White Nights by Ann Cleeves

the shop was the place for gossip, but Aggie never encouraged it. She sat behind the counter. Her book would be face down, but you could tell she was waiting to get back to it. She still seemed preoccupied by the story, indifferent to the rumours being spread.
    ‘Do you have no idea who he is?’ she asked.
    ‘I couldn’t see his face,’ Kenny said. ‘It was covered with a mask. A clown’s mask.’
    ‘Jimmy Perez said that too.’ She paused, fixed him with her eyes. ‘It couldn’t have been Lawrence?’
    She waited for Kenny to consider the possibility, watched for a reaction, and when none came she went on. ‘Martin described him to me. He saw him alive. Might have been the last person to see him alive. I just couldn’t help thinking . . .’
    ‘The dead man is English,’ Kenny said. ‘He spoke with an English accent. Perez told me.’
    ‘Lawrence has been away for a long time. He might speak differently now.’
    ‘You’re talking as if you want it to be Lawrence,’ he said.
    ‘No!’
    ‘I would have recognized him,’ Kenny said stubbornly. ‘Even without seeing his face.’
    ‘Would you? Really? How long is it since he’s beenhere? Years. Certainly he left before Alice was born and I can’t mind any visits.’
    Kenny tried to fix a picture of his brother in his mind. To see his height, the proportions of his body. He thought of the man he’d seen the night before loping down the track. Could that have been Lawrence?
    ‘When’s the last time you heard from him?’ Aggie asked.
    Kenny knew exactly, but he wasn’t going to tell Aggie. He wasn’t going to admit that Lawrence cared so little for him that there’d been nothing but a second-hand message left with Bella. ‘Lawrence says he’s going away again. He told me to tell you.’ Kenny hadn’t even been there to say goodbye when his brother left. Perhaps Lawrence had chosen the moment especially. He’d known that Kenny would persuade him to stay.
    ‘The man in the hut isn’t Lawrence,’ he said.
    He thought she would say more to convince him that it might be, but she suddenly gave up the fight.
    ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’m being foolish. I don’t know what’s been wrong with me to day. My head’s full of all kinds of fancies. You would know your own brother.’ She paused. ‘After the policeman left I even wondered for a moment if it might be Andrew. They didn’t find his body until weeks after he fell. The tide was so strong, the coastguard said he must have been taken out to open water. I thought maybe he survived after all. For all those weeks I kept hoping. There was some chance he’d survived, swum ashore somewhere, taken himself away to sober up.Even when the body was washed up, it could have been anyone.’
    ‘Andrew’s dead,’ Kenny said.
    ‘I know. It’s my imagination. I think, What if . . . and then I’m carried along by the possibility. The story.’ She gave a little smile. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.’
    ‘Have some tea while you’re here.’ Now, he felt sorry for her, living all on her own. She had no one to take her to bed on stolen afternoons.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just shut up the post office and ran up here. I need to get back. I might have customers waiting.’
    ‘It’s the time of year,’ he said. ‘The light nights. It makes us all go a little bit mad.’

Chapter Twelve
    Roy Taylor was head of the Inverness team. He’d be the senior investigating officer once he arrived. Perez had worked with him before and they’d become friends of a sort. Not close friends. Perez knew nothing about his private life, didn’t even know if he was married. But they’d come to an understanding about the case they were working on.
    Now, listening to Taylor’s impatience, Perez was irritated. He didn’t need telling that the priority was to get an ID on the victim. He’d only officially been a victim for half an hour, for Christ’s sake. Sandy should have arrived in