Thin Air: (Shetland book 6) Read Online Free Page B

through the open windows. She pushed on the door and went inside. Lowrie stood on a stepladder in the main hall and was taking down the bunting. In London he worked as an accountant for a big retail chain, and was always very respectable in jacket and tie. Now he was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a round Fair Isle hat shaped like a pork pie. He grinned and waved. The sound of the vacuum cleaner came from a smaller room, where they’d eaten supper the night before. It stopped and Caroline came through.
    ‘So you’ve come to help at last!’ she said. ‘About time too. We’ve nearly finished.’ She was big-boned and blonde. ‘We were just about to have a drink to celebrate clearing up. Apparently that’s traditional too.’
    ‘Is Eleanor here?’
    ‘No! Isn’t she sleeping off her hangover?’ Caroline took the string of bunting from her husband and started to wind it into a ball.
    ‘She didn’t sleep at Sletts last night,’ Polly said. ‘We don’t know where she is. Ian was so worried that he called the police. A couple of officers came from Lerwick and the inspector’s talking to him now. The coastguards are doing a search of the cliffs.’
    Lowrie climbed down the ladder. ‘She’ll surely not have gone far.’ He sounded so matter-of-fact that Polly could tell he thought they were overreacting. City people, so sensitized to crime that they saw it everywhere. Perhaps he was embarrassed that they’d caused this fuss, dragging police officers across two islands and two ferries because a woman had wanted to experience the strange Shetland night alone. But now it was lunchtime and there was still no sign of Eleanor. And she’d sent that weird email.
    ‘She sent me this message,’ Polly tried to keep her voice calm, ‘saying not to bother looking for her. Saying that we’d never see her alive again.’ And at that point she began to cry.
    They took her into Lowrie’s parents’ house and sat her in a tall wooden chair in the kitchen and made her tea. After the sunshine it seemed very dark in the house, all shadow and dust. There was a rack over a Rayburn where dozens of tea towels were folded and hanging to dry. Presumably they’d been used the night before and already washed. The room seemed to Polly to be impossibly cluttered. How could they find anything in the chaos of fading magazines, knitting wool and vegetables? There was a faint smell of sheep and mould. She hated disorder and found it physically repellent. Weren’t they embarrassed to bring guests to a house that was so untidy?
    There was no sign of Lowrie’s parents.
    ‘I know’, she said, ‘that it’s ridiculous, and I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. But Eleanor’s been so fragile lately. Losing the baby and all that talk of haunting and ghosts. When the policeman said you’d all be in the hall, I thought, Of course, she’ll be there. I couldn’t stand being in that house any longer. And then, when you hadn’t seen her, I knew something dreadful must have happened.’
    The room was very warm and she felt that she might fall asleep in the hard chair, and when she woke up all this would be a dream.
    ‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Caroline said. ‘There might be some news.’
    Her voice sounded hard, detached, as if she didn’t care about Eleanor at all. Why wasn’t she more upset? Polly had the idea that Caroline just wanted her out of the house before her in-laws returned. Perhaps a hysterical friend would reflect badly on her. Caroline was an academic, always measured and precise. It also occurred to Polly that Caroline might not believe her story and that she wanted to check out the facts of Eleanor’s disappearance for herself.
    They took a different route back to the holiday cottage. Caroline led the way through the garden where hens scratched behind wire mesh, over a stile and onto short cropped grass. She seemed very at home here.
    ‘Would you ever live in Shetland?’ Polly asked suddenly. ‘Would