Blue Lightning

by Ann Cleeves

  He came to bed immediately. No whisky for him, no tea. She switched on the bedside light when she heard him come in. He blinked. She thought he was disappointed she was still awake and tried not to feel hurt. He was too tired to talk. So, no questions. No recriminations about him wanting to send her away. She lay in silence and watched him take off his clothes, opened her arms when he climbed into bed beside her.

  His whole body was cold. He couldn’t have driven straight from the North Light; he wouldn’t be that chilled. She rubbed his arms to bring the life back into them and twisted her legs around his. She felt herself drifting into sleep, but could sense him lying beside her, rigid and quite awake. It was as if he’d suffered a personal grief; it didn’t feel as if he were a professional investigating the death of a stranger.

  She woke again when it was still dark. There were domestic noises in the house – a tap being run, the clatter of pans. James was up early to take out the Good Shepherd. She was alone in the bed. It was hard to believe that Perez had come back at all, that she had held the cold and silent man in her arms.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  In the North Light with Rhona Laing after the plane came in, watching the residents reacting to the news of Jane’s death, Perez felt disengaged from the process. It had already been a long evening. Perhaps because he hadn’t been present to see the arrival of the plane flying in through the darkness and could only imagine the sight – the silhouettes of the men, black against the orange lights – its appearance seemed part of a strange dream.

  He sat with Poppy in the warden’s flat. The curtains hadn’t been drawn and he saw the hill lit by moonlight and by the hypnotic regular sweep of the lighthouse beam. At last he was alone with the girl. Maurice was still in the common room with the guests. They sat together on the sofa. The grate hadn’t been cleaned and was full of ash and the remains of a piece of driftwood, some charred paper. The room was cold. Poppy had pulled a fleece jacket over her jumper.

  ‘You walked back from Springfield this evening,’ Perez said. ‘Did you meet anyone on the way?’

  It seemed that she hadn’t heard the question. ‘Jane was really kind to me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t care about Angela dying. It made my life easier. But why would anyone want to harm Jane?’

  ‘Can you think of a reason?’

  Poppy shook her head. ‘Angela was the only person who didn’t like her.’

  ‘Why didn’t Angela like her?’

  ‘Because Jane didn’t care about her being famous and stuff like that. Angela needed people to tell her how great she was all the time and Jane wouldn’t play those sort of games.’

  Perez returned to his original question. ‘Did you see anyone while you were walking back from Springfield?’

  ‘There was someone walking on the hill beyond the airstrip.’ Poppy hunched into her jacket. ‘For a moment it freaked me out because I thought it was Angela. You’d always see her walking like that. Like she could go on for miles without stopping. But of course it couldn’t have been. I don’t believe in ghosts.’ She shivered.

  ‘Who was it?’ It could have been the murderer, Perez thought, on his way north from the Pund.

  She shrugged. ‘It could have been anyone. It was just a silhouette against the hill. And they all look the same, don’t they, the birdwatchers? Waterproof jacket, hat, gloves.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Well, I thought at first it was Angela so it could have been a woman. But more likely a man.’

  The only woman staying at the centre was Sarah Fowler, but she was as tall as her husband, and in a bulky jacket and a hat, from a distance it would be impossible to tell the difference. But from the hill the walker would have seen Poppy clearly, especially if he had binoculars. Perez was pleased the girl would be out on the boat early the next morning.

  ‘Did Angela say anything to you in the week before she died? Anything to explain why she was killed?’

  ‘Nah, she didn’t pay much attention to me. I mean, she poked away about my boyfriend and what a loser I am, but looking back I don’t think her heart was in it. She had something else on her mind.’ There was a pause, a moment of honesty. ‘That’s probably why I tipped the beer over her. Better that she hated me than acted as if I wasn’t there.’

  At ten o’clock, Perez decided he would leave the residents in the company of Rhona Laing and return to the crime scene. She was untroubled about being abandoned and as he left, she was organizing sleeping accommodation for herself, Sandy and Vicki.

  ‘Absolutely not a dormitory,’ he heard her say to Maurice. ‘At least not for Ms Hewitt and me. Single rooms. Preferably with showers. You can put DC Wilson wherever you have room.’

  Perez walked through the moonlight to the Pund. There was already a frost and a thin shell of ice on the water in the mire. His earlier conversations with the field centre residents ran through his mind. What had he missed? What had provoked another murder? Perez still thought the killer was rational. These weren’t the actions of the tabloid psychopath. There’d been no sexual assault and, certainly in Angela’s case, no more violence than was needed to kill. That had been controlled, not the outburst of a spoiled teenager. He thought again he could safely send Poppy away from the island to her mother. After their conversation he had no sense of her as a murderer. It seemed to him that Jane had been stabbed because she posed a threat to Angela’s killer: she’d seen something or heard something or worked out the identity of the perpetrator. But even if she hadn’t been a victim in her own right, there’d been a ferocity in the attack that was different and Perez found that confusing.

  If Jane had discovered Angela’s hideaway, that might provide a motive for the death. Perhaps there had been a diary there, a letter or a photograph, which would have pointed to the killer. Jane had been killed for it. And now the item had been taken away and probably destroyed. That was the theory that he’d been developing since the discovery of Jane’s body. Before leaving the field centre, he’d sat in the bird room with Rhona Laing and discussed it with her; now it was firmer in his mind and he ran through the implications. They would pull in a specialist team to search the North Light. While whatever had been taken from the Pund probably no longer existed, they had to make the effort to find it. He knew it would be possible to bring planes in all the next day and if the charters had been taken by the birdwatchers, they’d call in the emergency helicopter again.

  When he arrived at the Pund, he found Sandy smoking outside. Perez saw the glow of the cigarette end as he approached the building and then the white halo of condensed air.

  ‘It’s weird,’ Sandy said. ‘I thought this would be like Whalsay, but smaller. But it isn’t, is it? It’s much more remote.’ Whalsay was the island where he’d grown up. It was only a few miles from Shetland mainland and linked to it by a regular roll-on roll-off ferry service. He rubbed out the cigarette and put the butt in a bag in his pocket, stamped his feet to keep out the cold. ‘I couldn’t take this. It would drive me crazy after a week.’

  ‘You’d get used to it.’ But Perez wasn’t really sure he would get used to it again if he moved home. Perhaps he’d been away for too long. ‘How’s the CSI getting on?’

  ‘She says she’s finished the photographs,’ Sandy said. ‘She was bagging up the evidence. I was getting in the way.’ He spoke as if he was always in the way.

  Perez left Sandy where he was and stood at the Pund door. He couldn’t see Vicki, so she must be in the loft. He shouted in to her: ‘Is it OK if I have a look up there?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m about finished. Just put on a suit and walk between the tapes. You don’t need to bother with the bootees. I’ll need to take a print of your shoes before I leave anyway.’

  Perez found a paper scene suit just inside the door, put it on and climbed the ladder. He stood halfway up and looked inside. Jane’s body remained just as he remembered it, lit up by the fierce white light. Vicki was crouched in the corner of the loft, to avoid an outstretched arm, and was ru
nning her hands under the sheepskins.

  ‘I was looking for the murder weapon,’ she said.

  ‘It’s another stabbing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Certainly looks that way to me. But it won’t be the same knife, of course. That went out in the helicopter with the first victim.’

  ‘There’s more blood this time.’

  ‘And more wounds,’ Vicki said. ‘I think Jane heard the killer climb up the ladder. There’d have been no escape for her but she put up a struggle. There are defensive cuts on her hands and arms.’

  Perez wondered what the murderer had made of that. Had he been sickened by having to face the woman he was stabbing? Or had he enjoyed it?

  ‘Could a woman have done it?’ Surely a woman wouldn’t have been excited by the violence?

  Vicki shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Any idea what sort of weapon we should be looking for?’

  ‘Hey, ask the pathologist. He gets paid a lot more than me.’

  But she grinned. She was never precious, and he valued her judgement more than that of the eminent doctor who performed the post-mortems in Aberdeen.

  ‘Something with a narrow blade,’ she said. ‘Very sharp. The murderer pulled it out afterwards, which is one reason why there’s more blood here than there was at the first scene. Looks like he hit an artery. Of course, the feathers are very different too.’

  ‘Are they?’ He was surprised. He thought feathers were feathers. ‘I suppose there are more of them here. In the bird room a few were woven into Angela’s hair. And those were longer.’

  ‘Here someone’s just slit open a feather pillow and spilled out the contents,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you ever have pillow fights in that boarding school of yours?’

  ‘The hostel at the Anderson High was hardly a boarding school.’ He made the same point every time they met, but it was a running gag: that he’d been to a posh boarding school while she was at the local comprehensive. ‘What about the feathers in Angela’s hair then?’

  ‘I’ve sent them for DNA analysis, but they’re not the sort you stuff pillows with, that’s for sure. Looks like they might have come from a couple of different species.’

  Perez considered that. He couldn’t understand what the implication might be. ‘Have we found the empty pillowcase?’

  ‘It’s not here.’ She stretched. The spotlights shining up from the ground floor threw strange shadows on her face. ‘Definitely no murder weapon either.’

  ‘I’m going to ask the search team to come in. They can pull this place apart and go to the North Light too. I’ll sort it out first thing.’

  He climbed down the ladder and Vicki followed. He’d brought a flask of coffee with him from the field centre. Now, standing with Sandy just outside the house, he took it out of his rucksack and pulled out of his pockets, like a magician conjuring brightly coloured ribbons from thin air, several rounds of sandwiches and half a fruit cake. ‘Jane’s fruit cake was famous. Make the most of it.’

  They sat in Tammy Jamieson’s van to eat. The man must have walked home. There were fingers of ice on the windscreen, but the cold hadn’t driven away a background stink of fish. Perez sat in the back on a grubby cushion. He drank some coffee but left the food to the others.

  He asked: ‘Where have you fingerprinted?’

  Vicki took her coffee like he did, strong and black. There was milk in a screw-top jar for Sandy, and a couple of tablespoons of sugar, twisted into the corner of a polythene bag. She took a gulp, spluttered because it was so hot, then turned round to where he was sitting behind her. ‘The shelf, the wine rack, the mugs. There are a couple of smudges on the ladder but I’ve pulled a good one from the planks in the loft. Could be Jane’s or Angela’s, of course.’

  ‘I opened that wooden box, before I found her body.’

  ‘I tried that for prints. There was nothing. Not even yours.’

  He thought that was odd because he hadn’t been wearing gloves, but maybe he’d just touched the edge of the lid and the prints hadn’t taken.

  He leaned forward to ask her another question. By now the back windows of the van were running with condensation. ‘Have you bagged up the stuff that was inside the box?’

  ‘What stuff?’ She took a slice of cake and put it in her mouth.

  Perez shut his eyes and felt for a moment as if he were drowning. He pictured his father, dressed in the crime scene suit, setting up the strong lights inside the Pund, the sharp response to Sandy’s offer of help. When Perez looked up again, Sandy was asking about plane times and the practicalities of bringing up the search team. ‘Do you think we could fly them direct from Inverness?’ Perez held his breath and waited for Vicki to repeat the question: What stuff? But when he hadn’t immediately replied, she’d answered Sandy instead, too tired and overwhelmed by the detailed work, it seemed, to hold the thought in her mind.

  What will I say if she asks me again?

  In the van the conversation continued, passing backwards and forwards between Sandy and Vicki, but he hardly heard it.

  Will I answer with the truth? The silver earrings and bangle. Jewellery made in the Isle by that Scottish woman who set up business in the South Light. I recognize the style. I bought some for Fran.

  ‘I hope they’ve got some heating on in the lighthouse,’ Vicki was saying. ‘What’s the accommodation like, Jimmy? OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  What stuff? She didn’t repeat the question again. And he didn’t remind her.

  They decided then to call it a day soon. Vicki said she just wanted to have a quick look for footwear prints on the muddy track outside the Pund. If the weather changed overnight they might lose them. ‘And shouldn’t one of us stay here to keep an eye on the scene?’

  ‘We’ll tape it,’ Sandy said. ‘And I’ll be back here before it gets light. Surely it’ll be safe enough if I have a couple of hours’ sleep. Jimmy?’

  And Perez, distracted, only nodded. While Vicki and Sandy were busy, he went into the ruined house. He opened the shiny wooden box himself and saw that it was empty.

  By then Sandy had the engine running. Perez turned off his torch, ran outside and climbed into the back of the van. Still he didn’t speak of the empty box. He paused before he got out at Springfield, and he might have said something then, but Sandy shouted from the driver’s seat: ‘Come on, man, I want my bed.’

  Perez let himself into the silent house. When he pushed open the bedroom door, Fran turned on the light. There was nothing to say to her, so he remained quiet. She wrapped him around with her body to warm him, but long after he heard the regular breathing that meant she was asleep, he stayed as cold and stiff as if he were lying outside on the frozen ground.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Perez stood on the bank above the Pund and looked down on it. He thought the building was crumbling back into the hill. The stone that had once formed the surrounding wall had been scattered and was indistinguishable now from the rocky outcrops that grew out of the bog. The building itself sagged at one end. There was a pool of mist covering the low land from Setter to the Pund, so in the dawn the house looked almost romantic. An ideal place for lovers to meet.

  Perez hadn’t slept, had turned occasionally during the early hours to look at the alarm clock, surprised at how slowly time was passing. The implication of the empty wooden box had struck him as soon as Vicki had given the puzzled frown, had turned to him in the stinking van and murmured: ‘What stuff?’ It had stayed with him all night, going round and round in his mind.

  He had known his father had taken the jewellery. Who else would have done it? Not Sandy or Vicki. Why would they? They hadn’t any personal connection with the investigation. And nobody else had had the opportunity. He had realized his father must be involved as soon as Vicki had asked the question, but he hadn’t answered. Did that make him as corrupt as the people he despised? The politicians who found work for their children, the businessmen who paid for planning rules to be overlooked. The Dun
can Hunters, who blackmailed and bribed their way to success.

  James had got up at the same time as Perez. They’d stood in the kitchen at Springfield drinking tea, eating toast made from his mother’s home-baked bread. But Mary had been there too and besides, tense and confused after a sleepless night, Perez wouldn’t have known what to say to the man. He wouldn’t have been able to control his anger. Because after the first realization of what his father had done, rage had swamped his brain and drowned out reason. How could his father, who blethered from the pulpit in the kirk about righteousness and morality, live with himself? How could he be such a hypocrite? Perez, who’d never really understood the impulse to physical violence, was scared of what he might do. He imagined how it would feel to smash his father’s face with his fist until the blood ran through his fingers. So he’d stayed silent and just nodded when James offered him a lift up the island on the truck with the rest of the Shepherd crew.

  They’d dropped him at Setter and he’d walked to the Pund from there. It was just starting to get light. Every blade of grass and head of heather was covered in hoar frost. As he got closer to the house he disturbed a snipe in the grass. He stopped for a moment and watched it zigzag away across the hill. In the old days, he supposed, men would have shot it, though it wouldn’t have provided more than a mouthful of food.

  After the first shock, Perez wasn’t even surprised that his father had taken the earrings and bracelet or by the betrayal that the theft implied. It made sense, explained details that had previously seemed irrelevant. Perez remembered the embarrassed shuffling of the boys on the boat when he’d asked if Angela had an island lover. His father’s offering to help by staying with Jane’s body if Perez wanted to meet the plane. Later, James must have taken the opportunity to steal the jewellery when he was setting up the lights in the Pund and their attention was elsewhere. He wouldn’t have realized Perez had searched the ground floor of the building before finding Jane’s body.