James was working and Mary had gone to visit a couple of elderly spinster aunts. The kitchen had been tidied specially for a visitor. There was a lasagne bubbling in the bottom of the Rayburn. New bread. The last of the fruit cake. They sat across the table from each other. He’d given her the seat with the view, a politeness he regretted later in the interview. There were times when she seemed distracted.
She knew what was expected and began her story as soon as the meal was over.
‘Of course I should have taken Angela with me when I left my husband. But at the time I thought he would be better for her. I was ill, severely depressed. Only partly his fault. He had a good job. We were still living then in the home where Angela had grown up. I thought, if I could think clearly at all, that the house would provide stability. And she was bright, determined – much more like her father than me in most ways. It never occurred to me that he’d sell up and move her out into the country, that she’d become one of his projects. His experiments. He said she didn’t want to see me and I believed him. They had always been very close.’
Through the window something seemed to catch her attention. Perez turned to see what had interested her, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
‘But Angela did make contact with you later?’
‘Much later. Yes. I wrote to her twice a year with brief snippets of news. That I’d qualified as a teacher. With my address if I’d moved. New phone numbers. At Christmas and on her birthday. I always sent money. Not a great deal at first, but as much as I could afford. I never knew whether she received the letters, but Archie must have passed them on, because at last there was a reply. She was eighteen, just about to start university. She asked if we could meet.’ The woman paused. ‘I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. Perhaps not someone quite as big. It was ridiculous, but I still thought of her as a child. She was very assertive. Forceful. She knew just what she wanted. From her life and from me.’
‘What did she want from you?’
The woman paused.
‘At first she just wanted me to listen. To understand what I’d put her through. To be sorry. Of course I could see why she was angry. She told me what it was like growing up alone with her father. “I had no friends. How could you do that to me?” Her passion for natural history grew out of her loneliness, I think. At least when she was watching the wildlife around the house in Wales there was a connection with something living. She was always going to be a scientist of some persuasion; her father had brought her up to believe that anything other than rational thought was ludicrous. She developed projects of her own – a study of a family of badgers, for example. She watched them from when she was ten until she left school and talked about them at that first meeting. “People speak of badgers as if they’re playful children. They can be really aggressive.”’ Stella smiled. ‘She told me she’d learned a lot from badgers.’
‘So she studied biology at university?’
‘Ecology,’ she said. ‘Later a PhD. Research into wading birds.’
‘And she dropped contact with her father?’
‘Apparently.’
Perez replayed the conversation in his head. ‘You said at first she just wanted you to listen and to be sorry. What came later? What did she want then?’
‘Money.’ She looked up at him, seemed to feel a need to explain. ‘Not for things. Angela was always ambitious but never materialist. For experience. The experiences she’d missed out on when she was growing up with her father. I paid for travel mostly and always gave her as much as I could. It never stopped me feeling guilty, but it helped.’
‘So you developed a relationship,’ Perez said. ‘An understanding at least.’
‘I’m not sure I ever understood her.’ Stella Monkton’s eyes were drawn to the garden just outside the window. It had been surrounded by a wall to provide shelter from the wind, but everything there had been ruined by the previous week’s storm. She seemed particularly fascinated by the row of sprouts, blackened by the salt spray, flattened. ‘And I didn’t like her very much. But occasionally there were moments of kindness and humour, a sudden vision of the girl she might have been in different circumstances.’ Stella corrected herself. ‘If I’d behaved differently.’
‘How could you ever know what she might have become?’ Perez said. ‘Nature and nurture. An old argument.’
‘In either case, surely, I was partly responsible.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘After Angela completed her PhD all contact stopped. It was as if I’d never existed.’
Perez didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He felt an ache of sympathy for the woman. She’d thought she had her daughter back – even if Angela wasn’t the daughter she might have chosen – only to lose her again.
‘Was there a row?’ he asked at last.
‘Nothing like that. Perhaps it was what she’d planned all along. Revenge. To drop me as I’d abandoned her. Perhaps she just felt she didn’t need me any more. After all, her disappearance from my life coincided with her success: the discovery of a rare bird on one of her travels, a best-selling book. The television series followed soon after.’
‘Did you try to get in touch with her?’
‘Of course. By email and by phone. But she didn’t reply and I knew there was no point in persisting.’
‘Then she married.’ Perez thought of his mother, the fuss she was making about his second wedding. It seemed a child’s wedding was a big deal. ‘Did you know about that?’
‘There was a note about it in a natural history magazine I was reading at the dentist’s,’ Stella said. ‘It had already happened by then. I certainly wasn’t invited.’
‘But you knew she’d taken up the position of director at the Fair Isle field centre?’
‘Occasionally I’d Google her,’ Stella said. ‘It was one way of keeping track. The field centre has a website. There was a picture of her next to the lighthouse. She looked very happy.’ She was staring into the distance. ‘I did think of booking myself in as a visitor. Perhaps using a made-up name. But really I had no right to intrude where I wasn’t welcome.’
Perez was astonished by the woman’s restraint. He tried to imagine Fran in a similar situation. She wouldn’t consider the niceties of her daughter’s feelings – she’d be on the first plane north. But Fran hadn’t run away and left Cassie behind.
‘I’d understood from a colleague that there’d been a more recent contact.’
‘Angela phoned me,’ Stella said, ‘a week before I left for Brittany. I was so certain when I answered that it would be one of my friends from the choir that at first I didn’t recognize her voice. I couldn’t speak. When Angela first broke contact, every time the phone rang I imagined it might be her, but this was a real shock. I didn’t know what to say. In the end she became impatient: “Mother, are you there?” I asked her what she wanted. It was clear, you see, that she must want something.’
‘And what did she want?’ Perez was suddenly tense. He was aware of the workings of his body, his heart pumping, his shallow breathing. Stella’s answer might explain the case.
‘She wanted to meet. She said she had to be in London to see her publisher at the beginning of November. Could she come on down to Somerset? Perhaps stay the night? This was new, Inspector. When she was a student we met on neutral territory. In restaurants or cafes, at the university. She would never come to my house.’
‘You must have asked her why she wanted to see you after such a long time.’ What must that have been like? A call out of the blue from a daughter she’d believed was lost to her.
‘No, Inspector!’ The response was sharp and immediate. ‘I asked no questions! I didn’t want to scare her off.’