Hugh stared at Perez, but didn’t mention his presence. He slouched across the table towards Sandy. He reminded Perez of the cocky teenagers he’d often picked up in the city. No discipline, no work, believing the world owed them a living. But those young men had grown up on sink estates with little prospect of work. Hugh Shaw didn’t have that excuse.
‘I knew Angela wouldn’t miss the money,’ he said. ‘She was minted. She made more from one TV documentary than a year’s salary at the field centre.’
‘So tell me.’
‘It was all about the slender-billed curlew,’ Hugh said. ‘The bird that made her famous.’
‘What about it?
‘It was lies. She didn’t find it. The fame, the money, the reputation as a great scientist, it was all built on a lie. She stole another man’s research.’
Perez understood why the woman had been so unhappy, why she’d married an older man just for convenience. Her work had been the most important thing in her world and she’d compromised it. She had no pride left. Perhaps she saw the baby as a chance for a new start. Something honest and real. Perhaps it was a biological imperative that had driven her, a desperation to give birth. Fran had been experiencing something of that sort in the last few months. Again, he tried to banish Fran from his mind.
‘How did you find out?’ Sandy leaned across the table towards Shaw, his elbow on the table.
‘There was a Brit in Tashkent. An ex-pat doing something dodgy with the Russians, but also a birder. We sat in the Rovshan Hotel one night, drinking local beer and Johnny Walker Black Label, and he told me the whole story. John Fowler had tracked down the curlew population. Angela was looking for the species. She wanted something big to make her name. But he got there first; he found the birds by looking for the food they took, some kind of insect.’
Mole crickets, Perez thought. Fowler was still trying to interest the scientific world in his story. There’d been a letter saved on his computer, but none of them had recognized the significance.
Hugh continued: ‘Fowler was an amateur lister, in a hired car, wandering across the desert, hoping for the big story to make his career as a natural history journalist. He didn’t even have a degree! She had a PhD and a research budget and he beat her to it!’
‘But he never got the glory he deserved.’ Sandy again. That’s just what I might have said, Perez thought. You’re just speaking my lines.
‘Angela published first. And who was the establishment going to believe? Fowler already had the reputation as a bit of a stringer. Angela made sure nobody took him seriously again by spreading rumours around Shetland about rare birds he was supposed to have claimed. He became a laughing stock.’
It became his obsession, Perez thought. At first I thought he was driven by the need to see birds, like the twitchers who piled into Fair Isle to see the swan. But it was about revenge. He blamed Angela Moore for everything that had gone wrong in his life. For the dead baby and the dead marriage as well as all his lost dreams.
‘And you thought you’d take advantage of the situation?’
‘I’d always wanted to visit Fair Isle. I’d run out of money and my father refused to give me more.’ Hugh looked up and Perez saw an attempt at the old smile. ‘Tight bastard. He could have afforded it. So yeah, I thought it was worth a go. I wasn’t greedy, only asked for a couple of grand to tide me over. I didn’t expect Fowler to turn up though.’
‘That must have been a shock to Angela too.’
‘You could say that! Maurice took the booking and suddenly Fowler was there in the common room when she came through to do the log. But Fowler was pleasant to her. Polite. Calm. He certainly didn’t give the impression that he was out for revenge. Maybe she thought he was a good man, who wouldn’t harbour a grudge. He went to church every Sunday. Perhaps he was into turning the other cheek. She was jittery though. Everyone thought she was moody because Poppy was staying in the lighthouse, throwing her tantrums, but that wasn’t it at all.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Sandy said and there was something steely in the voice Perez had never heard before, ‘what I really don’t understand, is why you didn’t tell us about this before. Two women dead and you knew a man had a motive to kill them. We could have had this cleared up days ago. A third woman need never have died.’
Hugh gave a little shrug. ‘I didn’t know for certain.’ He must have been aware that Perez looked up at him, stared at him very hard, but he didn’t show it. From the beginning he hadn’t acknowledged that Perez was there. ‘Besides, as you said, I’d committed blackmail. Not something I was going to own up to.’
‘So it wasn’t that you considered Fowler another target?’ Sandy said. ‘Angela was dead, she was no more use to you, but Fowler… He’d committed murder. He’d go on paying for the rest of his life as long as he was free.’
The smile returned. ‘Really, Sandy, that’s guesswork isn’t it? Speculation. You’ll never ever know.’
Ben Catchpole had a graze over his eye, covered by a sticking plaster. He saw Perez immediately and made a move to go over. He would have offered his condolences, said kind words about Fran, but something in the detective’s manner deterred him. Not hostility, but a new indifference. Perez felt it in himself.
‘Jimmy’s just sitting in,’ Sandy said easily. ‘I take it you don’t mind.’ He spoke it such a way that it would have been impossible for Ben to object. ‘What was it with you and Shaw?’ Sandy went on. ‘Scrapping like bairns in the schoolyard. I thought non-violence was your thing. Eating lentils and seaweed. Saving the planet.’
‘It was the tension,’ Ben said. ‘All of us on top of each other in the lighthouse.’
‘But more than that,’ Sandy said. ‘Surely it was more than that.’ He looked up. ‘Did you know Angela was carrying your child?’
‘It was true then?’
‘Who told you?’ Sandy asked.
‘Not Angela. She didn’t say a thing!’ The words came out hard and bitter. And Perez thought that was what Catchpole minded most: being excluded from Angela’s life, completely disregarded. ‘She’d have got rid of the baby without even telling me she was pregnant.’
‘So who did tell you?’ Sandy was gentle, prompting.
‘Shaw. He said he heard the Fowlers talking. Sarah’s a nurse. Perhaps she guessed. Perhaps Angela talked to her.’ Perez thought then that Hugh Shaw was like some kind of snake, slithering through the lighthouse, listening at doors, spreading his poison. Catchpole looked up at Sandy. ‘Was I the father?’
‘We think you must have been. It certainly wasn’t Hugh Shaw. Theirs was a purely…’ Sandy hesitated, ‘… financial arrangement.’
‘He told me he’d slept with her.’
‘Aye well, he would.’
There was a moment of silence. ‘You never told us,’ Sandy said, ‘that you’d met Fowler before. He wrote that article for The Times about the Braer protest. It confused us for a while.’
‘Was that him?’ Ben looked surprised. ‘I never met the man. We did an interview over the phone. There were lots of interviews.’
‘A coincidence then?’
‘I suppose. Birdwatching’s a small world.’
Like Shetland, Perez thought, sitting in his corner and watching. By now everyone in the islands will know Fran’s dead. There’ll be no hiding from their kindness. The best thing to do would be to move south. He thought with something approaching pleasure of a grey anonymous town, a small tidy room. No clutter, emotional or physical.
Sandy was waiting for Ben to leave, but still he sat there. ‘That wasn’t my finest hour,’ he said. ‘The Braer protest. My mother was so proud of me: I’d stood up for what I believed in. She came to court, took me out for a grand meal when it was all over. Paid the compensation order. But when they arrested me, the police said I’d most likely go to prison. Just give us the names of the locals who helped, they said, and we’ll put in a word with the Fiscal for you. I couldn’t face prison.’