of the movement. He didn’t have time to answer before they separated and skipped out of the circle, but with some satisfaction she saw a flush of anger. A moment later they came together again, linked arms, and promenaded around the room, following all the other couples. Ahead of them Mary and James Perez were light and easy on their feet so you could believe they’d keep going all night.
‘Nothing’s been decided,’ Maurice said. ‘She had no right to discuss it with you.’
‘I think I have every right to know what’s going on.’ Jane thought she sounded very reasonable. ‘I have my own plans to make.’
‘Leave it to me. I’ll sort it out.’
The music stopped and the dancers clapped and laughed. Outside, the storm grew even more fierce.
Poppy lost her temper at the end of the evening when many of the guests were leaving; by then Jane had been thinking they’d get through the party without a problem. The tantrum had been brewing for days. Jane thought Poppy was like an enormous two-year-old, chubby, demanding and inarticulate. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see the girl lying on the floor kicking and screaming. How could you reach the age of sixteen and have so little self-control?
Angela had been taking her turn working behind the bar – all the field centre staff did a stint on open evenings – and had refused to serve Poppy a drink. Poppy had been clearly drunk, but Jane suspected the decision not to allow her one more can of lager had been a deliberate provocation. Angela disliked the girl and disliked Maurice’s attention being distracted by her. The evening was winding up and perhaps Angela was a little bored. She did like a drama.
So suddenly Poppy started shouting abuse. She leaned across the bar and yelled at her stepmother: ‘You have no fucking right to tell me what to do.’ She took a full glass of beer that had been standing next to her and flung it at Angela. Jane saw with some satisfaction that it went all over the famous hair.
The lingering guests moved quickly into the lobby to collect their coats and change their shoes. They were clearly embarrassed. Jane went with them to say goodbye, to hold the door and warn them to take care on the drive south. Jimmy Perez was the last to go. He seemed intrigued by the scene being played out in the common room and stood watching through the open door. It took Mary to call him away. There was a flurry of thanks. Mary shouted back to her: ‘You must come and have dinner with us in Springfield before Jimmy and Fran go home.’ Then came the sound of a car engine over the gale, headlights showing it was still pouring with rain.
When all the guests had gone, Jane waited for a moment. The wind caught the heavy outside door and it began to bang. The storm must have changed direction. Still westerly, which the birdwatchers hated, but with some north in it. She pulled it to again and locked it. The common room was quiet. She supposed Maurice and his strange dysfunctional family had gone through the kitchen to their flat.
She began the task of clearing up. The visitors would still want their breakfast the next day. Usually Maurice would have stayed behind to help her, but she knew he would have other things on his mind. Ben, the assistant warden, seemed to have rushed off too. Jane stacked plates into the dishwasher and cleared the glasses from the common room. The tables could wait for the following day. She felt oddly happy. Angela had miscalculated. It hadn’t been clever to wind up Poppy so she made a show in public. Maurice wouldn’t like that. Then there came a horrible thought, worm-like, entering her brain and refusing to leave. She couldn’t let Maurice and Angela separate. If they were to split up Angela would stay at the North Light. She was the warden, the famous naturalist, the person who pulled in the punters. Anyone could take on Maurice’s role. And there would be no place for Jane in Angela’s new world.
Chapter Six
That night Perez slept immediately, untroubled by memories of his first lover or anxieties about his current one. It was as if the first ordeal was over. Fran had survived the party, had even enjoyed it. In the car on their way back to Springfield she’d said what a wonderful evening it had been. ‘Thank you so much, Mary, for organizing it.’ And Mary, crawling at ten miles an hour as the wind buffeted the car, leaning forward for a better view of the road, had turned briefly to them and beamed.
He woke before it was light. The storm still there in the background, taken for granted now. There was a knock on the door, his father’s voice as quiet as he could manage. ‘Jimmy, you need to get up.’
He thought there must be some community disaster. He remembered being called from his bed as a young man, when old Annie had fallen ill and they’d needed an ambulance flight in the middle of the night. They’d lit fires along the airstrip to mark the way for the plane to come in, all of the island men working together, the women left behind to mind the bairns.
Fran stirred but she didn’t wake. In the kitchen his father was making tea. He was wearing a cardigan over his pyjamas. That seemed odd to Perez. Why wasn’t the man dressed? His father was the nearest thing the island had to a leader and he should be out there to supervise if there was a problem. Then he thought maybe his mother was ill and they were waiting for the nurse who was resident on the island. No way would a doctor get in this morning.
‘They want you up at the field centre,’ James said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘You can take the car. I’ll not be going far today.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Jimmy drank the tea, helped himself to a couple of home-made ginger biscuits. He was still half asleep. ‘Why do they want me?’
‘You’re the police, aren’t you?’ James looked up. ‘There’s been a murder.’
Perez had to bang on the lighthouse door to be let in, because it was locked. It was still dark and the beam from the tower circled way over his head. The locked door struck him as unusual, but perhaps someone had watched crime dramas on television and realized it was important to keep people away from the scene. Jane came at once to open up. She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, though it wasn’t yet seven thirty. Inside, all the lights were on. The lighthouse was too far from the other houses to be on mains electricity and he heard the buzz of the generator in the distance. Jane looked very pale but quite composed.
‘In here.’ She opened a door that led directly from the lobby. ‘In the bird room.’
He stood in the doorway and looked inside. It was a small square space with one window facing east. He supposed all the equipment was to do with the business of ornithology. There were plastic tubes covered with small metal rings of different sizes hanging from one of the shelves, pliers, a set of small balance scales, a pile of small cotton bags with drawstring tops. There was the base field centre smell of wood from the floors, but it was overlaid by something faint and organic, which he supposed came from the birds: the oil on their feathers, the muck left in the bags while they were waiting to be ringed.
Under the window there was a wooden desk and a swivel chair. Sitting on the chair was a woman. Angela was slumped across the desk as if she’d fallen asleep in the middle of her work. But in her back was a knife. It had an ivory handle that protruded through the scarlet silk top she’d been wearing the evening before. There wasn’t a great deal of blood and no sign of a struggle. The knife had gone in just to the left of the spine and under the shoulder blade. Straight into the heart. Either the killer had known what to do or it had been a lucky strike. Lucky for him at least. Twisted through the black hair, like a garland, was a circle of white feathers. It gave Angela a frivolous air, reminded Perez of one of those flimsy hats that fashionable women wore to Ascot. She certainly hadn’t been wearing feathers in her hair when he’d last seen her and he realized now that they’d all fall away if she stood up. The arrangement had been made after her death.
‘Who found her?’ Perez struggled to make this real. It was too close to home and the image was like the jacket of one of the old-fashioned detective stories his mother had enjoyed. Even the feathers belonged to a different era.
‘Ben Catchpole, the assistant warden. It was his turn to do the trap round. He came in to collect some bird bags on his way out.’
‘Where’s Maurice?’
‘In the kitchen. I woke him to tell him. Ben’s there too.’
Perez looked more closely at the still figure. ‘Didn’t Maurice realize something was wrong when she didn’t come to bed?’
‘He’s in no state to discuss details.’ The words were sharp, a reproof. ‘I haven’t asked him.’
