Ann Cleeves - Blue Lightning

‘Is it possible to lock the bird room door?’

Jane looked dubious, disappeared and returned a few moments later with a bunch of heavy, old-fashioned keys. ‘These have been hanging in the larder since I first came here.’

The third key he tried fitted. He locked the door and followed her through the common room, where the night before they’d all sat drinking and laughing, to the kitchen.

It was, he saw at once, Jane’s domain. The men sitting at the table looked up when she came in and seemed comforted by her presence. She fetched ground coffee from the fridge and filled the kettle. Maurice was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. He was unshaven, red-eyed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I want to see her again. There must be a mistake.’

‘I’m afraid there’s no mistake.’ Perez sat beside him. This didn’t seem like a man about to confess to murdering his wife. And if it were a family affair, surely the daughter would be a more likely suspect? Maurice half-rose to his feet as if he were about to demand to be taken to Angela, then seemed to find the effort too much for him and sat down heavily again.

Ben Catchpole was skinny, with wild red hair. Perez had met him for the first time at the party the night before. He came from the West Country and had a soft rural accent. Perez tried to replay the conversation of the previous evening in his head. What had they discussed? The decline of seabirds. That had been the subject of Ben’s doctorate, though it seemed to Perez that he hardly looked old enough to be an undergraduate, never mind to have gained a PhD. He’d been passionate, had railed against politicians and environmentalists for their cowardice in dealing with the problem. Fran had joined in the conversation and Perez had seen at once that she liked the young man. Later in the evening Perez had overheard Ben telling her he’d been an active member of Greenpeace as a student, remembered a description of a stint at sea monitoring the tuna fishery.

Now, nobody spoke for a moment. Jane poured water into the cafetière. Perez realized his brain was so accustomed to the sound of the wind outside that he no longer noticed it. It was starting to get light.

‘The visitors will be down for breakfast in a while,’ Jane said. ‘I told them we’d make it later today. Nine o’clock because of the party and the weather. What do you want me to do?’

‘Give them breakfast,’ Perez said. ‘Of course. I’ll talk to them then.’ He wondered if Fran had woken yet, if she was sitting in Springfield eating the fancy organic muesli his mother had bought in specially. What would she make of his disappearance, the fact that work had followed him home to the Isle? ‘But sit down for a moment please. I’d like to speak to you first.’

Jane poured out coffee, set a carton of milk on the table and joined them.

‘If anyone knows anything about Angela’s death,’ Perez said quietly, ‘now is the time to tell me.’ They stared at him and he thought this might be harder than he’d expected. ‘Where’s Poppy?’

Now there was some response. Maurice looked towards the windows streaked with salt. ‘You can’t think she had anything to do with this.’

‘There was an argument yesterday evening. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption.’

‘She’s a child,’ Maurice said. ‘She has issues with anger management. That doesn’t make her a killer.’ But Perez thought he could hear uncertainty in the voice. Perhaps Maurice had come to the same conclusion as him. What must it be like to believe that your daughter was a murderer?

‘Talk me through what happened here after I left.’

‘You heard the argument in the common room when Angela refused to give Poppy a drink?’

Perez nodded.

‘A couple of our visitors were still up. I asked Ben to look after the bar and I took Poppy into the flat. You know we have our own accommodation at the west end of the centre.’

‘Where was Angela?’

‘She was already in the flat. She was drying her hair. Poppy had thrown beer over her.’ He looked directly at Perez. ‘She was drunk. It was childish, pathetic. But not malicious. Not murderous.’

‘How was Poppy then?’

Maurice gave a little grin. ‘Still angry. Unapologetic. She was here against her will. There’d been problems at school. Nothing serious, but she’d been excluded for a fortnight. Her mother decided a period away would be good for her. I thought she’d enjoy the island. She liked it here when she was younger, but I suppose a thirteen-year-old tomboy has a different outlook on life from a sixteen-year-old young woman.’ He paused. ‘There’s a boyfriend at home. She has the melodramatic notion that we’re trying to keep them apart. If anything her anger was directed at me, not Angela.’

‘How did Poppy and Angela get on?’ Perez finished his coffee and hoped there was more left in the pot.

‘Angela didn’t have a drop of maternal blood in her body. Poppy was an irritation to her. But she knew the irritation would be temporary.’

Perez was astonished by the honesty of the comments. People usually spoke more kindly of the dead. Especially dead partners. Maurice seemed to register the surprise: ‘I’m a historian by training, Jimmy. Telling the truth has become a habit.’

Perez nodded. ‘What happened when you got Poppy back to the flat?’

‘I laid her on her bed and went to get her a glass of water. When I got back she was dead to the world. I took off her shoes and some of her clothes and covered her with the duvet. She hardly stirred. She was practically unconscious. There’s no way she got out of bed and stabbed my wife. Or threaded feathers through her hair. Where would she get those?’

‘Why didn’t you look for Angela when she didn’t come to bed?’

‘She said she was going to do some work. She was young, Jimmy. She never seemed to get tired. There was a paper she was preparing and she was close to the deadline. I went to bed and straight to sleep. I didn’t even notice she wasn’t there.’ He looked up with blank eyes. ‘I loved her, you know, from the moment I first met her. She was a bright postgraduate student then. I knew it was madness but there was nothing I could do to stop it. My wife and I were happy, settled, and I wrecked all that, in a clear-sighted, self-destructive series of actions that alienated my children and my friends. And I wouldn’t have changed it. Even now that she’s dead, I wouldn’t go back and do anything differently.’ He stood up. ‘I have to wake Poppy and tell her what’s happened. That’s all right, Jimmy? You will allow me to do that?’

Perez nodded again and watched him leave the room.

Dougie Barr came to Fair Isle for the birds, not the culture. The party on the previous evening had left him cold. He’d had a couple of drinks, then taken himself off to bed. He liked music, couldn’t imagine a long drive without it blasting from the CD, but he was into techno, something with a strong beat. He’d never understood the attraction of folk music, of wailing fiddles and howling singers. He needed noise and rhythm to keep him awake on a long twitch and to get the adrenalin pumping before he arrived at the bird. When it came to his list of species seen in Britain, he was up there with the best of them. Respected. Whenever he turned up at a twitch people knew who he was. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

He’d been coming to Fair Isle since he was a boy, staying in the old place down at the North Haven. He’d found the UK’s first brown flycatcher here in 1992 when he was fifteen and had sneaked away early from school at the end of the summer term with a group of like-minded older friends, leaving his mother bewildered by his behaviour. On the estate where they lived kids got into drugs and car theft, not natural history. The memory of that glorious day in July, the sudden realization that he was looking at something truly mega, still lit up the gloomy hours in the call centre where he worked. Since then he’d had a kind of superstition about the place and had come back nearly every year. Waiting for another rarity to match the first. For him, the real thrill came in finding his own tick. There wasn’t the same excitement chasing after other people’s birds.