‘That night? No.’

‘Any time?’

Dougie knew what this was about. Ben had described the feathers in the hair. ‘I don’t understand why there should be. Unless there was some special study I knew nothing about.’

‘Was Hugh asleep when you went back to the dormitory?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you have heard him if he left the room in the night?’

‘No,’ Dougie said. ‘It takes me a long time to get to sleep, but when I finally go off, I sleep like the dead.’

Chapter Sixteen

In the field centre kitchen Jane made a cottage pie. Easy to prepare and also Maurice’s favourite. She’d do a veggie chilli for Ben. Jane was starting to worry about Maurice, who was still holed up in the flat and who hadn’t really eaten anything the previous day. The community nurse had come up to the lighthouse the morning that Angela had been found dead and offered sedatives, but Maurice had refused to see her: ‘I don’t need her pills. I don’t need tranquillizing. I don’t want to forget my wife.’

Now, Jane wondered if she should get the nurse back. The woman was chatty, easy-going and she was probably the source of many of the rumours floating round the island about Angela’s murder. She’d be happy enough to call in. But it was unlikely that Maurice would be persuaded to see her, and Jane didn’t want to provide more fodder for the Fair Isle gossip machine. She put the pie in the larder to keep cool and phoned Mary Perez. Mary had been the island nurse before she became a full-time crofter and Maurice had always got on well with her. No reason why Jane shouldn’t invite her to the North Light for coffee and try to persuade Maurice out of the flat to meet her.

While she waited for the woman to arrive, Jane went upstairs to make beds and tidy rooms. In the height of the season they’d employed a young woman from Belfast to do the cleaning, but now Jane looked after all the domestic chores. It wasn’t too onerous this week. Two rooms: the small dormitory where Dougie and Hugh slept and the twin belonging to the Fowlers. The staff looked after themselves, though sometimes Jane took pity on Ben Catchpole and did his laundry.

The dormitory had the stuffy, sweaty smell of men living in close proximity, even though two of the beds were empty and the men were sleeping at opposite ends of the room. Jane straightened sheets and folded duvets, cleaned the sink, opened the sash window just a little to let in fresh air. She wondered if Perez had searched in here. Would that be the normal procedure in a murder investigation? Surely he’d have to get permission first and he certainly hadn’t asked her if he could look round her room. She thought she would have known if he’d been there, looking through her drawers, prying in her things. Again she felt the investigation as a sort of challenge, an impersonal puzzle that had nothing to do with the reality of the murdered Angela. Jane had always been competitive and now she wanted to pit her intelligence against that of Perez, to come up with the identity of the killer before he did. She’d become an amateur sleuth, like a character in the detective stories she’d read as a child.