Markham shrugged. ‘He’d asked if I could get him into Sullom Voe. Did I still have any contacts there? I thought there’d be nothing at the terminal that would interest the paper. The oil’s running out, after all. That place is old news. But I arranged for him to visit the press officer.’

‘And that was where he was today?’

‘Yes,’ Markham said. ‘That was where he was today. We were expecting him back for dinner; when he didn’t turn up, we thought he’d bumped into old friends. You know how it is here, coming back. I tried to phone, but there was no answer. No reception, we thought. It never occurred to me that anything would have happened to him. We worried about him sometimes in London. But not here. Here we expect everyone to be safe.’

He was still talking when Sandy stood up. Sandy thought Markham was reluctant now to let the detective go. His face was tight with the effort of holding himself together. With just Maria for company, he’d not manage it.

Sandy drove north again. The windows were still lit in Jimmy’s house. He wanted to stop and ask advice. What should I do first? Tell me how I should run things. But he drove past and went to the office, got onto the computer to check the registration number of Jerry Markham’s car, phoned Davy Cooper, who was on watch at the marina, and asked him to wander round the car park and see if it was there. Sandy hadn’t noticed it, and he thought he would have noticed such a flash car. Morag had left a note that she’d fixed accommodation for the Inverness team in Lerwick.

Sandy returned to his flat in the early hours of the morning. He switched on the television, with the sound very low – a young family lived underneath him and he didn’t want to wake them. He drank a can of Tennent’s without bothering to get a glass, then set his alarm clock and went to bed. He slept immediately. Even when he was worried, Sandy Wilson had no trouble sleeping. Jimmy Perez had always said that was a gift. Sandy thought it was one of the few he possessed.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six