Ann Cleeves - Blue Lightning

‘No!’ Dougie was horrified. ‘I’d have said. Honest. I didn’t guess about the curlew. I believed the stories Angela made up about Fowler being a stringer. She fooled me too.’ He paused. ‘I thought it was Hugh. I could tell she didn’t like him, that maybe she was even scared of him. Wishful thinking. I couldn’t stand the guy.’

He reached out again and touched Perez’s shoulder, then turned and left the cafe. He’d find somewhere else to eat before he boarded the boat.

That was when Perez saw Cassie, walking through the shopping arcade. Not holding Duncan’s hand, but close to him. Six years old. Small for her age, stocky, brown hair cut in a fringe over her eyes. Enormous eyes like a bush baby’s, made even bigger because she’d been crying. She saw Perez and rushed towards him and he swung her into his arms as he always did. Now he clung on to her as if she were saving him. He was aware of a couple at a nearby table staring and realized there were tears on his cheeks. The people turned awkwardly away, almost affronted by the emotion.

Duncan bought coffee for himself, juice and chocolate cake for Cassie. Fran had never liked Cassie eating too much junk, but Perez swept the thought away. Let the girl have whatever she wanted.

‘I want to go home,’ Cassie said.

‘I’ve explained it’s kind of difficult.’ Duncan looked at Perez. ‘We have to sort things out.’

‘I want to go to school. I have to go to school.’ One way of coping, Perez supposed. Hadn’t he gone into work to watch Sandy interview the witnesses? Though now, a couple of days on, he couldn’t understand how it had seemed important.

‘Miss Frazer will understand,’ Perez said. Miss Frazer was the head teacher at Ravenswick, had only been there for a couple of years. She and Fran had become friends.

‘I’m in the play,’ Cassie said patiently. ‘I’ve learned my words.’ Then: ‘Jessie will be missing me.’ Jessie, her best friend, granddaughter of Geordie, who took the visitors out to Mousa in his small boat.

‘Could you move into the Ravenswick house for a while?’ Perez talked to Duncan but was aware all the time that Cassie was listening. ‘It would probably be good to have things back to normal. I mean as normal as we can make them.’ He was still crying, wiped his face with his napkin, hoping that Cassie hadn’t noticed.

‘Sure.’ But there was some uncertainty in Duncan’s voice. He travelled a lot for work, didn’t really like to be tied down.

‘I’ll help,’ Perez said. ‘Any way I can.’

‘Fran’s parents are coming up,’ Duncan said. ‘Things will be easier then.’

But only for a while, Perez thought. It occurred to him that they might want to take Cassie with them back to London. They weren’t so old after all and Cassie was very fond of them. Perhaps that would be a solution. He knew they wouldn’t want to live in the islands. They were city people. But then might he lose contact with the girl altogether?

That evening, back at his small house right by the water in Lerwick, he drank whisky with his father and worried about Cassie. James was still there. Perez had half-heartedly tried a few times to send him home and was always relieved when the older man refused. ‘It’ll be good for the crew to manage without me.’ There was something comforting about the dourness of his father, the solidness of his body and his lack of imagination. Perez had given up his bed to him and slept on the sofa in the living room. It would have been impossible for him, anyway, to sleep in the bed he’d shared with Fran on occasion. He suspected his father knew that. Perhaps he had some imagination after all.

The next day Rhona Laing, the Fiscal, called Perez to see her. As always when he walked into her office, he felt as though he had mud on his boots, that in some way he was contaminating her clean and elegant space. ‘We have to discuss the case, Jimmy. I know it’ll be hard but it has to be done.’ No mention of Fran, no soft and easy words. He was grateful for that. ‘Perhaps you’re interested anyway.’

‘No,’ he said. It came to him that he hadn’t tendered his resignation yet and that he should do it soon. If he were any sort of cop he’d have protected Fran; he couldn’t be in a position again where he put another life at risk.

‘John Fowler confessed.’ It was as if she hadn’t heard the negative. She smelled faintly of citrus. Expensive citrus. She’d done something different to her hair. Perhaps she had a new man. There were always rumours of the Fiscal’s men. ‘He was happy to talk but we found a confession on his laptop too. At least, more a series of excuses than a confession.’

‘He had no choice,’ Perez said. ‘Besides, that was what he wanted all the time. To tell his story.’

‘You knew it was him?’ She’d ordered a pot of coffee and poured him a cup.

‘A gut feeling at the beginning maybe,’ Perez admitted. He looked up and gave the first flash of a smile. He knew what lawyers made of gut feelings. ‘He seemed so uptight. A little strange. And there was the name of his bookshop.’

Rhona looked up sharply. ‘Which was?’

‘Numenius Books. It seemed a strange sort of name. I looked it up. Numenius is the scientific name for curlew. But it could have been a coincidence and we had no evidence, no motive until the DNA analysis of the feathers. Then I spoke to a few people and found out that Fowler had been travelling in the former Soviet Union at around the same time as Angela. Stella Monkton’s confession on her daughter’s behalf that Angela had stolen Fowler’s research confirmed it, of course. Angela wrote to her about it after asking if they could meet up.’

Rhona leaned back in her chair. ‘Why don’t you tell me, Jimmy? In your own way.’

Perez was tempted to get up and walk out. You know already. Sandy will have done a report. Although the spelling and the grammar will be crap, he’ll have set out the details. But he stayed. This was his last case. Might as well see it through for one more time.

‘John Fowler was a writer and journalist. Respected. A freelancer, but he did OK at it and made a good living. It seemed unlikely that he didn’t know Angela Moore. They’re all obsessive, these birdwatchers, and the scientists even more so. Look at Ben Catchpole. They come across an area of research and dig away at it.’ Perez found himself feeling his way into the skin of the murderer despite himself. He’d spoken to Fowler’s former colleagues; sitting in the kitchen in Springfield there’d been long telephone conversations about the man’s state of mind. This was Fran’s killer, but Perez had never really believed in monsters. To dismiss Fowler as a monster would be to let him off the hook. It was better to understand him and force him to take responsibility.

‘After Angela published the work on the slender-billed curlew everything went wrong for him,’ Perez went on. ‘He lost his credibility. He tried to persuade a few people that the find was his, but who would believe him? Angela was young and attractive, a publisher’s dream. It would be much harder to promote a middle-aged man, with a reputation for claiming rare birds that had never existed. Everyone had a vested interest in dismissing his claims. He gave up work as a journalist and set up the bookshop. He told everyone he needed to de-stress.’

‘Did he see a psychiatrist?’ The Fiscal looked up sharply from the paper where she was making notes. ‘Is he fit to plead?’

Perez shrugged. It seemed to him that anyone who had killed three women could be considered insane. He blamed himself. I knew. I should have stopped it.

‘He came to Fair Isle with the intention of killing Angela Moore,’ Rhona Laing went on. ‘It was premeditated. Planned. He didn’t lash out in a jealous rage. Not manslaughter due to diminished responsibility. They can’t go for that.’