Free Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves Page B

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.