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crofting or because they could get a better wage working for the council in Lerwick. Now the houses would be tarted up and sold for a fortune, but when he’d started expanding the croft there was no demand for them and he’d got the land dirt-cheap. The kirk had been pulled down years before when the population declined, the stone carried away for use throughout the island. Now this was all there was to Biddista, a community isolated from the rest of the island by the hill on one side and the sea on the other.
    Sandy’s car was pulled in to the side of the road. He was sitting on the harbour wall smoking a cigarette. Perez, who had worked for a time in Aberdeen and dealt with more real crime in a month there than Sandy had in his entire career, wondered what hewould do with the butt when he was finished. Throw it on to the ground and contaminate a possible crime scene? Instead, seeing Perez approach, Sandy stood up, pinched out the cigarette and hurled it into the tide. A different sort of pollution.
    ‘Where were you?’ Sandy asked. ‘I tried to phone you at home.’
    Perez ignored the question and Sandy didn’t follow it up. He was used to being ignored.
    ‘I let Kenny get on back to his place,’ he said. ‘No point him staying around here and we’ll know where to find him. He was in a bit of a state. It hasn’t bothered me so much. It doesn’t look real, does it? With that thing over his face.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Didn’t I tell you? You’ll see.’
    Perez walked to the shed, stood in the doorway and looked in. The body hung from a thick noose tied to a rafter close to the apex of the pitched roof. The face was turned away from them, but Perez recognized the clothes. Black trousers, black linen jacket. Only when he went a few steps further forward did he see the mask, grinning. He felt suddenly sick, but forced himself to look into the hut again. He took in the scene, the overturned bucket. On the face of it this was certainly suicide.
    Sandy had come up behind him. ‘The doctor will come as soon as he can,’ he said. ‘But he might be a while. There’s an emergency call-out. I said that was all right. Our man isn’t going anywhere.’ Sandy had an anxious-to-please, peerie-boy air about him still. It made Perez want to reassure him that he was doing OK, even when he got things wrong.
    ‘Good. Who did you get hold of?’
    ‘That new man who’s just moved in at Whiteness.’ Sandy paused. ‘What do you think’s going on there, with the mask?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Perez had found it so disturbing that he’d turned his back on the hanging man. It was the bare shininess of it, the manic grin. After the gloom in the shed, the sunlight, reflected from the water, hurt his eyes for a moment.
    ‘He must be a tourist,’ Sandy said, with absolute certainty. ‘Not anyone from Biddista at least. Not according to Kenny. He could tell that without seeing the face. And a place this small, he’d know. I haven’t checked his belongings for identity. You said not to touch.’
    ‘Good,’ Perez said again, distracted. He was remembering the man the night before, standing with the linings of his pockets pulled out. There would be nothing to identify him in his clothes. He began to run through the process he’d follow to trace him. Phone calls to hotels and guesthouses. Check with NorthLink and British Airways. They might have to wait until the man failed to turn up for his return trip south before they got a name for him. This time of year there were more visitors than locals on the islands. Despite himself he was interested. What had led first to the loss of memory and then for the man to become so desperate that he took his own life?
    ‘What do you think the mask is about?’ Sometimes he asked Sandy questions, not expecting much of an answer, but because he wanted to make him think, hoping that it might become a habit.
    ‘I don’t know. Making some sort of statement, maybe?’
    What sort of