Ann Cleeves - Blue Lightning

There was the inevitable bottle of whisky and a glass on the table. ‘You will join me, Jimmy?’ Maurice nodded towards it. Then: ‘Don’t look at me like that, man. I’m not a drunk, but I find it helps dull the edges a bit. Now Poppy’s gone, what does it matter?’

‘Maybe a small dram,’ Perez said and Maurice went off to find another glass.

‘What about Angela?’ Perez asked. ‘Did she like to take a drink?’

‘Red wine. That was her tipple. And lots of it if the mood took her.’

‘But not recently,’ Perez said. ‘At our engagement party, for example. She didn’t have a lot to drink then.’

‘What are you saying, Jimmy? Where is all this leading?’ Maurice wasn’t drunk, but as he’d said the hard edges were blurred, his thoughts a little slow and fuzzy.

‘I spoke to the pathologist today,’ Perez said. He paused to make sure he had the man’s attention. ‘Angela was pregnant.’ Maurice blinked at him. ‘You didn’t know?’

Slowly Maurice shook his head.

‘She’d arranged to go south,’ Perez persisted. ‘I was wondering maybe for an abortion. But if she’d stopped drinking, was looking after herself, that doesn’t quite make sense.’

Maurice looked up. ‘The baby wasn’t mine. I had a vasectomy years ago. Maybe you should talk to the father.’ The first hint of bitterness since Angela had died.

‘Who would that be?’ Perez asked. ‘Who should I talk to?’

‘Maybe you should look close to home, Jimmy. Big James followed my wife around like a love-sick puppy.’ Then he shrugged, a sort of apology for loading his pain on to the other man. ‘No, it couldn’t be him. If anything happened there it was nearly a year ago.’

‘A more recent admirer then.’

‘Oh, they all admired her,’ Maurice said. ‘And who could blame them? The more difficult question is which of them might she have fallen for. Enough to carry his child. I didn’t think she cared for any of them that much.’

‘It could have been a mistake, an accident.’

‘Angela didn’t make those sort of mistakes, Jimmy. I found the morning-after pill in her bag once.’

‘Not a maternal bone in her body,’ Perez said. ‘That’s how you described her to me.’

‘So I did. But perhaps biology overtook her in the end. Perhaps she’d decided she wanted a child even if she couldn’t have one with me. Angela was used to getting what she wanted.’

Perez looked at the man. He didn’t seem as astonished by the news of Angela’s pregnancy as Perez had expected. Had there been signs? Sickness? After all, he’d had three children of his own. Had he guessed she was carrying a child, but not asked, not really wanting his suspicions to be confirmed? Or was the information just too much for him to take in?

‘I wonder if Jane guessed that Angela was having a baby,’ Perez said. Jane had been observant. Nothing much happened in the field centre without her knowing about it. If Jane had worked this out, could it be a reason for her death? ‘Did Jane drop any hint about it to you? Maybe after Angela died?’

‘No!’ It came out as a shout. Maurice held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy, but I didn’t know Angela was pregnant.’

He hadn’t drawn the curtains and Perez looked out into the darkness. There were the lights of a ship, a big tanker from the shape of it, moving steadily south. Maurice had turned his body away, as if to make clear that the discussion was over. It was time for Perez to leave.

‘We’ve traced Angela’s mother.’

No reaction.

‘She’s coming into Fair Isle tomorrow. I’ve booked her on to the afternoon plane.’ He paused, but still Maurice gave no sign that he’d even heard. ‘I think she’d like to meet you, but that’s your decision.’

At last Maurice turned his head. ‘Of course I’ll meet her. You’ll make the arrangements, will you, Jimmy? You’ll bring her here.’

‘Why had Angela booked train tickets to go from Aberdeen to London at the beginning of November? It seems she had a meeting with her publisher, but do you know what that was about?’

‘No! It seems to me now that I didn’t know anything about her. She was my wife, but she could have been a stranger.’

He looked up at Perez, now obviously expecting him to leave, but still Perez sat where he was.

‘Is the lighthouse tower always kept unlocked?’

‘Of course not, Jimmy. It’d be a health and safety nightmare. We have kiddies staying here in the summer. You couldn’t have them running up and down the stairs, tampering with the light.’

‘But I found it unlocked this afternoon.’

Maurice shrugged. ‘Is it important?’

‘It could be. Did you have a key here?’

There was a pause. Maurice looked up from his whisky. ‘It was kept with the big bunch on the hook in the larder.’

‘The same one as the key to the bird room?’

‘Yes, but we never used most of them.’

‘But anyone staying in the centre would know where they were kept?’

‘Only if they’d asked Jane. She was the keeper of the keys.’ Then Perez thought at last he’d found a motive for the cook’s murder. She’d known the killer had been in the tower. Had he hidden something else there?

They sat for a moment in silence. ‘Were you never tempted to go up there?’ Perez asked at last. ‘To see where Angela was going, to see who she was with? You’d get a view from there of everything that was going on.’

Maurice set down the glass so violently that some of the liquid spilt on to the polished table. ‘You don’t get it, do you, Jimmy? I didn’t want to know where she was going or who she was meeting. As long as she came home to me every evening I didn’t care.’

Sandy was in the common room, drinking beer, talking to the three single men. Perez hoped Sandy realized he was in the North Light to work; this wasn’t a few days’ unofficial leave from the routine of the office. Immediately he decided that the thought was unfair; these days the Whalsay man took his job seriously. No one would be better than Sandy at getting these men to discuss Angela Moore and her relationships.

Perez helped himself to a coke at the bar and slipped some money into the honesty box. He took a seat just outside the circle of chairs. There was a pyramid of empty beer cans built on the coffee table in the middle. Hugh Shaw was at the end of a story – something about a birdwatcher in a brothel in Tashkent. He nodded to acknowledge Perez’s presence and continued to the tagline. Sandy almost choked, he was laughing so much. The others were more restrained; Perez guessed they’d heard it before.

Sandy saw Perez look at the empty cans. ‘These aren’t all ours,’ he said. ‘The boys from the search team were here earlier. They’ve only just gone to bed.’

‘Could I have a few words, Sandy?’ No point his sitting there drinking with them. They’d never accept him as one of the boys.

They returned to the bird room, the closest thing they had to an office here, the memory of a woman’s body still lying over the desk between them.

‘Did the team find anything in the tower?’

‘You were right. That was a pillowcase and the lining of the pillow itself. There are small fragments of feather still left inside. Nothing else. No fingerprints. The handrail going up the steps and round the lens had been wiped clean.’

‘The screwed-up pillowcase would have gone in a pocket. The killer must have gone straight up to the tower after murdering Jane.’ Perez pictured the killer, looking down the island. Had he seen Perez walking towards the Pund? Had he been already aware that the body had been found before Rhona Laing and the rest of the team arrived in on the plane?

Perez nodded vaguely in the direction of the common room. ‘Do any of them admit to having been up the tower?’