He was walking down the track to pick up his borrowed car, and wondering where Sandy was, when his mobile rang. He was so certain that it would be Sandy, reporting on the results of the search, that he didn’t check the screen and was surprised to hear Maurice.

‘Are you busy, Jimmy? Could you spare a few minutes?’

Maurice was waiting for him in the flat. The place was untidier than Perez had seen it, untidier certainly than when he’d been there with Poppy the night before. Maurice might have cleaned up his act for public appearance but in private things were still falling apart. With Poppy gone, perhaps he no longer felt the need to put on a show. On the table in the living room there was an ashtray full of cigarette ends. Maurice shrugged. ‘I’d given up. Angela hated it. Now . . .’ He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whisky and two glasses. ‘Have a dram with me, Jimmy. I’ll drink alone if I have to but I don’t like it.’

Perez nodded. Had Maurice called him back to the North Light just because he was lonely? He sipped the whisky and waited.

‘The mail came in on the boat today,’ Maurice said. ‘You know what it’s like when the weather’s been bad. You get a heap of the stuff and most of it junk.’

Perez nodded again. ‘And some of it’s for Angela?’

‘Of course I should have realized it would be, but it threw me, seeing her name on the envelopes.’

‘I’d like to take the mail with me, if that’s OK,’ Perez said. He should have thought about it and asked Joanne at the post office to set Angela’s mail to one side. ‘I’ll bring it back. Have you opened it?’

‘Not the letters addressed to her!’ Maurice sounded shocked.

‘But there was something that worried you? That’s why you phoned.’

‘It was the bank statement.’ Maurice stood up and pulled a sheet from the pile of paper on the table. ‘Our joint current account. I don’t understand it.’

‘What don’t you understand?’