Dougie pushed himself to his feet. There’d been a sharp sting on his palm and when he looked, he saw that there was blood on his hand, trickling through his fingers. For a moment he felt a bit faint, then he looked down to find what had caused it. A knife, half hidden by the pine needles. The search team had been on the island for two days, looking for the knife that had killed Jane Latimer. But they’d been on the hill, taking the direct route from the Pund to the field centre, and after that they’d looked along the road. They couldn’t have searched the whole island even in two years. It had taken Dougie to stumble on it by chance.

Chapter Thirty-five

‘Just an ordinary kitchen knife,’ Perez said.

‘I suppose it could have been here for years.’ Sandy pulled up his collar to stop the rain dripping down his neck. They stood under the only real trees on the island. ‘Did you know they take school kids to that copse that they’ve planted in North Mainland? To give them a feel of what it’s like to be in woodland. In the summer they had a teddy bears’ picnic. It was in the Shetland Times.’

Perez didn’t answer the last point. Sometimes Sandy’s brain worked that way: he opened his mouth and let out the words without realizing they weren’t relevant to the matter in hand.

‘The knife hasn’t been here for very long. There’s no rust. The blade’s still sharp.’ He squatted to look at it better, smelled the damp earth and the pine, thought it wasn’t such a daft idea to give Shetland kids the experience of a forest.

‘I suppose any blood on it will be Dougie Barr’s. It’s typical that the search team has just gone out. We could have got them down here to do a fingertip through the trees.’ Sandy had an almost religious faith in forensic science. Fibres. DNA. Perez thought he watched CSI on the quiet. ‘Do you think it came from the centre’s kitchen?’

Perez straightened. ‘I think Jane Latimer would be the only person to tell you that. But probably. If it came from anywhere else on the Isle it’d likely have been missed. And everyone here knew we were looking for a murder weapon.’

He scooped it into an evidence bag, taking care to include some of the soil and debris from the plantation floor. It could go out on the boat the following morning; he’d get Morag to meet the Shepherd and send the knife south to forensics.