Blue Lightning

looking pale and thin. She was a dried-out middle-aged woman. I need a lover, she thought. Someone warm and big-breasted with a deep laugh to breathe some life into me. The potatoes had come to the boil and she turned down the heat. She’d mash them to serve with the gammon she was roasting. Ben was the only veggie left in the place since the last plane went out and there was a quiche left over from the party that he could have. She knew there was a packet of broad beans still in the freezer and she’d serve them with a white sauce. Shame the last gale had killed the parsley in the little field centre garden. But all the time she was deciding the trivial domestic details that so calmed her, she was thinking about Angela’s murder. An act of anger, she thought. Or revenge.

She walked down the corridor that linked the kitchen to Maurice’s flat. Her leather shoes slapped on the tiles and echoed so they sounded like following footsteps. She knocked at the door and when there was no reply she went in. Maurice was sitting hollow-eyed, alone in the dark. She switched on a table lamp, and took a seat beside him.

‘Where’s Poppy?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. She saw he couldn’t care about anything. He was entirely wrapped around in his own grief. ‘She might be in her room.’

When Jane stood up to look he called after her. ‘They’ve taken Angela away.’

‘I know.’

Poppy was lying on her bed watching television, an Australian soap. On the screen, two impossibly beautiful teenagers were lying on a sandy beach staring at each other. For a moment Jane thought it was crass and insensitive for the girl to be engrossed in a sentimental love story while her father was so miserable. But the girl’s presence wouldn’t make things easier for him and she’d never pretended to be fond of Angela. The birdwatchers had been chasing all over the island after some rare bird and that was just as inappropriate. As inappropriate as Jane taking a secret delight in her attempts to unravel the mystery of Angela’s death.

‘Are you hungry?’

Poppy switched down the sound, but continued to stare at the sunny landscape, the young lovers.

‘Starving.’ She turned abruptly towards Jane. ‘Is that really gross? To want to eat when there’s a dead woman lying in the bird room?’

‘Of course not. And she’s not there any more. Jimmy Perez has taken her away.’ Jane sat on the bed. ‘Where do you want your dinner? In the flat or with us?’

There was a pause. ‘Do they all think I killed her?’

‘I don’t know what they think. I don’t believe it was you.’

The soap opera ended and the titles rolled silently towards a blue horizon. Poppy lay back on the pillow. ‘Could I have something here? I can’t face Dad either. He keeps crying. I’ve never seen him cry before.’

‘I’ll bring something through.’

‘Is there pudding too?’

‘Lemon meringue.’

‘Can I have a piece?’

Jane smiled and nodded.

At the table the talk was all about the swan. There was a pile of reference books between them. Dougie Barr was manic. It was as if he were on speed, the words tumbling out one after another. ‘Sometimes you see a bird and you just know! Like, that it’s the best bird you’ll ever find in your life, the thing you’ll be remembered for.’ He set down his knife and fork and turned a page in the big book beside him, then picked up a can, not of beer, but a highly coloured fizzy drink. Jane thought the sugar in it, added to his mood, had turned him into a hyperactive child. ‘I wasn’t even sure trumpeter migrated, but it does. Look. The Alaska population is migratory. So my bird came all the way from Alaska.’ My bird. As if he’d given birth to it. He began to eat again, very quickly, and occasionally small pieces of food flew out of his mouth. Perhaps he finally remembered that there’d been a death in the centre because he added: ‘Angela would have understood that. She knew what it was like to find a rarity. Her reputation was built on it.’

‘That and her hair,’ Sarah Fowler said.

The interjection was so unexpected, so bitchy, that for a moment Jane wasn’t sure how to respond, or even if the implied criticism was intended. She’d chatted to the Fowlers when they first arrived at the field centre on the Shepherd and found them pleasant, in a quiet, inoffensive way. She couldn’t remember if John had said what he did for a living; Sarah was some sort of social worker, dealing with kids and families. Now, surprised, she looked up and caught Sarah’s eye and they grinned at each other. Two women sharing a moment of cattiness, enjoying it all the more because of the circumstances, because they were restrained, polite women of a certain age and no one would have expected it of them. Sarah began to giggle, very quietly into her napkin, and Jane thought they were all close to hysteria.

Around them the conversation about the swan continued.

‘The wind’s supposed to drop tomorrow afternoon.’ This was Hugh Shaw. Jane knew his charm had been practised from birth. You could tell he’d always been adored by women – his mother and grandmother, certainly, and there’d probably been a nanny too – but still she found herself seduced by him. He was so pretty and his smile was so languid and appealing. He had to work hard to achieve the desired response and so she felt he deserved her admiration and amusement. ‘Birders are already travelling to Shetland on the chance that they’ll get to Fair Isle to see the swan.’

Jane looked at Ben, but he hardly seemed to be following the conversation.

‘Even if the wind does drop, there probably won’t be time for the plane to come in tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s starting to get dark so early.’ She hoped that was the case. It would be worse if the plane arrived late in the afternoon with a full load of visitors and immediately took off again without them. She’d have to find rooms for the incomers and feed them. She didn’t see how that would work – an influx of people with Maurice and Poppy hiding away in the flat. And if birdwatchers could get in, so could journalists. She had a sudden image of hacks surrounding the lighthouse, pointing their cameras through the windows, of Maurice, his head in his hands, appearing on the front pages of tabloid newspapers. Perhaps she should take the decision to close the field centre to new guests, but the reporters would probably find somewhere on the island to stay. Jane hoped that the weather would close in again, at least for the next few days, at least until Perez had discovered the murderer. Or until she had.

There was a lull in the conversation and she took in the scene. Dougie had moved on to pudding and was cramming his mouth full of lemon meringue pie. The Fowlers were talking quietly to each other. Jane saw that under the table John had taken Sarah’s hand and again she felt a stab of loneliness. I have nobody to touch, nobody to wrap me up in her arms to comfort me. Hugh was leaning back in his chair, his eyes half closed and a smile of contentment on his face. Ben was fiddling with his paper napkin and staring out into the darkness.

Someone in this building is a murderer, she thought. I could be sharing a meal with a murderer. There was an Agatha Christie book she’d read when she was a kid. A bunch of people on an island. Dying, one by one. It was warm in the dining room. She’d lit a big fire of driftwood to cheer them up here and in the common room. But she shivered.

She went into the kitchen to make coffee. While the kettles were boiling she stacked the plates in the dishwasher and then spooned instant granules into a big Thermos jug. Her evening ritual. The final task before the end of the working day. She thought suddenly that this would be her last year at the centre. She wouldn’t come back to the Isle once the season was over. It wouldn’t be the same and, anyway, she was ready now to move on. By becoming a victim of violence, Angela Moore had done that for her.

There was a movement behind her and she turned, expecting to see one of the visitors, Sarah perhaps, offering to help with the coffee. But Perez stood there. He’d taken off his boots and his coat and was standing very still, just by her shoulder. She felt her pulse quicken. Did everyone feel scared when the police arrived? Did everyone remember the misdemeanours, the unkind acts, not criminal perhaps but inhumane, when confronted by a detective like Perez? We all think he can see right through us. He knows what we’re thinking. It’s like standing before God on the Day of Judgement. Carefully she poured boiling water into the flask. Her hand was quite steady. I’m being ridiculous. It’s the weather and the melodrama of the situation. She thought again that she could have walked into a novel, if not Christie then something