‘So you’ll do it?’

He nodded.

‘Oh, Jimmy Perez, I didn’t know you were so keen to run away from me.’ She smiled to show that it was a joke, but still he felt awkward, as if he might have offended her.

It seemed that Lowrie and Caroline had taken the ferries into Lerwick, just as Hillier’s partner David had done, but Perez left a message with them to contact him when they returned. Then he tracked down Charles, who was mending a dripping tap in one of the grand bathrooms upstairs.

‘Any chance I could use your PC?’

Charles showed him into the office and switched on the computer so that Perez could book his flights to London online. The screensaver was a photo of Charles onstage dressed in Victorian costume, brandishing a big saw and heading towards a barrel with a beautiful blonde inside.

‘Of course, you were a famous magician!’ Vague memories of watching a television show with his parents came back to Perez. His father had loved it, but Perez had found the old-fashioned showmanship embarrassing. ‘Do you miss it?’

‘Not now. By the time I retired it was all about being disappointed. Driving miles to an audition, only to be told that the act was outdated. Days of being scared to leave the house in case my agent called. And there’s only so many ways of cutting a woman in half and making a rabbit disappear. It was time for me to give up, before all the money ran out, and let the young men take over with all that Houdini stuff. I’m too much of a coward to go in for that. Must admit that I’m enjoying this bit of melodrama, though. A bit of excitement in our dull and dreary lives, and it’s not as if I knew the poor woman.’

‘What brought you to Shetland?’

Charles looked up. ‘David. He’s always been an outdoors nut and he’s been visiting this place since he was a kid. He supported me throughout my stage career. Now it was my turn. I love it. Buying this place and moving north was the best thing we ever did, though it’s certainly been more work than I’d imagined.’

Charles went back to the dripping tap, and Perez phoned Fran’s parents from the office landline. Fran’s mother answered the phone.

‘How exciting! Of course Cassie can stay, Jimmy. And you too. It’d be great to catch up.’

He said that the offer was very kind, but he’d be working and needed to stay closer to the centre of town. The couple had never said anything, but he suspected they blamed him at some level for Fran’s murder. If he hadn’t dragged their daughter to Fair Isle the previous autumn, then she’d still be alive. He liked them well enough, but felt awkward in their company. The guilt that he managed to keep at the back of his mind when he was working took over all his thoughts when he was with them. He booked himself a hotel close to Eleanor’s office in King’s Cross for the following night and went out onto the island.