Her ghost hadn’t made it to the interview room and for that he was grateful. He tried to focus on the matter in hand in case she slipped under his guard and found him there too. There was a detective Perez didn’t recognize, sitting at the desk alongside Sandy. Perez assumed he was from Inverness, maybe even Roy Taylor’s replacement, but he didn’t care enough to ask. The stranger might as well not have been there: Sandy did all the talking. And he was bloody good, Perez thought, taking a stolen moment of pleasure to think Sandy had been well taught. Perez pulled a seat into a corner. Anyone looking in would have assumed he was sleeping, but he listened, caught up in the stories beside himself. They spoke to Hugh Shaw first.

‘Tell us about the blackmail,’ Sandy said. ‘It’ll all come out now. Fowler’s talked to us. No point hiding.’

Hugh stared at Perez, but didn’t mention his presence. He slouched across the table towards Sandy. He reminded Perez of the cocky teenagers he’d often picked up in the city. No discipline, no work, believing the world owed them a living. But those young men had grown up on sink estates with little prospect of work. Hugh Shaw didn’t have that excuse.

‘I knew Angela wouldn’t miss the money,’ he said. ‘She was minted. She made more from one TV documentary than a year’s salary at the field centre.’

‘So tell me.’

‘It was all about the slender-billed curlew,’ Hugh said. ‘The bird that made her famous.’

‘What about it?

‘It was lies. She didn’t find it. The fame, the money, the reputation as a great scientist, it was all built on a lie. She stole another man’s research.’

Perez understood why the woman had been so unhappy, why she’d married an older man just for convenience. Her work had been the most important thing in her world and she’d compromised it. She had no pride left. Perhaps she saw the baby as a chance for a new start. Something honest and real. Perhaps it was a biological imperative that had driven her, a desperation to give birth. Fran had been experiencing something of that sort in the last few months. Again, he tried to banish Fran from his mind.

‘How did you find out?’ Sandy leaned across the table towards Shaw, his elbow on the table.

‘There was a Brit in Tashkent. An ex-pat doing something dodgy with the Russians, but also a birder. We sat in the Rovshan Hotel one night, drinking local beer and Johnny Walker Black Label, and he told me the whole story. John Fowler had tracked down the curlew population. Angela was looking for the species. She wanted something big to make her name. But he got there first; he found the birds by looking for the food they took, some kind of insect.’