‘But he came home threatening to leave the university,’ George said. ‘You even thought he might kill himself! You called her a witch.’

‘I was overreacting,’ Grusche said. ‘And so was he. He found Caroline, who is sensible and not given to games.’

‘But that was the sort of woman Eleanor was, Jimmy.’ It seemed to Perez that George thought carefully about every word before he spoke it, that he was trying to convey a special message hidden behind the words. ‘She was a generous person and warm and funny. But she wasn’t very kind. She wasn’t aware of anyone’s pleasure but her own, and she was always after excitement.’

Perez looked at the man. He thought George had been brooding about all this since Eleanor Longstaff’s body had been discovered. ‘Is there anything else you think I should know?’

The man hesitated and then he shook his head. ‘No. But when I heard that someone had killed her, I wasn’t surprised.’

Chapter Thirteen

Willow Reeves watched the hearse from Lerwick drive away with the body, past Sletts, until it disappeared behind the Meoness community hall, where two days ago the victim had been dancing. From this distance the vehicle looked like a shiny beetle, and sunlight bounced from its black paint. Eleanor Longstaff would be in the boat south tonight and in Dr Grieve’s Aberdeen mortuary tomorrow.

She turned to look at Vicki Hewitt at work. So far the crime-scene manager had found little to excite her close to where Eleanor’s body had been lying. The ground was too dry for footwear marks and the heather grew right to the edge of the loch. No mud or sand. When they’d lifted the woman from the water they’d seen the blow to the head, just as James Grieve had predicted. There’d been bloodstains on the back of the expensive silk dress; spatters that had remained even though the body had been underwater for some time and the material was soaking. And there were other marks that might have been grass or soil.

‘Does this mean she was killed elsewhere and carried here? That the blood dried into the fabric before she was placed in the loch?’ If so, why? Because the place had a special significance? To make Eleanor look perfect?

‘Dragged rather than carried.’ Vicki’s words were muffled by her mask. She pointed to where the heather had been flattened in places, the stalks snapped. ‘Not conclusive of course, because the vegetation damage could have been caused by walkers in heavy boots any time in the last couple of weeks, but it’s possible, don’t you think? Dragging would explain the grass stains on the back of the dress. And I don’t think she was murdered very far away. I didn’t see any damage to the vegetation near the stile.’ She began moving in slow sweeps, bent almost double, parting the bog grasses and heather with her gloved hands. She stopped where the grass was shorter, cropped by sheep, then bent again and picked up an object so small that Willow couldn’t make it out, and slipped it into an evidence bag.