Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    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.
    Once or twice he’d plucked up courage to ask one out, but that always seemed to end in disaster. Even if she agreed to go with him to dinner or a film, the fumbling advances at the close of the evening ended in humiliation. Then he would imagine her talking to the other women he supervised. During training sessions he sensed they were all secretly laughing at him. He’d decided it wasn’t worth putting himself through that cycle again: the