Blue Lightning

by Ann Cleeves

  This time he replied to the question before Rhona could step in: ‘We have informed Mrs Moore’s father, but we still have to trace her mother. I’d be very grateful if she could contact me through Highland and Islands police.’ He was surprised by a camera’s flashlight and felt foolish.

  There were no further questions. Perez thought the media wanted to be away from the island as quickly as possible. This might be a huge story for them but they didn’t want to be stranded on a lump of rock for the night. He thought they were less concerned about there being a murderer on the loose than the fact that there was no pub here. As they waited at the airstrip for the planes to come in, the main topic of conversation was where they could get their first drink.

  Rhona Laing went out with them, pushed her way past the reporters to get on to the first plane back to Tingwall. Perhaps she’d rearranged her dinner date at the Busta House Hotel and wanted to get home in time to change.

  ‘Keep in touch, Jimmy.’ A little regal wave. No last-minute instructions, no insistence that he wrap up the case quickly. She realized he understood the pressure. Another couple of days and the press would be demanding that someone else, someone from the city, should take over.

  The second plane took off just as it was getting dark. He watched it disappear across the horizon. Now all the day visitors had gone. Apart from the North Light residents the only strangers on the island were members of the specialist search team. They would stay at least for another day. He decided to get home and speak to his father. The Shepherd would have been long unloaded and Big James would be at home, in front of the television, waiting for the football results. Perez felt a brief moment of pleasure at the thought of disrupting the sacred household ritual of Final Score.

  He was walking down the track to pick up his borrowed car, and wondering where Sandy was, when his mobile rang. He was so certain that it would be Sandy, reporting on the results of the search, that he didn’t check the screen and was surprised to hear Maurice.

  ‘Are you busy, Jimmy? Could you spare a few minutes?’

  Maurice was waiting for him in the flat. The place was untidier than Perez had seen it, untidier certainly than when he’d been there with Poppy the night before. Maurice might have cleaned up his act for public appearance but in private things were still falling apart. With Poppy gone, perhaps he no longer felt the need to put on a show. On the table in the living room there was an ashtray full of cigarette ends. Maurice shrugged. ‘I’d given up. Angela hated it. Now . . .’ He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whisky and two glasses. ‘Have a dram with me, Jimmy. I’ll drink alone if I have to but I don’t like it.’

  Perez nodded. Had Maurice called him back to the North Light just because he was lonely? He sipped the whisky and waited.

  ‘The mail came in on the boat today,’ Maurice said. ‘You know what it’s like when the weather’s been bad. You get a heap of the stuff and most of it junk.’

  Perez nodded again. ‘And some of it’s for Angela?’

  ‘Of course I should have realized it would be, but it threw me, seeing her name on the envelopes.’

  ‘I’d like to take the mail with me, if that’s OK,’ Perez said. He should have thought about it and asked Joanne at the post office to set Angela’s mail to one side. ‘I’ll bring it back. Have you opened it?’

  ‘Not the letters addressed to her!’ Maurice sounded shocked.

  ‘But there was something that worried you? That’s why you phoned.’

  ‘It was the bank statement.’ Maurice stood up and pulled a sheet from the pile of paper on the table. ‘Our joint current account. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘I don’t usually deal with our personal account. Of course, I manage the field centre budget, but most of our joint income came from Angela – from television and from her books. So really the joint account was always hers and she dealt with it.’ Perez wondered what that might be like – to have a partner who earned so much more than you. It might happen to him when Fran became really famous. He told himself that of course he’d be fine with it, but deep down he wasn’t sure. And it occurred to him for the first time that Angela might have been quite wealthy. The couple had no real expenses. They lived rent-free and the trust paid all their living expenses. Money was a powerful motive for murder.

  Maurice was continuing: ‘Angela went off for the day just before the weather closed in. A dentist’s appointment. She had dreadful toothache one night and arranged it urgently. The statement says she took three thousand pounds in cash from our joint account. Why would she have done that? Why would she want so much money? All we use cash for here is for the occasional drink at the centre bar and maybe chocolate from the shop. Everything else is settled on account.’

  ‘Is the cash here? Has the search team been through the flat yet?’ Perez had asked it to start at the Pund and move on to the North Light.

  ‘No.’ Now Maurice just seemed confused. He still stood with his back to the window, looking in at Perez.

  ‘Where would Angela have kept money? Handbag? Wallet?’ There had been no handbag in the bird room when the body was found.

  ‘She used a small rucksack instead of a handbag,’ Maurice said. ‘Her purse would probably be in that.’ But he made no move to find it.

  ‘Should we look?’ Perez spoke gently. Again he thought that although Maurice was managing to hold himself together to keep the field centre running, he was struggling to cope when he was alone. ‘Where might the rucksack be?’

  ‘In this cupboard with the coats.’ Maurice was already on his feet, scrabbling through a pine cupboard that stood in the entrance to the flat. He threw out odd boots and shoes and emerged with the sack. By the time Perez got to him, it was too late to suggest that it should be bagged up and regarded as evidence. Maurice squatted where he was and tipped the contents on to the floor.

  The burst of manic energy seemed to have left him drained and he just sat, looking at the pile of objects on the carpet. Perez knelt beside him.

  There were scraps of paper, including a couple of till receipts, which Perez would look through later, a small diary, a packet of tissues and a large leather purse. Maurice saw the purse at the same time as Perez did and reached out for it before the detective could stop him. It was fat with a wad of rolled notes. Maurice counted them out.

  ‘Three hundred and fifty pounds,’ he said. ‘And a bit of loose change. What did she do with the rest of it?’

  ‘Maybe early Christmas shopping?’ Perez suggested. His mother always went into Lerwick in November to stock up. Most of the islanders bought presents online, but she said she enjoyed her trip out to the shops. As much as anything it was a time to catch up with old friends.

  ‘Angela? Are you joking? Angela didn’t do Christmas!’

  But we will, Perez thought suddenly. This year it’ll be me and Fran and Cassie in the house in Ravenswick. He was ashamed then of thinking about his own happiness in the face of the man’s misery.

  Maurice looked up at him, his eyes bright and feverish. ‘I need to find out what was going on here. I know I said I didn’t care, but it’s making me crazy. The speculation. The possibilities. It just goes round and round in my head.’

  Perez replaced all the items in the bag. ‘I’ll take this with me too. It’ll help me sort this out for you. It’s probably got nothing to do with Angela’s murder. All kinds of thing come to light during an investigation. As soon as I know anything I’ll be in touch.’ He stood up. Maurice remained on the floor. Perez bent down and carefully helped him to his feet.

  Sandy was using the bird room as an office and Perez found him there on the phone. He must have been talking to one of his girlfriends because as soon as he saw Perez he ended the conversation quickly.

  ‘Did the search team come up with anything?’ Perez asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I need you to get back on the phone. Apparently Angela Moore went out to
Lerwick to the dentist just over a week ago. Find out if she did see her dentist in town. I’ve got a feeling the toothache was just an excuse to allow her off the island. She also withdrew three thousand pounds in cash from the Royal Bank of Scotland. She wouldn’t have been able to get that much from the hole in the wall. Talk to the cashier who served her. Did Angela mention why she needed that amount of cash? And see if you can track down what else she did that day. The cash doesn’t seem to be here. What did she do with it?’

  Perez could have answered these questions himself, but he knew it would take him weeks to do it. He’d grown up in Shetland, but still he was considered something of an outsider in the town. People would be reluctant to talk to him about the trivial details that would help trace Angela’s movements while she was off the Isle. Perhaps it was because he’d worked in a city in the south for part of his career, perhaps because he came from Fair Isle. Sandy might be a Whalsay man, but he was completely at home in Lerwick now. He had contacts everywhere.

  ‘I’ll get on to it now.’ Sandy leaned back in his chair and looked up at Perez. ‘I might as well. There’s nothing else to do. Did you know there isn’t even a television for the guests here?’ It was as if Perez had brought him to the edge of the world.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The next day was Sunday and suddenly everything was still. All activity ceased. No planes filled with birdwatchers and media folk. No helicopters. No murder. Even the weather was quiet. The island woke to a clear, cold dawn. On the bank by the shop, the wind turbine was motionless.

  Perez asked Sandy to spend the day at the field centre: his role to reassure the remaining residents and to continue taking statements about Jane Latimer.

  When Perez was a boy Sundays on Fair Isle were sacred. Every week he was taken to church twice – once to the kirk and once to the Methodist chapel. Before he was born, the islanders had decided they couldn’t live with sectarianism and this was their way of dealing with it: whatever denomination they’d been born into, they’d all go to both services, kids scrubbed, men in suits or fancy hand-knitted sweaters, women in skirts and proper shoes. Sunday was a day of rest then. There was no work on the croft. No fishing. It had been different for the women, of course. There had to be lunch and the pans had to be cleaned, but they couldn’t hang washing on the line – even if it was a good drying day – or the neighbours would talk.

  Perez took Fran to the morning service in the kirk. He knew it would make his mother happy to have them there and he needed time for reflection, away from the investigation. Let Sandy take the lead for a while. He felt too that Fran should understand what living in the Isle was about – she still had romantic ideas of a harmonious community existence. He wasn’t sure she’d stomach the part religion played in bringing about the cohesion – the sort of religion preached by his father at least.

  Thought of his father had been with him, reminding him of his cowardice, since he’d woken up. Perez still hadn’t confronted the man about his relationship with Angela Moore. The night before, the moment had never been quite right. Perez had got back to Springfield in time for a late supper and the family had spent all evening together. To take his father outside and say he had something important to discuss would have alerted Mary and even if she suspected anything about her husband and Angela she would hate to think the relationship had become part of the inquiry. Over the meal James had been jovial, a good host. Perez thought his father was probably relieved. He’d taken the jewellery from the Pund and thought his secret was safe. What had he done with it? Thrown it out of the Shepherd on the way to the mainland? Or perhaps James was pleased Angela had died. The temptation to sin had been removed.

  They left early for the kirk because James would be preaching, and took the long way round by the road because the ground was still sodden. Fran thought God was about as real as the tooth fairy. She came from a family of unbelievers and, to her, religious faith was incomprehensible. But today she behaved herself. She was soberly dressed in a long brown skirt and a little tweed jacket, brown leather boots. Just as they went in through the kirk door, she whispered to him: ‘I hope you know I’m only here because I love you, Jimmy Perez. You owe me.’

  Then after a quick grin she followed Mary to her seat.

  Whenever they discussed religion, Perez always ended up agreeing with Fran. Stories and metaphors, that was the Bible. But in his gut he couldn’t dismiss his father’s teaching so lightly. He’d grown up with the notion of sin and had spent his adolescence haunted by guilt. He thought guilt was like a tapeworm living – and growing – inside him.

  They’d just sat down when John and Sarah Fowler came in. The congregation turned to look at them; visitors were always welcomed to services but were something of a novelty. John beamed amiably around him, but Sarah still seemed tense. Perez thought she’d been most happy in the field centre kitchen. Away from the lighthouse she seemed lost.

  His father took as his text Galatians 5:22 on the fruits of the spirit. At first Perez let the words wash over him. He was still thinking about the double murder, looking for connections between the women. He’d assumed at the beginning that Jane’s death had come as a direct result of Angela’s but it wouldn’t do to close his mind to other possibilities, to dismiss altogether an irrational killer targeting women. The team in Lerwick should do a more detailed check on the North Light visitors and staff. Were there unsolved crimes of violence against women in the areas where the incomers lived? He felt in his jacket pocket for a pen, so he could jot down a few notes.

  Then the meaning of his father’s sermon seeped into his consciousness. Perez set down the pen and the scrap of paper and began to listen more carefully. As he laid the pen on the narrow shelf built into the seat in front of him he saw his hand was trembling. Anger. It was all he could do not to walk out.

  James had moved on to talk about self-control. One of the fruits of the spirit. It might be the last in the list but it was by no means the least important. James leaned forward and repeated the words for emphasis: ‘By no means.’ He turned over a sheet of paper on the lectern. James took his preaching seriously; he always made notes.

  ‘In Proverbs, we learn that controlling one’s own passions is harder than conquering a walled city fortress. A man must have mastery over his own behaviour. If he can’t control himself, he’d be like the city after its walls are destroyed. Defenceless.’ The last word came out in a thundering roar, but seemed to have little impact on the audience and James sought to find an image closer to home. ‘Think how it would be if you were out in a small, flimsy kind of boat in the gale we’ve had in the last couple of days. Bad enough in something like the Shepherd, which is built for the job. But imagine one of those small dinghies the bairns play in close to shore in the mainland on summer days. And a force ten wind battering into the hull. You’d be drowned by the waves. Lost.’ The audience nodded then in understanding and looked at their watches. Fifteen minutes. Big James never went on for much longer than that. And it seemed he was coming to a close: ‘Without self-control the other fruits of the spirit would be impossible. Kindness, gentleness, patience and peace. All those would be swept away and drowned by selfish desires and emotions.’

  The music started and they swung into a hymn. Sarah Fowler had a sweet voice and seemed to know the words. The couple were sitting just in front of them and Perez could make it out over the rest of the congregation. Beside him, Fran was singing too, but she could never hold a tune. It was something they laughed about.

  After the service the islanders stood outside in the sunshine and chatted. No talk of the murders. The conversation was about when the bairns would get in from the Anderson High, a sixtieth birthday party to be arranged in the hall. Perhaps the Fowlers’ presence constrained them. The couple stood for a moment too on the edge of the crowd, rather awkwardly.

  Fran went up to talk to them: ‘Did you walk all the way from the North Light?’

  ‘It’s a lovely day,’ John said. ‘And we want
ed to get away for a while. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift back,’ Fran said. ‘That is OK, Mary? I can use the car?’

  Mary looked for James as if the decision wasn’t hers to make, but Perez answered for her. ‘Sure, no problem. Take it. But come straight home or you’ll be late for lunch.’ He didn’t like the idea of Fran without him at the lighthouse.

  He was still furious at his father’s hypocrisy; how dare James preach about self-control? Perez thought he couldn’t sit down for another meal with the man until the matter of Angela Moore had been discussed. Even if he’d got the whole thing wrong, if he made a complete fool of himself, he had to know.

  Mary hurried away after a few words with her friends. She had the meat to get into the oven. Fran went with her, followed by the Fowlers. She muttered to Perez as she went: ‘If I don’t get out of these clothes soon, I’ll almost believe I’m a Sunday school teacher or a member of the WI.’

  ‘I’ll hang on for my father,’ Perez said. ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not. You don’t see him often enough.’

  James was still playing at being minister, shaking hands and asking after his flock. At last the rest of the congregation drifted away and the two men were left in the bright autumn sunshine, their long shadows making strange shapes on the boggy grass.

  ‘That sermon.’

  James turned to face him. They’d started to walk slowly away from the kirk. ‘Yes?’ Pleased that his son was showing an interest.

  ‘I really don’t know how you’ve got the nerve.’