‘I’m sorry, Jimmy,’ Maurice said. ‘I really have to speak to you.’ It seemed he’d lost patience and had refused to wait in the flat any longer. Though looking at his watch, Perez saw it had only been a quarter of an hour since they’d spoken. This evening, time seemed to have stretched. So much had happened since they’d returned to the North Light with the murder weapon that it appeared that days had passed.

‘Have you seen Fran?’

‘She was in the kitchen a moment ago,’ Maurice said. His voice had lost something of its neediness and had gained a new authority. ‘You have to know what Angela’s mother told me. I think it could be important.’

Perez weighed up his options. Could he entrust Maurice to Sandy? Looking again at the centre administrator, he saw that wouldn’t do. Maurice would only talk to him.

‘Come into the bird room, then. Sandy, bring everyone into the common room and keep an eye on them there. Everyone. Fran included. I don’t want her wandering around on her own.’

Sandy nodded.

At the bird room door Maurice hesitated and Perez saw he was thinking about his wife. He’d never thought of Maurice as an imaginative man but the picture of Angela, with the knife in her back and the feathers in her hair, would surely remain with him. Knife in the back. The words stuck with Perez for a moment. A metaphor for betrayal, he thought, and he wondered if that was what the murderer had wanted to convey, if like the feathers, a message had been intended. In that case did the killer want to be caught? Did he want the world to know what had provoked the act of violence?

‘Stella asked to speak to me alone because she had information that might lead to Angela’s killer.’ Maurice leaned against the windowsill. The wall was three feet thick and the glass encrusted with salt. His profile was reflected in it, but it was blurred, made him look like a ghost peering in.

‘More appropriate, surely, to speak to me!’

‘It doesn’t show Angela in a very good light,’ Maurice said. ‘Stella left the decision to me: should we go public and ruin her reputation or keep the information to ourselves and risk the chance that the murderer would go free?’