Perez would have preferred that, but he didn’t like to say so. He nodded for the man to sit down, buttered a piece of bread and dipped it into the soup. ‘Can I buy you a pint?’

‘Nah,’ Brodie said. ‘I’m working this afternoon.’

‘When did Jerry Markham arrive?’

‘Thursday morning straight from the ferry. He screeched up in that flash car of his and Peter and Maria came down to the dining room to have breakfast with him. The return of the prodigal son. Nothing was too much trouble for him. Chef had a full restaurant and he was none too pleased. Jerry didn’t seem himself, though. Quieter somehow. I wondered if he might be ill.’

‘Was he a prodigal son?’ Perez dipped another bread roll into the soup. He found it strange that the questions came so easily to him.

Brodie shrugged again. He had a good line in expressive shrugs. ‘He left under a bit of a cloud,’ he said. ‘Got one of the chambermaids here pregnant. Not a hanging offence these days, but she was quite an innocent soul. Grew up on Fetlar, to a religious family. She might not have expected him to marry her, but she looked for more support than she got. So did her parents.’

‘What was the name of the lass?’ Perez had never heard this story. But then he’d been living in his house in Lerwick when it had happened. Fran might have known about it, might even have told him. She’d come up with snippets of gossip when he visited, but he’d had his mind on other things then.

‘Evie Watt. She worked here over the summer before she went off to university.’

‘Francis’s daughter?’ Francis Watt was well known in the islands. He did a column in the Shetland Times every week about island traditions. He was probably the only man in Shetland to regret the coming of the oil.

‘Aye.’

‘Did she keep the baby?’

‘I think she intended to, but then she had a miscarriage. Maybe it was for the best, eh?’

Perez thought that an outsider, and especially a man, couldn’t really say what was for the best when a woman had lost a baby. His ex-wife Sarah had suffered a miscarriage and things had never been the same between them afterwards. She had a brood now with her second husband, a Lowland GP, and they lived in an old farmhouse in the Borders.

‘Does Evie still work here?’ Perez asked.

Brodie pulled a face. ‘What do you think? This is the last place she’d want to spend her time. She’d never know when Jerry would appear from the south to catch up with his folks.’