Chapter Text
It started, Jimmy Perez would later insist, with the cardamom buns.
That was the version he gave Duncan, at least, when Duncan began looking at him over the rim of his mug with the sort of expression that meant he had formed an opinion and was just waiting for the right moment to make a nuisance of himself with it.
The bakery had opened six weeks earlier on a narrow street in the village, tucked between a post office that sold more gossip than stamps and a little shop with faded fishing nets in the window. Northlight Bakery, the sign read, painted in clean white letters over blue. In the mornings, when the rain came sideways off the water and the pavements shone dark under the low sky, the front windows steamed up from the warmth inside.
Perez had gone in the first time because Cassie had mentioned it over breakfast, casually and without looking up from her phone.
“There’s an American woman opened a bakery,” she had said. “June Harper. Tosh says the coffee’s good.”
“Tosh says a lot of things,” Perez had replied.
But he had gone anyway, because it was on his way back from Lerwick if a person was generous with the meaning of on his way, and because the morning had been cold enough to make coffee seem less like an indulgence and more like a public service.
June Harper had been behind the counter with flour on one cheek and her hair twisted up in a careless knot, speaking to an older man about oatcakes as if there was no more important matter in the world. She had looked up when the bell over the door rang, and smiled at Perez with a warmth that seemed, for a second, to alter the weather.
“Morning,” she had said, the word rounded by an accent that did not belong to Shetland and somehow made the little room feel wider. “What can I get you?”
He had ordered coffee and one of the buns cooling on the tray near the till. Cardamom, she told him, with brown sugar and butter folded through the dough. He had taken it away in a paper bag, still warm enough to soften in his hand, and eaten it in the car while the rain tapped steadily on the windscreen.
After that, it was not, strictly speaking, his fault that the bakery became part of his morning.
“You’re going to Northlight again?” Duncan asked one Friday, standing in Perez’s kitchen with a tea towel over his shoulder and Cassie at the table pretending not to listen.
“It’s breakfast,” Perez said.
“Aye,” Duncan said. “You’ve been having a lot of breakfast lately.”
Cassie hid her smile behind her mug. Perez saw it anyway.
Two days later, the weather turned mean.
Not dramatic, not enough for warnings or cancelled ferries, but a hard, needling rain that came at the windscreen in silver lines and made the road shine black under the tyres. Perez drove with both hands on the wheel, Duncan in the passenger seat and Cassie in the back, all three of them quiet in the way people were on Shetland when the weather was doing its best to remind them who was in charge.
They had been to see Duncan’s cousin about a stubborn leak in a roof and were heading back toward the village with the heater humming and the smell of damp wool rising from Duncan’s coat. Cassie had one earbud in and one out, scrolling through her phone until she suddenly leaned forward between the seats.
“Dad,” she said. “Is that June?”
Perez saw the car at the same moment: a small blue hatchback pulled half onto the verge, hazard lights blinking weakly through the rain. The bonnet was up. Beside it, June Harper stood in a yellow raincoat that looked too cheerful for the day, one hand braced against the front of the car while the wind worried strands of hair loose from beneath her hood.
Perez slowed before Duncan could say anything.
“Well,” Duncan said, too brightly, “would you look at that.”
“Don’t start,” Perez said, though he was already indicating and easing the car in behind hers.
“I have not started anything,” Duncan said, which was a lie spoken with impressive confidence.
Cassie was smiling when Perez looked in the rear-view mirror.
“You started this morning,” she said quietly.
Perez ignored both of them and got out into the rain.
June turned at the sound of his door closing, relief and embarrassment moving across her face at once. “Oh. Hi. I’m sorry. I swear I’m not usually the woman standing dramatically beside a dead car in the rain.”
“No need to apologise,” Perez said, coming around to the front of the car. “What happened?”
“There was a noise,” June said. “A bad noise. I realise that’s not mechanically useful, but it was quite loud.”
Behind Perez, Duncan got out of the car with the air of a man arriving at a theatre just as the curtain went up. Cassie followed, pulling her hood over her hair and giving June a small wave.
“Hi,” Cassie said. “I’m Cassie. I’ve heard about your cinnamon twists.”
June’s embarrassed smile softened immediately. “Then you can have all the cinnamon twists you want on the house for stopping to help me. I’m not above bribery when I’m stranded.”
“Careful,” Duncan said, with immediate interest. “She’ll hold you to that.”
“I absolutely will,” Cassie said, brightening despite the rain. “But only because it would be rude not to.”
Perez leaned under the raised bonnet, more to be useful than because he expected to diagnose anything meaningful in the rain. Steam had faded, and there was the sharp smell of hot metal and wet road. He checked what he could, then straightened, rain darkening the shoulders of his coat.
“I can call Sandy to give you a tow,” he said. “Or we can run you back to the bakery first, if you’ve somewhere you need to be.”
June looked past him toward the village road, then back at her car with a sigh that tried very hard to be practical. “I have dough proving and a delivery of eggs sitting outside the back door if Mrs. Bain hasn’t decided to rescue them. So yes. Back to the bakery would be amazing.”
“We can manage that,” Perez said.
It was only then, with her standing close enough that he could see the raindrops caught on her lashes and the tiredness she had tucked beneath her smile, that Perez realised he had been thinking of her as the woman from the bakery when there was clearly more to June Harper than warmth and good coffee.
Duncan, unfortunately, realised something else entirely.
He looked at Cassie. Cassie looked at him. In the space of that silent exchange, a plan was born.
Perez, who had spent years reading suspects, witnesses, grieving families, and men with too many secrets, somehow missed it completely.