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Back Red Bones Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. ANNCLEEVES
  2. Contents
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-one
  24. Chapter Twenty-two
  25. Chapter Twenty-three
  26. Chapter Twenty-four
  27. Chapter Twenty-five
  28. Chapter Twenty-six
  29. Chapter Twenty-seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-one
  34. Chapter Thirty-two
  35. Chapter Thirty-three
  36. Chapter Thirty-four
  37. Chapter Thirty-five
  38. Chapter Thirty-six
  39. Chapter Thirty-seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-eight
  41. Chapter Thirty-nine
  42. Chapter Forty
  43. Chapter Forty-one
  44. Chapter Forty-two
  45. Chapter Forty-three
  46. Chapter Forty-four
  47. Chapter Forty-five
  48. Acknowledgements

It wasn’t just a coat. It was his grandmother, looking very small inside the yellow jacket. He thought she was hardly bigger than a doll, thin, her arms and legs like twigs. He touched her face, which was cold and smooth as wax, felt for a pulse. He supposed he should call for the doctor, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen, paralysed by shock and by the need to take in the information that Mima was dead. He looked down at her face, chalk white against the muddy ground. This isn’t Mima, he thought. It can’t be. There’s been some terrible mistake. But of course it was his grandmother; he looked at the ill-fitting teeth and the wispy white hair and felt sick and very sober at the same time. He didn’t trust his judgement though. He was Sandy Wilson, who always got things wrong. Maybe he’d fumbled for the pulse and she was really alive and breathing fine.

He picked her up in his arms to carry her indoors. He couldn’t bear to leave her here out in the cold. It was only when he had her in the kitchen that he saw the wounds in her stomach and the blood.

Chapter Six

Inspector Jimmy Perez arrived in Whalsay on the first ferry. He was there at Laxo, the terminal on the west of Shetland mainland, waiting on the pier when the boat arrived from Symbister. There was no one else in the queue; that time of the morning traffic was mostly the other way: folks coming off the smaller island for work in town, teenagers too old for the Whalsay Junior High, still half asleep, on their way to meet the bus for Lerwick. He watched the ferry approaching, waited for the half-dozen cars to leave and the gaggle of sixth-year students for Anderson High to walk off to the waiting bus, then he started his engine. Billy Watt was working the ferry today. The crew were all Whalsay men; that was how it worked with the inter-island ferries. Billy waved Perez’s car into position, watched while he drove slowly forward so his bumper was inches off the iron ramp, then gave a genial nod. Whalsay was known as the friendly island; it was famous for the way folk waved when cars passed on the road. When he came to take Perez’s money, Billy didn’t ask what the detective was doing there. He didn’t need to: by now most of the people in Whalsay would have heard about Mima Wilson’s accident.