Perez realized he was hungry and ordered onion soup and steak. He propped Eleanor’s notebook in front of him and tried to read as he ate. In a clearer hand there was the history of Lizzie Geldard and her death. Then the first sighting of the ghost. That had come during the war, when Peerie Lizzie had appeared to a Yell woman visiting her sweetheart who was stationed at the RAF station in Unst. The next day he was killed in a raid over Germany, and a week later the woman discovered that she was pregnant. So it seemed that a sighting of Lizzie didn’t only foretell a new birth, but death as well.

By now the restaurant was empty apart from him. The waiter cleared his plate and offered dessert or coffee.

‘Coffee would be wonderful. Unless you’re wanting to close.’

‘We’re open all afternoon. In this climate we need all the business we can get.’ He was French certainly, but the accent was less pronounced now. Now that Perez was the only customer this was more of a conversation than a performance.

‘I was recommended your restaurant place by a friend,’ Perez said.

‘Oh?’

‘Eleanor Longstaff.’

A pause. ‘Poor Eleanor.’ The man’s grief seemed genuine. ‘She’s dead, you know. Murdered. It was in the newspaper.’ He hurried behind the bar and returned with a page from a tabloid from two days earlier. The headline ran: TV boss killed in the land of the midnight sun. Which wasn’t quite true, Perez thought. The simmer dim wasn’t quite the same as full sunlight. The piece was heavy on sensationalism and light on facts. Perez suspected that the journalist hadn’t made the trek north. Few editors would have the budget for last-minute air fares to the islands.

‘Did Eleanor eat with you often?’

The man had made Perez coffee. Now he disappeared again and poured one for himself. He sat at the next table, not presuming to join Perez, but willing to gossip at a distance. ‘She was a regular. She came for coffee and pastries sometimes on her way to her office. She worked here on her laptop. Or with her writing.’ He nodded to the notebooks on the table. ‘Just like those.’

‘I’m a police officer from Shetland,’ Perez said. ‘I’m investigating her death.’

‘So not her friend then?’

Perez paused. ‘I didn’t meet her while she was alive. But I feel as if she’s almost a friend. That I’m responsible for finding out who killed her.’ He wondered where that had come from. The waiter would think he was mad. And he’d only had a small glass of sharp red wine with his lunch.

The man nodded again to the books. ‘Do you think they’ll help you?’