Blue Lightning Read online

  So suddenly Poppy started shouting abuse. She leaned across the bar and yelled at her stepmother: ‘You have no fucking right to tell me what to do.’ She took a full glass of beer that had been standing next to her and flung it at Angela. Jane saw with some satisfaction that it went all over the famous hair.

  The lingering guests moved quickly into the lobby to collect their coats and change their shoes. They were clearly embarrassed. Jane went with them to say goodbye, to hold the door and warn them to take care on the drive south. Jimmy Perez was the last to go. He seemed intrigued by the scene being played out in the common room and stood watching through the open door. It took Mary to call him away. There was a flurry of thanks. Mary shouted back to her: ‘You must come and have dinner with us in Springfield before Jimmy and Fran go home.’ Then came the sound of a car engine over the gale, headlights showing it was still pouring with rain.

  When all the guests had gone, Jane waited for a moment. The wind caught the heavy outside door and it began to bang. The storm must have changed direction. Still westerly, which the birdwatchers hated, but with some north in it. She pulled it to again and locked it. The common room was quiet. She supposed Maurice and his strange dysfunctional family had gone through the kitchen to their flat.

  She began the task of clearing up. The visitors would still want their breakfast the next day. Usually Maurice would have stayed behind to help her, but she knew he would have other things on his mind. Ben, the assistant warden, seemed to have rushed off too. Jane stacked plates into the dishwasher and cleared the glasses from the common room. The tables could wait for the following day. She felt oddly happy. Angela had miscalculated. It hadn’t been clever to wind up Poppy so she made a show in public. Maurice wouldn’t like that. Then there came a horrible thought, worm-like, entering her brain and refusing to leave. She couldn’t let Maurice and Angela separate. If they were to split up Angela would stay at the North Light. She was the warden, the famous naturalist, the person who pulled in the punters. Anyone could take on Maurice’s role. And there would be no place for Jane in Angela’s new world.

  Chapter Six

  That night Perez slept immediately, untroubled by memories of his first lover or anxieties about his current one. It was as if the first ordeal was over. Fran had survived the party, had even enjoyed it. In the car on their way back to Springfield she’d said what a wonderful evening it had been. ‘Thank you so much, Mary, for organizing it.’ And Mary, crawling at ten miles an hour as the wind buffeted the car, leaning forward for a better view of the road, had turned briefly to them and beamed.

  He woke before it was light. The storm still there in the background, taken for granted now. There was a knock on the door, his father’s voice as quiet as he could manage. ‘Jimmy, you need to get up.’

  He thought there must be some community disaster. He remembered being called from his bed as a young man, when old Annie had fallen ill and they’d needed an ambulance flight in the middle of the night. They’d lit fires along the airstrip to mark the way for the plane to come in, all of the island men working together, the women left behind to mind the bairns.

  Fran stirred but she didn’t wake. In the kitchen his father was making tea. He was wearing a cardigan over his pyjamas. That seemed odd to Perez. Why wasn’t the man dressed? His father was the nearest thing the island had to a leader and he should be out there to supervise if there was a problem. Then he thought maybe his mother was ill and they were waiting for the nurse who was resident on the island. No way would a doctor get in this morning.

  ‘They want you up at the field centre,’ James said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘You can take the car. I’ll not be going far today.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jimmy drank the tea, helped himself to a couple of home-made ginger biscuits. He was still half asleep. ‘Why do they want me?’

  ‘You’re the police, aren’t you?’ James looked up. ‘There’s been a murder.’

  Perez had to bang on the lighthouse door to be let in, because it was locked. It was still dark and the beam from the tower circled way over his head. The locked door struck him as unusual, but perhaps someone had watched crime dramas on television and realized it was important to keep people away from the scene. Jane came at once to open up. She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, though it wasn’t yet seven thirty. Inside, all the lights were on. The lighthouse was too far from the other houses to be on mains electricity and he heard the buzz of the generator in the distance. Jane looked very pale but quite composed.

  ‘In here.’ She opened a door that led directly from the lobby. ‘In the bird room.’

  He stood in the doorway and looked inside. It was a small square space with one window facing east. He supposed all the equipment was to do with the business of ornithology. There were plastic tubes covered with small metal rings of different sizes hanging from one of the shelves, pliers, a set of small balance scales, a pile of small cotton bags with drawstring tops. There was the base field centre smell of wood from the floors, but it was overlaid by something faint and organic, which he supposed came from the birds: the oil on their feathers, the muck left in the bags while they were waiting to be ringed.

  Under the window there was a wooden desk and a swivel chair. Sitting on the chair was a woman. Angela was slumped across the desk as if she’d fallen asleep in the middle of her work. But in her back was a knife. It had an ivory handle that protruded through the scarlet silk top she’d been wearing the evening before. There wasn’t a great deal of blood and no sign of a struggle. The knife had gone in just to the left of the spine and under the shoulder blade. Straight into the heart. Either the killer had known what to do or it had been a lucky strike. Lucky for him at least. Twisted through the black hair, like a garland, was a circle of white feathers. It gave Angela a frivolous air, reminded Perez of one of those flimsy hats that fashionable women wore to Ascot. She certainly hadn’t been wearing feathers in her hair when he’d last seen her and he realized now that they’d all fall away if she stood up. The arrangement had been made after her death.

  ‘Who found her?’ Perez struggled to make this real. It was too close to home and the image was like the jacket of one of the old-fashioned detective stories his mother had enjoyed. Even the feathers belonged to a different era.

  ‘Ben Catchpole, the assistant warden. It was his turn to do the trap round. He came in to collect some bird bags on his way out.’

  ‘Where’s Maurice?’

  ‘In the kitchen. I woke him to tell him. Ben’s there too.’

  Perez looked more closely at the still figure. ‘Didn’t Maurice realize something was wrong when she didn’t come to bed?’

  ‘He’s in no state to discuss details.’ The words were sharp, a reproof. ‘I haven’t asked him.’

  ‘Do you always lock the main door of the centre?’ Perez spoke as if he were only vaguely interested in the routine of the place, as if it could have no possible significance to the crime.

  ‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Of course not. But the wind was so strong last night that it kept blowing open. I locked it before I went to bed to stop it banging.’

  ‘Was Angela in the bird room then?’

  Jane paused. Perez thought she understood quite clearly the implication of the question and was considering lying. At last she said: ‘No, the bird room door was open and I could see inside. It was empty then.’

  So this wasn’t the work of one of the islanders. Whoever had killed Angela had been in the lighthouse when Jane locked the door.

  Perez stood for a moment. Thoughts chased through his head. First that he needed coffee. He’d not been drunk the night before, but he had a faint headache and his brain was sluggish and disengaged. He’d slept too heavily. Then that this was a complete nightmare. How long would it be before a crime scene investigator could get in to the island? Two days at least, according to the latest forecast by Dave Wheeler, Fair Isle’s met officer. Would the body have to stay here until then? He’d need to phone
the team in Inverness and get advice. But first coffee and a few words with Maurice. This would probably be very simple. A domestic row. He could understand how that could happen in the fraught and claustrophobic atmosphere that developed during a gale, though it didn’t explain the feathers twisted through the long black hair.

  ‘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.

  Chapter Seven

  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 g
loomy 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.

  His mates mocked him. Why spend all that money? If you had to go birdwatching in Shetland it made much more sense to stay on the mainland and just get a plane into Fair Isle if you needed to, if the big one turned up. That way you kept your options open. But each season Dougie went back to the field centre, convinced that eventually his loyalty would be rewarded. He kept a blog and dreamed of the photos he’d post there, the description, very factual and precise, of the rarity he’d found on the Isle. It would be a first for Britain, maybe even a first for the Western Palearctic. Then his friends would read his blog and weep.

  Dougie had never married. Some of his mates had gone to Thailand to find a bride, and at one time Dougie had been tempted to go down that route. He imagined a small pretty woman, mild-mannered and grateful to be in the UK. He would be her hero: after all, he would have rescued her from poverty, perhaps from a life on the streets. She would provide companionship, laugh at his jokes, come birding with him. There would be sex. Regular sex. But his acquaintances’ Thai brides turned out to be strong and forceful women. They laughed at their men and made their lives a misery. Dougie had decided it would be better to continue alone. At least he had nobody else to consider when the pager beeped and there was a rare bird, a tick at the other end of the country. He could just put his binoculars round his neck, load the telescope into the car, and go.

  Occasionally he had fantasies about a woman in the call centre where he worked. He was a supervisor now and most of the team he managed were women. He listened in to their calls, heard the soft persuasive voices talking to the anonymous customers on the end of the phone and imagined that they were trying to please him.