Later she knocked at the door of Maurice’s flat. He came to open it. He was dressed now, but he still hadn’t shaved and looked as he had when he’d had a bad bout of flu earlier in the year. Jane had looked after him then too. Angela had been far too busy with the seabird ringing. She’d never even had a cold in all the time Jane had known her and had no sympathy for people who were ill.
‘I’ve brought a pan of soup,’ Jane said. ‘It’ll just need heating up.’
He took the saucepan from her and stood in the doorway.
‘How’s Poppy?’ Jane really wanted to ask what he would do now. She presumed that he would want to leave the island as soon as the weather improved. Then she would have the place to herself. To tidy and scrub and order. The new warden would be glad of a cook who knew the ropes.
‘I’ve sent her back to bed,’ Maurice said. ‘She’s exhausted. The shock, I suppose.’ He looked up at Jane. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without Angela. I can’t imagine life without her.’
It wasn’t the sort of practical answer Jane was looking for, though she would have been happy to talk to Maurice, even about Angela, if that would have helped. But he shut the door without asking her into the flat, more distressed now, it seemed, than when he’d first learned his wife was dead.
Jane couldn’t bear the idea of spending another minute in the field centre. It wasn’t just the image she created in her head of Perez in the bird room, taking his photographs, collecting his samples, moving in his quiet, precise way around the dead woman. She needed to get away from the place for a while. She felt as if she’d been indoors for weeks. The truck was parked just outside the back door so she assumed that Fran was still in the bird room with him. Jane thought she’d walk down the island, talk to Joanne in the shop, and perhaps call in on Mary at Springfield as long as Perez and Fran hadn’t returned. The wind would be behind her and she thought someone would give her a lift back. Jane wouldn’t want to be thought curious or ghoulish, but Mary was the closest thing to a friend that she had in Fair Isle.
Outside, the wind took her breath away, but the rain had stopped and there were flashes of sunshine, sudden spotlights on the green sea and the sodden grass. For the first time she began to wonder who could have killed Angela, to work out how it might have happened. Like everyone else she’d assumed at first that Poppy had been responsible, but perhaps it wasn’t that simple. Away from the tension and the raw emotion inside the building it was possible to regard the murder as an intellectual puzzle. Surely her intellect was as strong as the inspector’s and she knew the people there better than he did. Angela had been right about one thing: Jane was ready for a new challenge. She imagined going to Perez and offering him the solution. She would enjoy his approval.
There were a couple of people in the shop, there not to buy, Jane thought, but to talk. They were delighted to see her, of course, and much less restrained about gossiping than the residents of the North Light.
‘They say there were gallons of blood.’ ‘Has Jimmy arrested the child yet?’ ‘What a terrible thing to happen on the Isle.’
Jane said very little. She understood their voraciousness and their desire for information. They were outsiders looking in at the drama. No one was suggesting, for example, that they might be murderers. But still she was restrained. She told them there had been no arrest as far as she knew. And of course, she said, everyone at the North Light was very shocked and upset.
She wrapped her coat around her and went out again. The turbine blades of the windmill on the mound by the shop were spinning furiously and the machine gave off that low humming sound that meant the generator was storing power. The children must just have come out of school because they were making their way down the road, laughing and chasing, bent against the wind. There was no truck outside Springfield, no sign of Big James’s car, so she opened the door and went in. Mary was standing at the kitchen table whisking egg whites.
‘I hope you don’t mind my turning up out of the blue,’ Jane said. ‘I just had to get away from the lighthouse.’
‘Of course. Come in.’ Mary shook the egg from the whisk. ‘Just wait till I get this in the oven and I’ll make us some tea.’ She tipped caster sugar into the mixture and spooned it onto a tray. ‘How’s Jimmy doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘He’s just getting on with it.’ She paused. ‘I suppose we’re all suspects.’
‘I worry about him,’ Mary said. ‘What must it do to a man to be mixing all the time with crime and violence? I thought he’d come back home and settle here on a croft. He always said it was what he wanted. But when Skerry was vacant and he had the chance he threw it away.’
‘He seems very good at what he does.’
‘He’ll have a wife soon. She’ll not want him away all hours, never knowing when he’s getting home. I thought this week on the island would let her see what the place has to offer. Then this has to happen.’
‘If she wants him to be happy surely she’ll let him work…’ But what do I know? Jane thought. I’m a lonely middle-aged woman and my idea of happiness is a couple of weeks’ spring-cleaning in an empty field centre.
‘Ah.’ Mary’s voice was impatient. ‘We all start off thinking we can change our men. It never happens that way.’
Suddenly there was a thunderous knocking on the door. Mary stood white and shocked, her hand resting on the kettle. She looked at Jane. The banging continued. ‘Come in,’ Mary shouted. ‘Whoever you are, stop that noise and come in.’
The door was flung open.
‘My God, man, whatever is the matter?’
It was Dougie Barr, flushed from running. His coat was flapping open and his telescope was still on its tripod, hanging from a strap on his shoulder. His binoculars hung round his neck.
‘I need to use your phone.’ The words came out in a pant. ‘My mobile’s not working. No reception.’
‘What’s happened?’ Jane imagined another body. Her mind was racing.
‘I have to call the lighthouse.’ He saw they were staring at him. ‘There’s a bird in the South Harbour. Trumpeter swan. A first for Britain.’ When they didn’t answer he repeated, yelling at the top of his voice: ‘A first for Britain.’
Chapter Ten
All morning Dougie Barr hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Angela. Images of her swam in and out of his head. Of course he’d seen her on the television before he’d met her. She’d been famous before she married Maurice and was appointed as warden of the field centre, one of the new wave of young people brought in to present wildlife programmes, employed to make natural history more sexy and pull in a fresh audience. Dougie understood what they were doing. He knew about selling. Since then Angela had become a part of his life. A secret obsession.
Everyone remembered Angela because of her hair. Right down her back, sleek and beautiful even when she’d been camping out in the wastes of Alaska for a fortnight, or trekking across a desert. But it had been the hands, long and brown, that had stuck in his mind when he’d first seen them on screen. He’d noticed them at once, holding binoculars to her eyes, and later picking up a young razorbill as she prepared to ring it. When she first greeted him in the field centre he’d stretched out an arm to shake hands and looking down at the grip he’d been thrilled: the long strong fingers were just as he’d imagined. He’d thought that handshake had been one of the most intimate experiences of his life. He was finally touching the woman he admired more than any other.
One evening, plucking up courage after a couple of beers, he’d asked her why she’d applied for the field centre job. She’d been sitting in the common room preparing to call the log of the species seen that day, squatting on a chair, her knees under her chin, drinking lager from a can.