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 gloomy 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.