‘Are you hungry?’

Poppy switched down the sound, but continued to stare at the sunny landscape, the young lovers.

‘Starving.’ She turned abruptly towards Jane. ‘Is that really gross? To want to eat when there’s a dead woman lying in the bird room?’

‘Of course not. And she’s not there any more. Jimmy Perez has taken her away.’ Jane sat on the bed. ‘Where do you want your dinner? In the flat or with us?’

There was a pause. ‘Do they all think I killed her?’

‘I don’t know what they think. I don’t believe it was you.’

The soap opera ended and the titles rolled silently towards a blue horizon. Poppy lay back on the pillow. ‘Could I have something here? I can’t face Dad either. He keeps crying. I’ve never seen him cry before.’

‘I’ll bring something through.’

‘Is there pudding too?’

‘Lemon meringue.’

‘Can I have a piece?’

Jane smiled and nodded.

At the table the talk was all about the swan. There was a pile of reference books between them. Dougie Barr was manic. It was as if he were on speed, the words tumbling out one after another. ‘Sometimes you see a bird and you just know! Like, that it’s the best bird you’ll ever find in your life, the thing you’ll be remembered for.’ He set down his knife and fork and turned a page in the big book beside him, then picked up a can, not of beer, but a highly coloured fizzy drink. Jane thought the sugar in it, added to his mood, had turned him into a hyperactive child. ‘I wasn’t even sure trumpeter migrated, but it does. Look. The Alaska population is migratory. So my bird came all the way from Alaska.’ My bird. As if he’d given birth to it. He began to eat again, very quickly, and occasionally small pieces of food flew out of his mouth. Perhaps he finally remembered that there’d been a death in the centre because he added: ‘Angela would have understood that. She knew what it was like to find a rarity. Her reputation was built on it.’

‘That and her hair,’ Sarah Fowler said.

The interjection was so unexpected, so bitchy, that for a moment Jane wasn’t sure how to respond, or even if the implied criticism was intended. She’d chatted to the Fowlers when they first arrived at the field centre on the Shepherd and found them pleasant, in a quiet, inoffensive way. She couldn’t remember if John had said what he did for a living; Sarah was some sort of social worker, dealing with kids and families. Now, surprised, she looked up and caught Sarah’s eye and they grinned at each other. Two women sharing a moment of cattiness, enjoying it all the more because of the circumstances, because they were restrained, polite women of a certain age and no one would have expected it of them. Sarah began to giggle, very quietly into her napkin, and Jane thought they were all close to hysteria.