by Ann Cleeves
‘What exactly do you do in the real world?’ Fran asked.
‘I run an early-years centre, working with babies and parents.’ Sarah looked up. Her face was flushed from the heat of the room. She switched on the machine and it started to churn.
‘Interesting. How did you get into that?’
‘I trained as a nurse, then worked as a health visitor. I always enjoyed the community stuff most.’
So she would make a natural confidante for Angela. But if the field centre warden had told Sarah she was pregnant, why hadn’t Sarah passed on the information to the police straight after the woman’s body had been found?
The door opened and Perez was standing there. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’ His voice was light, but Fran could tell he’d been worried. He didn’t like her being on her own in the North Light. Well, tough. No way was she going to spend another day with his parents. ‘I’m just going to fetch Angela’s mother from the airstrip,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come?’
‘No, thanks.’ She grinned at Sarah. ‘All this domesticity, I think we deserve a coffee.’
They had coffee in the kitchen to the background smell of yeast from the rising pizza dough.
‘Did Angela ever talk to you?’ Fran asked. ‘She didn’t get on with Jane or Poppy. You’d have thought she’d be glad of another woman around the place.’
‘I don’t think she liked women very much.’ A pause. ‘I don’t think she liked anyone.’
Outside, the sky was dark and another storm of sleet passed over, rattling against the windows, bouncing inside the chimney breast.
‘Is your husband out in this? Jimmy said the birders were obsessed, but they must be mad.’
‘John loves being out.’ Sarah looked at her over the rim of her mug. ‘Even in bad weather. Birdwatching has been his passion since he was a child. Sometimes I resented it. It took up so much of his time. It was as if he were defined by it. I felt rather excluded.’
‘And now? Do you still resent it? You’re here after all.’
‘I suppose if you love someone, you don’t stop them doing the things that make them happy.’
‘That’s just what I think.’ Fran looked up, smiling. ‘I feel exactly the same way about Jimmy and his work.’
‘But it’s not easy,’ Sarah said. ‘Sometimes you feel you come second place to an obsession.’
‘What do you make of the other guys here? Are they all obsessives?’
‘I’m not sure about Ben. He’s more into the science, the conservation, than the rare birds. John did a piece on him once when he worked for Greenpeace. Ben was very radical then. I think he’s calmed down a bit, but the passion’s still there. He lives what he preaches. He’s vegetarian. He doesn’t wear leather. Angela used to tease him.’
‘She was a meat-eater?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Sarah said. ‘A predator in every sense.’
‘Did she prey on your husband?’
‘What do you mean?’ The woman looked up, shocked.
‘Well, she seems to have had a go at all the other men in the place. And Angela was a writer too, wasn’t she? Perhaps they met before.’
Sarah gave another of her strained little smiles. ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘Can you imagine it? Angela and John! She liked her men young and pretty as far as I could tell, unless they could be useful to her. Besides, she’d scare John rigid.’
Fran smiled too as if she were sharing a joke, but she thought John might have been useful to Angela when her book had first been published. And in fact, John didn’t seem to her to be the sort who would be easily scared.
Chapter Thirty-three
Perez stood at the airstrip waiting for Angela’s mother to arrive, his hood up against the hail. Fran would be leaving the next day. He’d told her the sea might be a bit lumpy but she’d decided to stick with her decision to go out on the boat. He hadn’t realized how much the plane trip in had scared her. ‘I don’t care if I’m sick. I’ll feel safer.’
The search team was already there, eager to be leaving. Frustrated because they’d contributed nothing to the case. Perez turned his back to the weather and chatted; occasionally they had to raise their voices to be heard against the breeze.
‘Nothing,’ the leader repeated. ‘Complete sodding waste of time. You found the only piece of useful evidence in the lens room of the tower.’ As if it was Perez’s fault that they’d spent a couple of days on a bleak lump of rock where the Atlantic met the North Sea. ‘I mean, we did the field centre. Although Miss Hewitt is sure the second victim was killed where she was found, we treated the whole of the lighthouse as a potential crime scene – except the lens room, obviously. It never occurred to us that anyone could have access up there.’
Perez said nothing. No point in recriminations now.
‘The woman was moved around a bit in the loft after the attack,’ the man went on. ‘Posed, like Miss Hewitt said.’
‘The killer would have had bloodstained clothes?’ Perez asked.
‘Almost certainly. There was that arterial spatter. Unless he wore protective gear.’ Perez had a picture of the oilskins the Shepherd crew used. ‘Not that we found anything. The clothes could have been burned, I suppose. Or ditched over a cliff.’
‘And nothing else of interest in the field centre.’ Perez didn’t pose it as a question, just repeated it to himself.
‘Of course, that doesn’t prove much.’ A younger man, dark-haired, spoke now. ‘They all knew we were coming. He’d have dumped anything he didn’t want us to see.’ That assumption again that the killer was a man.
As the noise of the plane approached, the conversation moved on to their families, what they’d be doing for half-term, plans for Christmas.
Stella Monkton was small and neat, dressed in a long camel coat and brown leather boots. The only other passengers were Anderson High kids, late home for the mid-term break. They took the plane for granted: it could have been the school bus. They sauntered away to meet their parents, super cool. Angela’s mother followed them away from the plane, then stood and looked around her. The waiting families stared. They’d noted Perez’s presence. News of the stranger’s arrival would be all over Fair Isle before teatime. He wondered how many would guess her identity. At first glance there was no physical resemblance to Angela, who had been tall and strong. Perhaps she’d chatted to the kids on the way and word would get out through them.
Perez had already decided to take her back to Springfield before they went to the field centre. She’d be tired after her early start, would have only been given snacks on the flight into Sumburgh. And he’d find it easier to unpick the complicated family relationship in a more domestic setting.
She stood again by the car and looked east towards Sheep Rock. ‘It’s very beautiful here. Very dramatic. I can see what appealed to Angela.’ Then she sat beside him, with her seat belt fastened and her hands clasped primly in her lap.
James was working and Mary had gone to visit a couple of elderly spinster aunts. The kitchen had been tidied specially for a visitor. There was a lasagne bubbling in the bottom of the Rayburn. New bread. The last of the fruit cake. They sat across the table from each other. He’d given her the seat with the view, a politeness he regretted later in the interview. There were times when she seemed distracted.
She knew what was expected and began her story as soon as the meal was over.
‘Of course I should have taken Angela with me when I left my husband. But at the time I thought he would be better for her. I was ill, severely depressed. Only partly his fault. He had a good job. We were still living then in the home where Angela had grown up. I thought, if I could think clearly at all, that the house would provide stability. And she was bright, determined – much more like her father than me in most ways. It never occurred to me that he’d sell up and move her out into the country, that she’d become one of his projects. His experiments. He said she didn’t want to see me and I believed him. They had always been very close.’
Through the window something seemed to catch her attention. Perez turned to see what had interested her, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
‘But Angela did make contact with you later?’
‘Much later. Yes. I wrote to her twice a year with brief snippets of news. That I’d qualified as a teacher. With my address if I’d moved. New phone numbers. At Christmas and on her birthday. I always sent money. Not a great deal at first, but as much as I could afford. I never knew whether she received the letters, but Archie must have passed them on, because at last there was a reply. She was eighteen, just about to start university. She asked if we could meet.’ The woman paused. ‘I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. Perhaps not someone quite as big. It was ridiculous, but I still thought of her as a child. She was very assertive. Forceful. She knew just what she wanted. From her life and from me.’
‘What did she want from you?’
The woman paused.
‘At first she just wanted me to listen. To understand what I’d put her through. To be sorry. Of course I could see why she was angry. She told me what it was like growing up alone with her father. “I had no friends. How could you do that to me?” Her passion for natural history grew out of her loneliness, I think. At least when she was watching the wildlife around the house in Wales there was a connection with something living. She was always going to be a scientist of some persuasion; her father had brought her up to believe that anything other than rational thought was ludicrous. She developed projects of her own – a study of a family of badgers, for example. She watched them from when she was ten until she left school and talked about them at that first meeting. “People speak of badgers as if they’re playful children. They can be really aggressive.”’ Stella smiled. ‘She told me she’d learned a lot from badgers.’
‘So she studied biology at university?’
‘Ecology,’ she said. ‘Later a PhD. Research into wading birds.’
‘And she dropped contact with her father?’
‘Apparently.’
Perez replayed the conversation in his head. ‘You said at first she just wanted you to listen and to be sorry. What came later? What did she want then?’
‘Money.’ She looked up at him, seemed to feel a need to explain. ‘Not for things. Angela was always ambitious but never materialist. For experience. The experiences she’d missed out on when she was growing up with her father. I paid for travel mostly and always gave her as much as I could. It never stopped me feeling guilty, but it helped.’
‘So you developed a relationship,’ Perez said. ‘An understanding at least.’
‘I’m not sure I ever understood her.’ Stella Monkton’s eyes were drawn to the garden just outside the window. It had been surrounded by a wall to provide shelter from the wind, but everything there had been ruined by the previous week’s storm. She seemed particularly fascinated by the row of sprouts, blackened by the salt spray, flattened. ‘And I didn’t like her very much. But occasionally there were moments of kindness and humour, a sudden vision of the girl she might have been in different circumstances.’ Stella corrected herself. ‘If I’d behaved differently.’
‘How could you ever know what she might have become?’ Perez said. ‘Nature and nurture. An old argument.’
‘In either case, surely, I was partly responsible.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘After Angela completed her PhD all contact stopped. It was as if I’d never existed.’
Perez didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He felt an ache of sympathy for the woman. She’d thought she had her daughter back – even if Angela wasn’t the daughter she might have chosen – only to lose her again.
‘Was there a row?’ he asked at last.
‘Nothing like that. Perhaps it was what she’d planned all along. Revenge. To drop me as I’d abandoned her. Perhaps she just felt she didn’t need me any more. After all, her disappearance from my life coincided with her success: the discovery of a rare bird on one of her travels, a best-selling book. The television series followed soon after.’
‘Did you try to get in touch with her?’
‘Of course. By email and by phone. But she didn’t reply and I knew there was no point in persisting.’
‘Then she married.’ Perez thought of his mother, the fuss she was making about his second wedding. It seemed a child’s wedding was a big deal. ‘Did you know about that?’
‘There was a note about it in a natural history magazine I was reading at the dentist’s,’ Stella said. ‘It had already happened by then. I certainly wasn’t invited.’
‘But you knew she’d taken up the position of director at the Fair Isle field centre?’
‘Occasionally I’d Google her,’ Stella said. ‘It was one way of keeping track. The field centre has a website. There was a picture of her next to the lighthouse. She looked very happy.’ She was staring into the distance. ‘I did think of booking myself in as a visitor. Perhaps using a made-up name. But really I had no right to intrude where I wasn’t welcome.’
Perez was astonished by the woman’s restraint. He tried to imagine Fran in a similar situation. She wouldn’t consider the niceties of her daughter’s feelings – she’d be on the first plane north. But Fran hadn’t run away and left Cassie behind.
‘I’d understood from a colleague that there’d been a more recent contact.’
‘Angela phoned me,’ Stella said, ‘a week before I left for Brittany. I was so certain when I answered that it would be one of my friends from the choir that at first I didn’t recognize her voice. I couldn’t speak. When Angela first broke contact, every time the phone rang I imagined it might be her, but this was a real shock. I didn’t know what to say. In the end she became impatient: “Mother, are you there?” I asked her what she wanted. It was clear, you see, that she must want something.’
‘And what did she want?’ Perez was suddenly tense. He was aware of the workings of his body, his heart pumping, his shallow breathing. Stella’s answer might explain the case.
‘She wanted to meet. She said she had to be in London to see her publisher at the beginning of November. Could she come on down to Somerset? Perhaps stay the night? This was new, Inspector. When she was a student we met on neutral territory. In restaurants or cafes, at the university. She would never come to my house.’
‘You must have asked her why she wanted to see you after such a long time.’ What must that have been like? A call out of the blue from a daughter she’d believed was lost to her.
‘No, Inspector!’ The response was sharp and immediate. ‘I asked no questions! I didn’t want to scare her off.’
So, no magic answer. Stella Monkton’s trip to Fair Isle had helped him understand more about the victim but had brought him no closer to her killer.
The woman continued: ‘I’m so grateful for that short telephone call, Inspector. It was a sort of reconciliation.’
She began to pile the plates together as if she expected the discussion to be over. Perez reached across the table towards her. No physical contact, but a way of telling her there were still things to say.
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What else is there?’
‘Angela was expecting a baby.’
She looked at him, horrified. ‘Oh no, the poor child.’
Was she talking about her daughter or the baby? He was certain the pregnancy was news to her. For the first time since she’d arrived on the island, she lost control and began to cry.
By the time they reached the field centre she was composed again. Maurice was waiting for them in the common room. Through the open door Perez saw Fran in the kitchen. Not working, it seemed, but sitting on a high stool next to a workbench, drinking tea. Sarah was there and so was the young birder Hugh Shaw. Fran glanced up and saw Perez, gave an immediate smile then a frown. Don’t interfere. Let me get on with it. There was no sign of Sandy and that worried Perez. He’d told Sandy to keep an eye on Fran, to make sure she was safe, though surely no harm could
come to her in full view of all the residents.
Perez wondered now what he hoped to get out of the encounter between Maurice and his mother-in-law. Not much. No dramatic revelation or confession. Maurice brought in a tray of coffee and they sat making polite conversation, like strangers in a waiting room, passing time.
‘Would you give us a moment, Inspector?’ Stella said when the coffee was drunk. ‘I’d like to talk to my son-in-law alone.’
The description jarred. Maurice and Stella must be the same sort of age. And Perez was reluctant to leave them alone together. After all, he had hoped for some breakthrough in the case from the conversation. But he walked away and stood in the lobby for ten minutes.
Sandy came down the stairs from his room.
‘I’ve tried every bank in Lerwick. If Angela Moore has her own account, it’s not held anywhere in town. And I can’t find out what she did between leaving the RBS and going into Boots.’
Perez supposed that in a city there’d be CCTV. In Shetland they had to rely on inquisitive people. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Keep trying.’
Sandy nodded towards the common room. ‘How’s it going?’
Perez shrugged. He didn’t really know. When he returned to the common room he found Maurice and Stella much as he’d left them: polite, distant, formal. He sensed no drama or increased understanding.
It was only when Perez looked at his watch and said he’d have to get Stella back to the airstrip for the afternoon plane that Maurice spoke with any real feeling. He stood up and took Stella’s hand.
‘Your daughter was a remarkable woman.’ A pause. ‘I loved her very much.’
Chapter Thirty-four
The autumn was over. That was clear to Dougie as he walked back from the south of the island for lunch. All the birds he saw belonged to winter. A flock of snow buntings turned so the light caught the white under-wings and they gleamed against the grey sky. A straggling line of pink-footed geese flew over, calling, and came slowly in to land on the west side. There would be no more migration, no more rare birds. It was time for him to escape back to the city, to his grubby flat and his tedious work. Perez couldn’t keep them imprisoned any longer. Dougie would take the boat out on the following day.
