Now he thought the suicide was too much of a coincidence. The mystery southerner had been clearly distraught, unbalanced even. The dead man had been found only a few hundred yards from the Herring House, where the stranger had last been seen. Perez hadn’t considered the possibility that he would take his own life. He felt guilty that he’d been so careless, responsible for a stranger he’d only once met. Then he tried to form in his head the words he’d use to explain the situation to Fran. Would she blame him for the man’s suicide? And hoping against the odds that, when he reached the hut by the Biddista pier, he would find that someone altogether different had killed himself.

He took the road north and west through Whiteness. Here twisted fingers of land ran into the sea and it was hard to tell where the line of the coast lay. There were lochs and inlets, so the land beyond looked like islands. In the low meadows flowers everywhere – buttercups, campion, orchids which his mother would have been able to name. In this light, at this time of the year, on impulse visitors bought up the old houses for second homes.

The road narrowed, became single-track with occasional passing places, then turned a bend in the hill, so Perez could see Biddista laid out in front of him. The cemetery, then the Herring House, close to the beach, the hut on the jetty, and beyond that, three terraced single-storey houses. The largest held the post office and shop. Then the track wound on past the Manse where Bella Sinclair lived until it came to Kenny Thomson’s croft. Once the community had been bigger. There were traces of ruined houses in a number of Kenny’s fields. He’d bought up the land steadily as folk moved out, either too old to carry on crofting or because they could get a better wage working for the council in Lerwick. Now the houses would be tarted up and sold for a fortune, but when he’d started expanding the croft there was no demand for them and he’d got the land dirt-cheap. The kirk had been pulled down years before when the population declined, the stone carried away for use throughout the island. Now this was all there was to Biddista, a community isolated from the rest of the island by the hill on one side and the sea on the other.

Sandy’s car was pulled in to the side of the road. He was sitting on the harbour wall smoking a cigarette. Perez, who had worked for a time in Aberdeen and dealt with more real crime in a month there than Sandy had in his entire career, wondered what he would do with the butt when he was finished. Throw it on to the ground and contaminate a possible crime scene? Instead, seeing Perez approach, Sandy stood up, pinched out the cigarette and hurled it into the tide. A different sort of pollution.

‘Where were you?’ Sandy asked. ‘I tried to phone you at home.’

Perez ignored the question and Sandy didn’t follow it up. He was used to being ignored.

‘I let Kenny get on back to his place,’ he said. ‘No point him staying around here and we’ll know where to find him. He was in a bit of a state. It hasn’t bothered me so much. It doesn’t look real, does it? With that thing over his face.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? You’ll see.’

Perez walked to the shed, stood in the doorway and looked in. The body hung from a thick noose tied to a rafter close to the apex of the pitched roof. The face was turned away from them, but Perez recognized the clothes. Black trousers, black linen jacket. Only when he went a few steps further forward did he see the mask, grinning. He felt suddenly sick, but forced himself to look into the hut again. He took in the scene, the overturned bucket. On the face of it this was certainly suicide.

Sandy had come up behind him. ‘The doctor will come as soon as he can,’ he said. ‘But he might be a while. There’s an emergency call-out. I said that was all right. Our man isn’t going anywhere.’ Sandy had an anxious-to-please, peerie-boy air about him still. It made Perez want to reassure him that he was doing OK, even when he got things wrong.

‘Good. Who did you get hold of?’

‘That new man who’s just moved in at Whiteness.’ Sandy paused. ‘What do you think’s going on there, with the mask?’

‘I don’t know.’ Perez had found it so disturbing that he’d turned his back on the hanging man. It was the bare shininess of it, the manic grin. After the gloom in the shed, the sunlight, reflected from the water, hurt his eyes for a moment.

‘He must be a tourist,’ Sandy said, with absolute certainty. ‘Not anyone from Biddista at least. Not according to Kenny. He could tell that without seeing the face. And a place this small, he’d know. I haven’t checked his belongings for identity. You said not to touch.’

‘Good,’ Perez said again, distracted. He was remembering the man the night before, standing with the linings of his pockets pulled out. There would be nothing to identify him in his clothes. He began to run through the process he’d follow to trace him. Phone calls to hotels and guesthouses. Check with NorthLink and British Airways. They might have to wait until the man failed to turn up for his return trip south before they got a name for him. This time of year there were more visitors than locals on the islands. Despite himself he was interested. What had led first to the loss of memory and then for the man to become so desperate that he took his own life?

‘What do you think the mask is about?’ Sometimes he asked Sandy questions, not expecting much of an answer, but because he wanted to make him think, hoping that it might become a habit.

‘I don’t know. Making some sort of statement, maybe?’

What sort of statement? That his life had been a joke? He hadn’t been laughing much the night before.

‘I’m sure I saw the man last night,’ Perez said. ‘He was one of the guests at the Herring House party.’ Then, as the thought suddenly occurred to him, ‘I wonder where he got hold of the mask? He certainly didn’t have it on him then.’

This time Sandy didn’t answer. I shouldn’t have left the man alone, Perez thought. He was frightened of being left alone.

‘Do you mind waiting here for the doctor? I’ll go and chat to Kenny Thomson. He might have some idea who the dead man might be, where he was staying. If someone in Biddista has been taking paying guests, Kenny will know.’

Sandy shrugged. ‘It seems a weird sort of place for a visitor to want to stay. What would you do all day here?’

‘Look at it, man. The peace. Nothing to do. This is what they come for.’

Sandy looked out across the water. ‘It’s more likely he came up from Lerwick specially, chose the loneliest sort of spot he could find to do away with himself.’

But Perez thought he hadn’t just come here to kill himself. He’d been at the party for a reason.

Chapter Six

Perez walked up the track to Kenny Thomson’s house. He was very tired now and his brain felt sluggish. He thought the exercise might make him more alert. Skoles, the Thomson place, was more like a farm than a croft. Since he’d bought up the land all around him Kenny had more sheep than he needed for his own use and there were cows in one of the low parks near the house. But everything was still done in the old way. Perez liked that. A field of tatties just coming up, the lines straight and true, and a field of neeps. In lots of places crofters were selling sites for new housing, but it seemed Kenny hadn’t been tempted to go down that route.

Perez tried to remember when he’d talked to Kenny last, but couldn’t think. He might have nodded to him in town, bumped into him at Sumburgh or in the bar on the ferry. But Kenny was more than a casual acquaintance. The year of Perez’s sixteenth birthday, Kenny had spent the whole of one summer in Fair Isle and they’d worked together. It was the time they did the major work on the harbour in the North Haven. Kenny had been brought in to oversee the building work and Perez had been one of the labourers, his first proper job over the school holidays. He still remembered the blisters, the aching back and the ease with which Kenny, twenty years his senior, slender and dark then, could lift a Calor cylinder under each arm when he helped the islanders unload the boat, the way he could work all day at the same pace without seeming to get tired.