When he arrived at the Pund, he found Sandy smoking outside. Perez saw the glow of the cigarette end as he approached the building and then the white halo of condensed air.
‘It’s weird,’ Sandy said. ‘I thought this would be like Whalsay, but smaller. But it isn’t, is it? It’s much more remote.’ Whalsay was the island where he’d grown up. It was only a few miles from Shetland mainland and linked to it by a regular roll-on roll-off ferry service. He rubbed out the cigarette and put the butt in a bag in his pocket, stamped his feet to keep out the cold. ‘I couldn’t take this. It would drive me crazy after a week.’
‘You’d get used to it.’ But Perez wasn’t really sure he would get used to it again if he moved home. Perhaps he’d been away for too long. ‘How’s the CSI getting on?’
‘She says she’s finished the photographs,’ Sandy said. ‘She was bagging up the evidence. I was getting in the way.’ He spoke as if he was always in the way.
Perez left Sandy where he was and stood at the Pund door. He couldn’t see Vicki, so she must be in the loft. He shouted in to her: ‘Is it OK if I have a look up there?’
‘Yeah, I’m about finished. Just put on a suit and walk between the tapes. You don’t need to bother with the bootees. I’ll need to take a print of your shoes before I leave anyway.’
Perez found a paper scene suit just inside the door, put it on and climbed the ladder. He stood halfway up and looked inside. Jane’s body remained just as he remembered it, lit up by the fierce white light. Vicki was crouched in the corner of the loft, to avoid an outstretched arm, and was running her hands under the sheepskins.
‘I was looking for the murder weapon,’ she said.
‘It’s another stabbing, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly looks that way to me. But it won’t be the same knife, of course. That went out in the helicopter with the first victim.’
‘There’s more blood this time.’
‘And more wounds,’ Vicki said. ‘I think Jane heard the killer climb up the ladder. There’d have been no escape for her but she put up a struggle. There are defensive cuts on her hands and arms.’
Perez wondered what the murderer had made of that. Had he been sickened by having to face the woman he was stabbing? Or had he enjoyed it?
‘Could a woman have done it?’ Surely a woman wouldn’t have been excited by the violence?
Vicki shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Any idea what sort of weapon we should be looking for?’
‘Hey, ask the pathologist. He gets paid a lot more than me.’
But she grinned. She was never precious, and he valued her judgement more than that of the eminent doctor who performed the post-mortems in Aberdeen.
‘Something with a narrow blade,’ she said. ‘Very sharp. The murderer pulled it out afterwards, which is one reason why there’s more blood here than there was at the first scene. Looks like he hit an artery. Of course, the feathers are very different too.’
‘Are they?’ He was surprised. He thought feathers were feathers. ‘I suppose there are more of them here. In the bird room a few were woven into Angela’s hair. And those were longer.’
‘Here someone’s just slit open a feather pillow and spilled out the contents,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you ever have pillow fights in that boarding school of yours?’
‘The hostel at the Anderson High was hardly a boarding school.’ He made the same point every time they met, but it was a running gag: that he’d been to a posh boarding school while she was at the local comprehensive. ‘What about the feathers in Angela’s hair then?’
‘I’ve sent them for DNA analysis, but they’re not the sort you stuff pillows with, that’s for sure. Looks like they might have come from a couple of different species.’
Perez considered that. He couldn’t understand what the implication might be. ‘Have we found the empty pillowcase?’
‘It’s not here.’ She stretched. The spotlights shining up from the ground floor threw strange shadows on her face. ‘Definitely no murder weapon either.’
‘I’m going to ask the search team to come in. They can pull this place apart and go to the North Light too. I’ll sort it out first thing.’
He climbed down the ladder and Vicki followed. He’d brought a flask of coffee with him from the field centre. Now, standing with Sandy just outside the house, he took it out of his rucksack and pulled out of his pockets, like a magician conjuring brightly coloured ribbons from thin air, several rounds of sandwiches and half a fruit cake. ‘Jane’s fruit cake was famous. Make the most of it.’
They sat in Tammy Jamieson’s van to eat. The man must have walked home. There were fingers of ice on the windscreen, but the cold hadn’t driven away a background stink of fish. Perez sat in the back on a grubby cushion. He drank some coffee but left the food to the others.
He asked: ‘Where have you fingerprinted?’
Vicki took her coffee like he did, strong and black. There was milk in a screw-top jar for Sandy, and a couple of tablespoons of sugar, twisted into the corner of a polythene bag. She took a gulp, spluttered because it was so hot, then turned round to where he was sitting behind her. ‘The shelf, the wine rack, the mugs. There are a couple of smudges on the ladder but I’ve pulled a good one from the planks in the loft. Could be Jane’s or Angela’s, of course.’
‘I opened that wooden box, before I found her body.’
‘I tried that for prints. There was nothing. Not even yours.’
He thought that was odd because he hadn’t been wearing gloves, but maybe he’d just touched the edge of the lid and the prints hadn’t taken.
He leaned forward to ask her another question. By now the back windows of the van were running with condensation. ‘Have you bagged up the stuff that was inside the box?’
‘What stuff?’ She took a slice of cake and put it in her mouth.
Perez shut his eyes and felt for a moment as if he were drowning. He pictured his father, dressed in the crime scene suit, setting up the strong lights inside the Pund, the sharp response to Sandy’s offer of help. When Perez looked up again, Sandy was asking about plane times and the practicalities of bringing up the search team. ‘Do you think we could fly them direct from Inverness?’ Perez held his breath and waited for Vicki to repeat the question:
In the van the conversation continued, passing backwards and forwards between Sandy and Vicki, but he hardly heard it.
‘I hope they’ve got some heating on in the lighthouse,’ Vicki was saying. ‘What’s the accommodation like, Jimmy? OK?’
‘Fine.’
They decided then to call it a day soon. Vicki said she just wanted to have a quick look for footwear prints on the muddy track outside the Pund. If the weather changed overnight they might lose them. ‘And shouldn’t one of us stay here to keep an eye on the scene?’
‘We’ll tape it,’ Sandy said. ‘And I’ll be back here before it gets light. Surely it’ll be safe enough if I have a couple of hours’ sleep. Jimmy?’
And Perez, distracted, only nodded. While Vicki and Sandy were busy, he went into the ruined house. He opened the shiny wooden box himself and saw that it was empty.
By then Sandy had the engine running. Perez turned off his torch, ran outside and climbed into the back of the van. Still he didn’t speak of the empty box. He paused before he got out at Springfield, and he might have said something then, but Sandy shouted from the driver’s seat: ‘Come on, man, I want my bed.’
Perez let himself into the silent house. When he pushed open the bedroom door, Fran turned on the light. There was nothing to say to her, so he remained quiet. She wrapped him around with her body to warm him, but long after he heard the regular breathing that meant she was asleep, he stayed as cold and stiff as if he were
