Ann Cleeves - Blue Lightning

The kitchen door, which had been open all day, so Perez had managed to catch reassuring glimpses of the women inside, was shut now. When he opened it, the room was empty. There was a big pan of water on the hob, the heat turned off. The smell of cooking: something sweet and appetizing. A pan containing thick custard, with a skin on the top. A big colander half full with chopped cabbage. Everything ordinary. Yet again Perez had the sense of a nightmare continuing. Sometimes, he thought, terror can be in the everyday. He shouted back to Sandy: ‘Who exactly did you see upstairs?’

‘Dougie and Ben. Ben was covered in blood and Dougie was helping him to clean up.’

‘What about the others?’

‘I thought they went upstairs. But maybe they came through the kitchen.’

‘Someone went outside,’ Perez said. ‘I heard the door.’

By now Sandy had picked up his boss’s panic. He looked close to tears and was perfectly aware of his own stupidity, his ability to cause the biggest cock-up in the world. ‘I’m sorry. I was in the dormitory. I didn’t see.’

In the enclosed space of the yard, Perez was hit by the cold. There was a faint gleam from a moon half-covered by cloud, and the bright occasional spot of the lighthouse beam. He ran through the gap in the whitewashed wall, ducking the clothes lines on the way, and looked out on the open hill. A thicker cloud covered the moon and suddenly it was pitch black. The sort of darkness you never get in a city. Then the cloud thinned again and he made out the silver line of reflected light that was Golden Water.

A woman screamed. Not Fran. He’d have recognized her voice, even as a scream. Thank God, not Fran. He raced towards the sound, tripping over the heather and outcrops of rock, splashing through the bog towards the loch. He was surprised by a movement at his feet, a slow beat of wings, saw a pair of eyes, yellow in the pale moonlight. A short-eared owl flying low over the hill.

The lighthouse lens circled and there was a brief snapshot before the beam moved on. The pool, a pale backdrop. Very black against it, a man’s silhouette, his arm raised. Perez saw the glint of light on metal, like a silent flash of lightning on a stormy night, before everything was dark again.

For a second the old curiosity kicked in: Where did he get the knife? Did he pick it up from the kitchen on the way through or is it what he was intending all along? He couldn’t allow the woman to speak. The light came back, pulsing and regular as a heartbeat. This time Perez almost screamed himself because now the silhouette was moving; the arm slashed and chopped, mechanical as the engine that moved the reflector in the lighthouse. If the killer had begun as a rational man, he’d certainly lost all reason now. How could he do that to his wife? The woman he claimed to adore? More darkness.

Behind him, Perez heard someone yelling. Sandy. Good. It would take two of them to restrain the man. As he ran, thoughts and images rattled around his head. Sandy was the stronger: once they had the knife, he could control John Fowler and then Perez would comfort Fran. He’d hold her and wrap his jacket around her shoulders and tell her she would never have to deal with anything like this again. He wouldn’t expose her to more violence or danger. Perez thought he would have to resign now; Fran wouldn’t like it, but he’d insist. Despite the chase, the stumbling, the gasping for breath, he felt a sudden and immense relief. How strangely the mind worked under stress! So the decision was made. There would be no more police work. That part of his life was over.

Sandy was younger and fitter and had already overtaken him. He must have grabbed a torch on his way out, because the light bounced ahead of them and captured the three people on the shore of the loch. They were posed like a sculpture. One of those pieces in white marble Fran had dragged him to see in a gallery the last time they were south. One figure was standing, one sitting and one lying. Fowler was standing and his arm was by his side. He’d dropped the knife, which was hidden somewhere in the tussocky grass. His head was bent as if he was praying and he seemed quite calm.

Perez lost his mind for a moment. He heard screaming in his ears and knew it was his own. When he came to he found himself in a frenzy, scrabbling in the boggy water for the knife. If he’d found it he would have killed the man. It was only Sandy’s voice that brought him to his senses. Because the sitting figure was Sarah Fowler and the statue on the floor, pale and bleeding, was Fran. Sandy was already bending over her, his mobile in his hand, shouting for an ambulance flight. A helicopter. ‘Just get us a fucking doctor.’ Perez took off his jacket as he’d planned he would, wrapped it around Fran and held her in his arms.

Wherever she’d been, Fran would have died. They said that over and over again to Perez as if he were supposed to find some comfort in it. She could have been stabbed next door to the most well-equipped hospital in the world and still they wouldn’t have saved her. The attack was too violent. And besides, the helicopter did arrive very quickly. Perez remembered very little of that. Flying out with Fran’s body, knowing that this wasn’t Fran, not essentially. Looking down as Fair Isle disappeared beneath them – a scattering of lights marking each of the familiar crofts – wondering suddenly if he’d ever be able to return again. If he’d ever be able to face it.

His father was in the helicopter with him. His mother had wanted to be there, but Perez couldn’t bear the thought of her fussing. And now, at this moment, for perhaps the first time in his life, he’d thought he had the right to disregard other people’s feelings. His father had offered tentatively: ‘I could come out with you, lad.’ Suddenly that was just what Perez needed: the taciturn man with the granite face, flawed but still certain. Unsentimental.

Then there was lots of waiting about in an office in the Gilbert Bain hospital. Gallons of tea. Distant noises – the clang of a tea trolley hitting a metal bedstead, cheerful voices. The doctor, who looked to Perez no more than a teenager, repeating over and over again that there had been nothing they could do. He’d been with the team that had come into Fair Isle in the helicopter and in the morning when it was getting light and James was telling Perez they should go back to the house in Lerwick, because Jimmy needed to eat and to rest, the doctor clung onto them. As if he was the bereaved person. And Perez didn’t want to go. Because somehow this young man, with his acne and his bad breath, was the last link he had to Fran.

In the hospital they’d offered Perez pills to help him sleep, but he’d refused them. He didn’t deserve to sleep again. He sat in the narrow kitchen in his house by the water in Lerwick watching his father frying bacon and eggs. The older man’s face was grey. He was exhausted but his movements were deft. He warmed the plates, flipped the oil over the egg to make sure it was cooked. As soon as the meal was over he washed the dishes. ‘Why don’t you get some rest?’

While his father was lying on Perez’s bed, the detective replayed the moments of Fran’s death in his head, over and over again, like a film on a loop. Maybe thinking that eventually there would be a different ending to the story. Knowing that was crazy but wanting to believe it.

Sometime in the afternoon Sandy turned up at the house. He blamed himself for Fran’s death. Perez saw that as soon as he came through the door. He was shaking. ‘You told me to look after her.’ He couldn’t stop saying that. Not the same words but meaning the same thing. Why did people feel the need to speak so much?