‘I was looking for the murder weapon,’ she said.

‘It’s another stabbing, isn’t it?’

‘Certainly looks that way to me. But it won’t be the same knife, of course. That went out in the helicopter with the first victim.’

‘There’s more blood this time.’

‘And more wounds,’ Vicki said. ‘I think Jane heard the killer climb up the ladder. There’d have been no escape for her but she put up a struggle. There are defensive cuts on her hands and arms.’

Perez wondered what the murderer had made of that. Had he been sickened by having to face the woman he was stabbing? Or had he enjoyed it?

‘Could a woman have done it?’ Surely a woman wouldn’t have been excited by the violence?

Vicki shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Any idea what sort of weapon we should be looking for?’

‘Hey, ask the pathologist. He gets paid a lot more than me.’

But she grinned. She was never precious, and he valued her judgement more than that of the eminent doctor who performed the post-mortems in Aberdeen.

‘Something with a narrow blade,’ she said. ‘Very sharp. The murderer pulled it out afterwards, which is one reason why there’s more blood here than there was at the first scene. Looks like he hit an artery. Of course, the feathers are very different too.’

‘Are they?’ He was surprised. He thought feathers were feathers. ‘I suppose there are more of them here. In the bird room a few were woven into Angela’s hair. And those were longer.’

‘Here someone’s just slit open a feather pillow and spilled out the contents,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you ever have pillow fights in that boarding school of yours?’

‘The hostel at the Anderson High was hardly a boarding school.’ He made the same point every time they met, but it was a running gag: that he’d been to a posh boarding school while she was at the local comprehensive. ‘What about the feathers in Angela’s hair then?’

‘I’ve sent them for DNA analysis, but they’re not the sort you stuff pillows with, that’s for sure. Looks like they might have come from a couple of different species.’

Perez considered that. He couldn’t understand what the implication might be. ‘Have we found the empty pillowcase?’

‘It’s not here.’ She stretched. The spotlights shining up from the ground floor threw strange shadows on her face. ‘Definitely no murder weapon either.’

‘I’m going to ask the search team to come in. They can pull this place apart and go to the North Light too. I’ll sort it out first thing.’