Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online

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