Blue Lightning

by Ann Cleeves

  She went into the kitchen to make coffee. While the kettles were boiling she stacked the plates in the dishwasher and then spooned instant granules into a big Thermos jug. Her evening ritual. The final task before the end of the working day. She thought suddenly that this would be her last year at the centre. She wouldn’t come back to the Isle once the season was over. It wouldn’t be the same and, anyway, she was ready now to move on. By becoming a victim of violence, Angela Moore had done that for her.

  There was a movement behind her and she turned, expecting to see one of the visitors, Sarah perhaps, offering to help with the coffee. But Perez stood there. He’d taken off his boots and his coat and was standing very still, just by her shoulder. She felt her pulse quicken. Did everyone feel scared when the police arrived? Did everyone remember the misdemeanours, the unkind acts, not criminal perhaps but inhumane, when confronted by a detective like Perez? We all think he can see right through us. He knows what we’re thinking. It’s like standing before God on the Day of Judgement. Carefully she poured boiling water into the flask. Her hand was quite steady. I’m being ridiculous. It’s the weather and the melodrama of the situation. She thought again that she could have walked into a novel, if not Christie then something else Gothic and overblown.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ Perez said.

  ‘You’re not intruding. Come and have coffee with us.’

  He followed her into the dining room. They were all sitting just as she had left them. Another squall had blown up and the rain was hitting the window. Nobody was speaking. Jane felt a responsibility to put people at their ease. It had been the same at the parties in Richmond: Dee had invited strangely mismatched people to her home and then ignored them and it had been Jane’s role to make the introductions and bring the guests together.

  ‘Everybody’s rather excited,’ she said. ‘There’s a very rare bird on Golden Water. A trumpeter swan. It’s never been seen in the UK before.’

  Still Perez said nothing. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat between Dougie and Hugh.

  ‘This is an unusual situation.’ Perez seemed to be weighing his words. Jane wondered if he already knew who’d killed Angela. Perhaps there was some magic test of technology that had made it clear during the hours he’d spent in the bird room. Was he here to make an arrest? She realized she’d be disappointed as well as relieved if that were the purpose of his visit. She was still intrigued by the puzzle. She felt as she did when she was attempting to complete a crossword and someone leaned over her shoulder and gave her the answer to a cryptic clue.

  But it seemed Perez was no further forward in the investigation than she was. ‘Usually, in a case like this a big team would be working it, taking statements, checking the background of the witnesses. Here, there’s only me. I’d be grateful for your cooperation. I do need a statement from each of you and I’d like to speak to you individually.’ He looked round the table. ‘As soon as possible while your memories are still fresh.’

  ‘What about Maurice and Poppy?’ Hugh said. ‘I assume you’ll be talking to them.’ He shrugged and gave the diffident little smile to signal he intended no offence.

  Really, Hugh, Jane thought. You’re rather poisonous after all. And I thought you were such a nice boy.

  ‘I’ll be talking to everyone,’ Perez said sharply. ‘And I’ll run the investigation in my own way. I’ll begin the interviews this evening.’ He handed sheets of paper around the table. ‘In the meantime, I’d be grateful if you could write down everything you can remember about yesterday evening. I’ll need a timetable of your own movements after the party, but anything else that might be relevant. Perhaps there was an overheard conversation that has become more significant in the light of Angela’s death. Or perhaps you noticed someone moving around the lighthouse late last night. Please don’t discuss the matter with fellow guests. It shouldn’t be the subject of speculation. And be honest. As I said this is an unusual situation, but it isn’t a game.’

  He turned to Jane and for the first time since arriving he smiled. ‘Would it be possible to have more coffee? It’s going to be a long night.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Perez thought this was the most difficult case he’d ever worked. Here, stranded in the North Light, it was as if he was working in a strange country; it even seemed that the witnesses spoke a foreign language and he was groping to make sense of the words. He understood for the first time how difficult it must have been for Roy Taylor, his colleague from Inverness, to come into Shetland and take charge of an investigation there. The place would have seemed quite alien to him. Perez knew how Shetlanders thought. He could see the world through their eyes. The field centre staff and guests were English and had different ambitions and preoccupations. In a sudden fancy, he thought that the building was like an outpost of Empire during the time of the Raj; he felt like a native official bridging the gap between both cultures.

  He moved everyone from the dining room to the common room. They would be more comfortable there and he could use the dining room to interview his witnesses. He preferred to sit on an upright chair with the table between him and his interviewee, rather than slouched on a sofa, his knees touching those of his suspect. Because of course they were all suspects. That was the only way he could consider them at the moment. He knew it was unlikely that the field centre residents would sit in silence in the common room; they would discuss what was going on as soon as he left the room. Their written statements would be compromised. But it was the best he could do.

  Fran had offered to come back to the field centre with him: ‘I could help. I’m observant. I could watch them and listen to what was said. Make notes without their realizing.’ But he wasn’t sure information gathered in that way would be considered admissible evidence. And one woman had been murdered already. He wasn’t going to place Fran in danger again.

  He asked John Fowler to join him first in the dining room. Why had he made that choice? It was a random decision made partly because quiet people always interested him, and Fowler had hardly spoken over coffee. Also, he seemed amiable and Perez could do without a hostile conversation to kick off the evening.

  They talked with the churning of the dishwasher in the kitchen as a background to the conversation. Perez set a small tape recorder on the table between them. He’d borrowed it from Stella, the schoolteacher, when he’d gone down the island to store Angela’s body.

  He nodded towards the machine. ‘You don’t mind? This isn’t a formal interview, but I don’t have anyone to take notes.’

  Listening to the recorded conversation later, the background sound of the kitchen appliance, kicking in before the speech, would immediately make him feel uneasy and remind him of his struggle to ask the important questions.

  He began with the factual details he already knew: he’d found guests’ names and addresses on the bird room computer and colleagues in Lerwick had already done a check for criminal records. Fowler’s was clean. The couple lived in Bristol. John was forty-nine and Sarah was forty-one. Now the man sat in front of him, quite unmoved, it seemed, by the situation. His hair was slightly long for a man of his age and he wore denims and a knitted jersey. There was nothing unusual or impressive about him. He was the sort of character always passed over in an identity parade.

  ‘What brought you to Fair Isle in the autumn?’ Perez asked.

  ‘Birds.’ Fowler smiled. ‘We’re just like the other mad people who come all this way. I’ve spent a couple of autumns in Shetland, but I’ve never been to Fair Isle. It’s been a dream, you know. For birdwatchers the place has an almost mythical status. It’s a place where almost anything can happen. And today it did, of course, with the trumpeter swan. Besides, Sarah needed a holiday.’

  ‘Why did your wife need a holiday?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ The smile vanished, replaced by a small frown, as if Perez had committed some unfortunate breach of manners.

  ‘Probably not.’ Perez wasn’t sure what had led him to ask
the question, but now Fowler’s response intrigued him. ‘But I’m interested.’

  Fowler shrugged. ‘She’d lost a baby. We’d given up hope of conceiving. Tried everything – had all the tests, IVF. Then there was that wonderful moment when she realized she was pregnant. But there was a miscarriage. Nobody can tell us why. Her baby would have been due this week. It’s been a strain for both of us. I had to get her away.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Perez’s first wife had been called Sarah too and she’d had a miscarriage. He’d thought it had been at the root of the breakdown of his marriage. Certainly he had never been more unhappy than when they lost the baby. Now he felt like an insensitive oaf for prying into private grief.

  ‘You won’t say anything to her.’ Fowler looked earnestly at Perez. He had the air, Perez thought, of an academic, gentle, a little unworldly.

  ‘Of course not.’ The dishwasher beeped to show it was at the end of its cycle. ‘Had you met Angela Moore before you came to the field centre?’

  ‘Once, I think, at a publisher’s party. I used to write features for specialist journals.’

  ‘You’re a journalist?’ Perez looked up sharply. ‘These interviews are confidential. I wouldn’t want what’s said here to appear in a newspaper.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that to her family.’ Fowler was staring out of the window. ‘Besides, I’m never asked to write anything these days. I seem to have gone out of favour. And I didn’t write much for the dailies: only occasionally features on natural history.’

  Perez supposed he would have to trust the man but he thought every journalist would like a story in a big paper, his name in bold, next to the headline. And Fowler would be very quickly back in favour if the nationals realized he was here. ‘So why was Angela at the publisher’s party?’

  ‘It was to celebrate the launch of her book. They were hoping for publicity. A review.’

  ‘That was when Angela’s book on the curlew was published?’ Perez felt he was having to prise information from the man. Perhaps the tape recorder was a mistake and there would have been a more relaxed conversation without it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you write a review?’

  ‘I did. I’m afraid it was less than generous.’

  ‘It’s not a good book?’

  ‘You’ll have to read it, Inspector, and judge for yourself.’ He looked up and gave a brief smile.

  ‘Did Angela recognize you when you arrived at the lighthouse?’ Perez asked. He still didn’t know where these questions were leading. Again he thought this was a world about which he knew nothing. He could talk to crofters about their sheep and fishermen about the piltock, but these writers and birdwatchers were strange and incomprehensible to him.

  ‘She knew my name, but probably didn’t remember having met me.’

  ‘And you got on all right, despite the poor review?’

  ‘Of course, Inspector. She had become a famous woman. She had no reason to bear a grudge. She no longer needed my approval.’

  It seemed to Perez that Angela was a woman who might bear a grudge for a long time. He looked at the sheet of paper on the table in front of him and saw he’d written nothing.

  ‘How do you make your living now?’ he asked.

  ‘Still through books, Inspector. But now I collect them and sell them, I don’t write about them. I have a little natural history bookshop. Most of my work is done over the Internet these days of course, but there are still devoted customers who like to browse. I’m very fortunate to be able to indulge my passion and call it work.’

  Perez wondered if that was what he did. Did he indulge his passion, his curiosity at least, and call it work?

  ‘You were at the party here last night,’ he said. The Fowlers had introduced themselves, offered their congratulations and said how lovely it was that all the guests had been invited, but he had no memory of them dancing. Perhaps they’d stayed long enough to be polite, then gone to bed. ‘How did Angela seem to you then?’

  Fowler shrugged. ‘Much as she always was. Driven, abrasive, entertaining.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill her?’ It had seemed to Perez, despite the strange show with the feathers, that this was a crime with a rational motive. Apparently, there’d been no sexual assault on Angela. He didn’t believe they could blame a madman enraged by the storm.

  ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to ask, Inspector.’ Fowler’s voice was quite distant now, though he was as polite as ever. It was as if the interview was beginning to bore him. ‘I hardly knew the woman.’

  Perez took a break before calling the next witness into the dining room. He poured another mug of coffee and on impulse carried it outside for a moment in an attempt to raise his energy level. He had to put his weight behind the door to get it open and even in the lee of the building, the force of the wind made him gasp for breath. The noise of the sea thundered and echoed, driving speculation about the case from his brain. It was replaced by a moment of despair. I can’t do this. Not on my own. He’d never found formal interviews, the sterile question-and-answer session with the witness defensive and on guard, particularly useful. Here, he thought, he had no control at all and no sense of what the suspects were thinking. This was his island, but in the North Light the writer, the scientists and the birdwatchers were on home territory. They had the advantage. Somehow he had to shift the balance of power.

  He walked briskly into the common room. They had heard his approaching footsteps on the wooden floors and when he entered the place was quiet; everyone seemed to be concentrating on the papers in front of them. They looked up. Who would be next?

  ‘A change of plan,’ he said. It seemed to him that his voice was unnaturally loud. ‘I have to go back to Springfield. There’s been a call from Inverness. We’ll continue tomorrow, but I’ll set up base in the community hall. Then I disrupt the working of the field centre as little as possible. I’ll phone when I’m ready. If I could collect your statements now . . .’

  He stalked away, the papers in one hand, feeling like a teacher in a rough school struggling to maintain authority in his class. He had reached his car when Jane called after him. He saw her in the light that spilled out from the lobby. She had thrown a coat over her shoulders but was still wearing indoor shoes. She ran to join him. ‘Jimmy, can I talk to you? I’ve remembered something. Probably not important, but I thought you should know.’

  They sat in Big James’s rust-pocked car, battered by the wind. Occasionally he had to ask Jane to speak up so he could hear her.

  ‘It was something Angela said at lunchtime the day before she died.’ Jane was looking ahead of her through the windscreen, though it was quite black outside. Perez had switched on the interior lamp, had been astonished when it worked, so they talked in that pale, rather flickering light. ‘She said someone had been into the bird room and disturbed her papers. Something she was working on. She was furious. I mean, incandescent. It wasn’t unknown for her to manufacture rage, just because she was bored, but this was the real thing.’

  ‘Can you remember anything else about the conversation?’

  ‘I think a paper was missing. She accused one of us of having taken it.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’ Perez asked. He turned to look at the woman, at the thin, intense face. Why did this matter so much to her?

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘At least it didn’t seem so to me at the time.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He assumed she would get out now, that the conversation was finished, but she sat where she was. He waited, thinking that waiting was one of his skills. He could do it better than anyone else he knew.

  ‘You should speak to Ben Catchpole,’ she said at last. ‘Hugh too, perhaps. Angela liked pretty young boys.’

  ‘You’re saying she slept with them?’ He heard the surprise and disapproval in his own voice. How Fran would mock him if she’d been listening in! She was always telling him he was narrow-minded, prudish. And if they’d been talking about a man, wo
uld Perez be equally shocked?

  There was no direct answer. ‘She was predatory,’ Jane said. ‘She needed admirers. I don’t know for certain about Ben and Hugh, but it certainly happened last year. She took up with a young visitor and really screwed him up.’ She continued to stare ahead of her into the darkness.

  ‘What did Maurice make of the arrangement?’

  ‘I would guess,’ Jane said, ‘that he pretended not to know. Maurice likes an easy life. And more than anything he wanted Angela to be happy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again, and this time Jane did get out of the car. Through the back windscreen he watched her run towards the lights of the field centre.

  In Springfield they were watching television. The thick curtains were drawn against the storm. There was a fire of peat and driftwood and he could smell that as soon as he walked into the house. His mother got up when she heard him come in and made him coffee, brought out a plate with oatcakes and cheese. His father poured him a glass of whisky. Fran was alone on the sofa, her legs curled under her, and he bent and kissed her head. He smelled the shampoo she always used, along with the peat smoke.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you back so early,’ she said. ‘Is it all over?’

  ‘No, but I couldn’t go on this evening. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Plenty to do tomorrow though.’

  ‘We’ve just seen the forecast,’ his father said. ‘The weather should start to change in the morning. There’s a high pressure coming in.’

  ‘You’ll get the boat out then?’

  ‘Not just yet. There’ll still be too much of a swell. And I can’t see the plane making it either. The chopper might be OK. And the day after should be fine. Everything should be back to normal by then.’