Maria recovered herself quickly. She straightened her jacket and sat down again. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that Jerry would have told me in his own time if he’d found someone special. Perhaps that’s why he’d made the effort to come home. He wanted to tell us personally, not by phone. He’d know that we’d be delighted.’

‘Would you?’

‘Of course. We only wanted him to be happy.’

They were early at Sumburgh airport and the plane was a little delayed, so they sat, drinking tea, waiting for Markham’s girlfriend to arrive.

‘What did you make of Maria?’ Willow Reeves looked smarter today, Sandy thought. Maybe she’d had time to iron her skirt in the hotel bedroom, and she’d coiled her hair into a twist at the back of her head and fixed it with a comb.

‘She seemed kind of crazy,’ he said. ‘But she’s just lost her son.’

‘Could she have killed Henderson, do you think?’ Willow asked. ‘In revenge for Jerry?’

‘If she’d thought Henderson had killed her son? Yes, I do.’ Sandy shivered slightly. A kind of disgust at the thought. Before Willow could answer, through the window beyond the baggage belt they saw that the plane had arrived. They stood up to cross the hall and meet Jerry Markham’s new woman.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Annabel Grey wasn’t alone.

Standing beside Sandy, watching the passengers walk across the airstrip to the terminal, Willow tried to guess which of these women was Markham’s girlfriend. Sandy had said she sounded very young. There was a small dark girl in a duffel coat and striped scarf, but she was waving to her waiting parents even before she came into the building. Not her then. Nor the smart lass in the trouser suit carrying a briefcase, who headed straight for the car-hire desk. Willow thought that she and Sandy should have prepared a card with Grey’s name on it and should have stood there like the taxi drivers collecting the gas contractors.

In the end Markham’s girlfriend approached them. She came straight towards them after coming down the narrow corridor from the tarmac – no bag to collect, just a small rucksack over her shoulder. And beside her walked a tall, distinguished man. Grey-haired, tanned from a winter holiday in the sun. Or skiing. Willow thought he might be a skier. He carried a leather holdall.

‘You must be Sandy.’ The woman spoke as if he was the only one that mattered, as if Willow was quite invisible.

And Sandy blushed and muttered that he was. He’d become a schoolboy again because this woman was startlingly beautiful, film-star lovely. Tall and blonde with a wide mouth and a slender body, and Sandy wasn’t sure how to respond to her at all. Her eyes were red from crying.