‘Well, she seems to have had a go at all the other men in the place. And Angela was a writer too, wasn’t she? Perhaps they met before.’

Sarah gave another of her strained little smiles. ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘Can you imagine it? Angela and John! She liked her men young and pretty as far as I could tell, unless they could be useful to her. Besides, she’d scare John rigid.’

Fran smiled too as if she were sharing a joke, but she thought John might have been useful to Angela when her book had first been published. And in fact, John didn’t seem to her to be the sort who would be easily scared.

Chapter Thirty-three

Perez stood at the airstrip waiting for Angela’s mother to arrive, his hood up against the hail. Fran would be leaving the next day. He’d told her the sea might be a bit lumpy but she’d decided to stick with her decision to go out on the boat. He hadn’t realized how much the plane trip in had scared her. ‘I don’t care if I’m sick. I’ll feel safer.’

The search team was already there, eager to be leaving. Frustrated because they’d contributed nothing to the case. Perez turned his back to the weather and chatted; occasionally they had to raise their voices to be heard against the breeze.

‘Nothing,’ the leader repeated. ‘Complete sodding waste of time. You found the only piece of useful evidence in the lens room of the tower.’ As if it was Perez’s fault that they’d spent a couple of days on a bleak lump of rock where the Atlantic met the North Sea. ‘I mean, we did the field centre. Although Miss Hewitt is sure the second victim was killed where she was found, we treated the whole of the lighthouse as a potential crime scene – except the lens room, obviously. It never occurred to us that anyone could have access up there.’

Perez said nothing. No point in recriminations now.

‘The woman was moved around a bit in the loft after the attack,’ the man went on. ‘Posed, like Miss Hewitt said.’

‘The killer would have had bloodstained clothes?’ Perez asked.

‘Almost certainly. There was that arterial spatter. Unless he wore protective gear.’ Perez had a picture of the oilskins the Shepherd crew used. ‘Not that we found anything. The clothes could have been burned, I suppose. Or ditched over a cliff.’

‘And nothing else of interest in the field centre.’ Perez didn’t pose it as a question, just repeated it to himself.

‘Of course, that doesn’t prove much.’ A younger man, dark-haired, spoke now. ‘They all knew we were coming. He’d have dumped anything he didn’t want us to see.’ That assumption again that the killer was a man.