Perez could have answered these questions himself, but he knew it would take him weeks to do it. He’d grown up in Shetland, but still he was considered something of an outsider in the town. People would be reluctant to talk to him about the trivial details that would help trace Angela’s movements while she was off the Isle. Perhaps it was because he’d worked in a city in the south for part of his career, perhaps because he came from Fair Isle. Sandy might be a Whalsay man, but he was completely at home in Lerwick now. He had contacts everywhere.

‘I’ll get on to it now.’ Sandy leaned back in his chair and looked up at Perez. ‘I might as well. There’s nothing else to do. Did you know there isn’t even a television for the guests here?’ It was as if Perez had brought him to the edge of the world.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The next day was Sunday and suddenly everything was still. All activity ceased. No planes filled with birdwatchers and media folk. No helicopters. No murder. Even the weather was quiet. The island woke to a clear, cold dawn. On the bank by the shop, the wind turbine was motionless.

Perez asked Sandy to spend the day at the field centre: his role to reassure the remaining residents and to continue taking statements about Jane Latimer.

When Perez was a boy Sundays on Fair Isle were sacred. Every week he was taken to church twice – once to the kirk and once to the Methodist chapel. Before he was born, the islanders had decided they couldn’t live with sectarianism and this was their way of dealing with it: whatever denomination they’d been born into, they’d all go to both services, kids scrubbed, men in suits or fancy hand-knitted sweaters, women in skirts and proper shoes. Sunday was a day of rest then. There was no work on the croft. No fishing. It had been different for the women, of course. There had to be lunch and the pans had to be cleaned, but they couldn’t hang washing on the line – even if it was a good drying day – or the neighbours would talk.

Perez took Fran to the morning service in the kirk. He knew it would make his mother happy to have them there and he needed time for reflection, away from the investigation. Let Sandy take the lead for a while. He felt too that Fran should understand what living in the Isle was about – she still had romantic ideas of a harmonious community existence. He wasn’t sure she’d stomach the part religion played in bringing about the cohesion – the sort of religion preached by his father at least.