Blue Lightning

decided that women had more sense.’

They sat for a moment in silence.

‘That new Fiscal came in on the plane,’ James said at last, an attempt, Fran thought, to distract Mary with a snippet of gossip. ‘She seems a fine woman.’

Fran was going to say that Jimmy didn’t get on with her so well, but stopped herself. It wasn’t the sort of subject Jimmy would want to discuss with his father.

James turned to her and his voice was unusually gentle. He could have been speaking to a baby. ‘Jimmy wants you to come out with us on the boat in the morning. He thinks you’ll be safer at home.’

‘No!’ How much harder would the waiting be, if she were at home in Ravenswick. Even with Cassie to keep her company, she couldn’t bear it. ‘Absolutely not.’

He shrugged, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting, as if he’d told his son already that she wouldn’t be persuaded.

‘Have you any idea when he’ll be back here?’ Mary asked.

‘He said not to wait up for him. He could be out all night.’

Fran felt desolate. Was this how her life would be? Jimmy would have his work. She’d be at home worrying. Perhaps she couldn’t deal with that. Perhaps they’d be better moving on to Fair Isle. If he were working on the croft and the Shepherd he wouldn’t be poking around in the private lives of killers. She wouldn’t spend her time thinking he was in danger.

She was still awake when Perez came in. It must have been after three in the morning; she’d glanced occasionally at the alarm clock by the bed. Now the wind had stopped she heard a vehicle approaching, a couple of whispered words, and then the sound of the engine disappearing north again. Sandy Wilson would have driven him home. Perez must be exhausted. She hadn’t appreciated before his ability to do without rest. The relief of his return made her relax and she thought now sleep would be possible.

He came to bed immediately. No whisky for him, no tea. She switched on the bedside light when she heard him come in. He blinked. She thought he was disappointed she was still awake and tried not to feel hurt. He was too tired to talk. So, no questions. No recriminations about him wanting to send her away. She lay in silence and watched him take off his clothes, opened her arms when he climbed into bed beside her.

His whole body was cold. He couldn’t have driven straight from the North Light; he wouldn’t be that chilled. She rubbed his arms to bring the life back into them and twisted her legs around his. She felt herself drifting into sleep, but could sense him lying beside her, rigid and quite awake. It was as if he’d suffered a personal grief; it didn’t feel as if he were a professional investigating the death of a stranger.

She woke again when it was still dark. There were domestic noises in the house – a tap being run, the clatter of pans. James was up early to take out the Good Shepherd. She was alone in the bed. It was hard to believe that Perez had come back at all, that she had held the cold and silent man in her arms.

Chapter Twenty-five

In the North Light with Rhona Laing after the plane came in, watching the residents reacting to the news of Jane’s death, Perez felt disengaged from the process. It had already been a long evening. Perhaps because he hadn’t been present to see the arrival of the plane flying in through the darkness and could only imagine the sight – the silhouettes of the men, black against the orange lights – its appearance seemed part of a strange dream.

He sat with Poppy in the warden’s flat. The curtains hadn’t been drawn and he saw the hill lit by moonlight and by the hypnotic regular sweep of the lighthouse beam. At last he was alone with the girl. Maurice was still in the common room with the guests. They sat together on the sofa. The grate hadn’t been cleaned and was full of ash and the remains of a piece of driftwood, some charred paper. The room was cold. Poppy had pulled a fleece jacket over her jumper.

‘You walked back from Springfield this evening,’ Perez said. ‘Did you meet anyone on the way?’

It seemed that she hadn’t heard the question. ‘Jane was really kind to me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t care about Angela dying. It made my life easier. But why would anyone want to harm Jane?’

‘Can you think of a reason?’

Poppy shook her head. ‘Angela was the only person who didn’t like her.’

‘Why didn’t Angela like her?’

‘Because Jane didn’t care about her being famous and stuff like that. Angela needed people to tell her how great she was all the time and Jane wouldn’t play those sort of games.’

Perez returned to his original question. ‘Did you see anyone while you were walking back from Springfield?’

‘There was someone walking on the hill beyond the airstrip.’ Poppy hunched into her jacket. ‘For a moment it freaked me out because I thought it was Angela. You’d always see her walking like that. Like she could go on for miles without stopping. But of course it couldn’t have been. I don’t believe in ghosts.’ She shivered.

‘Who was it?’ It could have been the murderer, Perez thought, on his way north from the Pund.

She shrugged. ‘It could have been anyone. It was just a silhouette against the hill. And they all look the same, don’t they, the birdwatchers? Waterproof jacket, hat, gloves.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Well, I thought at first it was Angela so it could have been a woman. But more likely a man.’

The only woman staying at the centre was Sarah Fowler, but she was as tall as her husband, and in a bulky jacket and a hat, from a distance it would be impossible to tell the difference. But from the hill the walker would have seen Poppy clearly, especially if he had binoculars. Perez was pleased the girl would be out on the boat early the next morning.

‘Did Angela say anything to you in the week before she died? Anything to explain why she was killed?’

‘Nah, she didn’t pay much attention to me. I mean, she poked away about my boyfriend and what a loser I am, but looking back I don’t think her heart was in it. She had something else on her mind.’ There was a pause, a moment of honesty. ‘That’s probably why I tipped the beer over her. Better that she hated me than acted as if I wasn’t there.’

At ten o’clock, Perez decided he would leave the residents in the company of Rhona Laing and return to the crime scene. She was untroubled about being abandoned and as he left, she was organizing sleeping accommodation for herself, Sandy and Vicki.

‘Absolutely not a dormitory,’ he heard her say to Maurice. ‘At least not for Ms Hewitt and me. Single rooms. Preferably with showers. You can put DC Wilson wherever you have room.’

Perez walked through the moonlight to the Pund. There was already a frost and a thin shell of ice on the water in the mire. His earlier conversations with the field centre residents ran through his mind. What had he missed? What had provoked another murder? Perez still thought the killer was rational. These weren’t the actions of the tabloid psychopath. There’d been no sexual assault and, certainly in Angela’s case, no more violence than was needed to kill. That had been controlled, not the outburst of a spoiled teenager. He thought again he could safely send Poppy away from the island to her mother. After their conversation he had no sense of her as a murderer. It seemed to him that Jane had been stabbed because she posed a threat to Angela’s killer: she’d seen something or heard something or worked out the identity of the perpetrator. But even if she hadn’t been a victim in her own right, there’d been a ferocity in the attack that was different and Perez found that confusing.

If Jane had discovered Angela’s hideaway, that might provide a motive for the death. Perhaps there had been a diary there, a letter or a photograph, which would have pointed to the killer. Jane had been killed for it. And now the item had been taken away and probably destroyed. That was the theory that he’d been developing since the discovery of Jane’s body. Before leaving the field centre, he’d sat in the bird room with Rhona Laing and discussed it with her; now it was firmer in his mind and he ran through the implications. They would pull in a specialist team to search the North Light. While whatever had been taken from the Pund probably no longer existed, they had to make the effort to find it. He knew it would be possible to bring planes in all the next day and if the charters had been taken by the birdwatchers, they’d call in the emergency helicopter again.