as well for a talk as anywhere. Tony Johnson was looking at his phone and had barely looked up.

  ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ Barbara said. ‘We can always ask for more.’

  ‘Tea, please.’ She found a cup and saucer on a sideboard under the window and pulled up a seat to join them. ‘Tell me what you’re doing in Westray.’

  ‘We came first as part of a university project.’ Again, Barbara spoke for them both, though Tony did stop looking at his phone to help himself to more coffee and seemed to be listening.

  ‘We were volunteering on a dig,’ he said. ‘Both university students, looking for adventure. I was at Durham and Barbara was at Bangor, so it was this place that brought us together. It’s forty years since we met here as youngsters, so we thought we’d come back to celebrate the anniversary.’

  ‘You were digging over Christmas?’ Willow thought that with frosty ground or torrential rain it would be hard going.

  Barbara laughed. ‘No! It was hard enough work in the summer. But our kids wanted to do their own thing this year, so we thought why not? Neither of us is really into the traditional Christmas nonsense. The anniversary year gave us an excuse to escape.’

  Annie appeared with the breakfasts. Willow waited until the couple had started eating before she continued with her questions.

  ‘And that was the last time you visited the island? When you were students in the 1980s?’

  ‘No.’ The man spoke now. ‘We came back in 2006 when the Noltland site was opened up again. I brought a couple of PhD students for the whole summer. Barbara visited a few times. We got more friendly with the islanders then, perhaps because we were older and less wrapped up in our own group.’

  ‘Do you both still work in archaeology?’

  ‘Tony does,’ Barbara said. ‘He’s back in Durham but now he’s a prof. It was never my true passion and I moved on to arts management. I look after a little community arts centre in Gateshead. A bit of a nightmare with all the funding cuts but great fun.’

  Willow couldn’t imagine either of these people experiencing any kind of bad dream. It seemed to her that they’d float through life cushioned by a regular income, the prospect of a decent pension, and a mortgage paid off years ago. There was a smugness about them, a complacency. But she knew that was probably unfair. How could she judge their lives on one meeting?

  ‘Are you still involved in the archaeology here in Westray?’

  Tony shook his head. ‘Not since the dig in 2006.’ He had his hand over his phone and Willow could tell that he was itching to look at it again. What could be so important? ‘Since then, I moved on from the Neolithic to quite a different field. I’m interested in the Nordic influence on our culture. The people popularly known as the Vikings.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about the story stones? If you were here in the eighties, that must have been around the time that they were found.’

  ‘We were here as students when they were discovered.’ Barbara sounded excited. ‘Not by us unfortunately, but it was the beach party celebrating the find of the stones that brought Tony and me together. A lot of Spanish wine followed by cheap whisky can do that to you.’ She looked across at her husband with a smile. ‘And that influenced your later research, didn’t it, Tony? The runes carved into the stones intrigued you from the beginning.’

  Willow directed her attention back to the man. ‘Could you explain?’

  Now Tony turned into lecturer mode. ‘The stones are certainly Neolithic. They’re made of Caithness flagstone like much of Maeshowe.’ He looked at her to see if she understood the reference to the burial mound on Orkney mainland. She nodded and he continued. ‘Our stones were part of a similar chamber here in Westray. We think at least part of that structure was still standing when the Vikings came to Orkney. One side of each stone has picked traditional Neolithic spirals. The other was carved much later with runes. Viking graffiti.’

  ‘And you can tell what those runes say?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t then, but I can now after nearly twenty years of research. We can’t tell the exact date of the carving, because of course carbon dating would only give us the age of the stone, which we already know is Neolithic. One says: “I am Olaf, teller of tales.” The other: “Hear my stories and know death.”’

  ‘So that’s why they’re called the story stones?’ Despite her antipathy to the man, Willow was fascinated.

  Johnson nodded.

  ‘Were they one stone originally, and split into two later?’

  ‘No. We think they always were two separate stones, and that they were chosen for the later Viking decoration because they were so evenly matched. They’re each larger and squarer than a modern house brick. We believed that they were used originally as part of the entrance to a Neolithic burial chamber, then stolen by the Vikings to form part of a building for communal feasting.’

  ‘And now the stones stand in the heritage centre?’

  Or they did, until someone used one of them to kill Archie Stout. And the other has disappeared.

  That was a piece of information they had so far managed to keep secret.

  Johnson nodded again. ‘They were held in the museum in Kirkwall until the centre was built and then they were brought back here.’

  ‘Did you know Archie Stout?’

  ‘We knew his parents better,’ Barbara said. ‘May and Magnus. A few of us stayed in their holiday rental on that first visit in the eighties. They were so kind and did seem very interested in everything to do with the dig. May would come along to volunteer sometimes. Magnus would drop off crab if he’d been out with his creel boat and we’d invite them to our parties. They were farming Nistaben then and Archie was just a lad. Mischievous, into everything.’

  ‘They died,’ Willow said.

  ‘They must have been quite elderly,’ Barbara said. ‘I think Archie was a late child. The first son was already away to school in Kirkwall when we were here as students. They were still alive in 2006 and I got to know them better then. Because I wasn’t officially working, I had more time for visiting islanders. They were always up for tea, homebakes and chatting.’

  ‘When did you last see Archie?’

  ‘The afternoon before he disappeared,’ Barbara said. Now that Tony wasn’t talking about the stones, he seemed to have lost interest again in the conversation, and his hand twitched back towards the phone on the table. ‘We were here in Pierowall walking down the street past the shop, and he was just coming out. We stopped for a moment to chat.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  Barbara looked at her husband. ‘I’m not sure. A bit distracted? We’ve been talking about it since we heard he was dead. Because we know what happened later, we wondered if we’ve been reading too much into it.’

  ‘I know what you mean. We all make up stories in our heads after any kind of drama. I’m interested in your impression though.’

  ‘Usually, he was very friendly,’ Barbara said. ‘He’d take time to chat. Reminiscences of when we were staying in his parents’ cottage. He remembered that summer with great fondness, I think. He was the sort of man who wanted to be liked, a big character. We’ve met him in here in the hotel a few times, and he could switch on his personality like a light as soon as he had any sort of audience. He became more alive. But that afternoon, it was as if he hardly saw us. I wondered if he’d had bad news and called after him to ask after Vaila and the boys, in case one of them was ill. He just muttered a response and turned his back on us. It was almost rude.’

  ‘It was rude.’ Now the temptation became too strong, and Tony picked up his phone. ‘I’m sorry, there are some work calls I need to make.’

  ‘I won’t be much longer,’ Willow said, her voice mild. ‘This is a murder inquiry and I’m sure you want to help. Where did Archie go after he left you?’

  ‘He was walking, and he came this way. Towards the hotel,’ Barbara said.