‘I’ll be on the ferry from Yell soon. If you can meet me at Toft in half an hour we can talk then.’ In the background she heard engine noise and gulls. She wondered what he’d been up to and felt a small stab of anger. Did he think he had the right to play private detective and ignore her completely? But she was curious and knew she’d do exactly what he said. She looked at her map and headed north again.

On the road towards Sullom Voe terminal she saw the stuffed images of Evie Watt and John Henderson, the life-size photos still intact on the faces despite the weather, held around the heads with thin elastic. Evie’s had slipped a bit and the straw was spilling out of the pillowcase. Willow remembered that there’d been a discussion of Evie’s hen party in the bar at Voe and thought the same friends must have made the models for a laugh. Willow wondered briefly who she’d invite to her hen party, then decided the question was academic: she wasn’t the marrying kind.

She’d slowed down to look at the dummies dressed up in the wedding finery and was about to continue when something made her change her mind. Instead she pulled her car onto the verge, got out and walked back to look at them more closely. She was interested to know what Evie’s fiancé looked like and she still had twenty minutes before she’d arranged to meet Jimmy Perez. Walking through the long grass, she saw there were irises and marsh marigolds in the ditch. Not in flower yet, but in a few weeks they’d look magnificent. She wouldn’t see them because she’d be long gone by then, the murderer in custody. She hoped. Getting closer, she thought the hen-party lasses had gone to a lot of trouble. Real shoes on the feet. A frilly white dress on the girl model. But on the other – not a suit as she’d expected, but navy-blue trousers and jacket. On the jacket a red-and-white lapel badge. The male dummy, which had previously been propped up on the bank, had slipped and was lying in longer grass. It was only as she looked down at it that she saw real hands and, behind the photographic mask, real skin, real hair.

A moment of panic. This was too close to a horror movie, to childhood fairy stories of a puppet coming to life. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Then she lifted the mask gently with the end of her pen, stretching the elastic that fixed it in place. The face beneath it coincided exactly with the glossy picture on the photograph. John Henderson was lying dead beside the figure of his bride-to-be.

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One