She led him into a wide hallway. The walls had been painted a deep green and there were pictures everywhere. The art was unfamiliar. Some looked like prints of cave paintings, scratched images of animals and birds. Primitive, but also amazingly lifelike. There were photos of strange dwellings growing out of a hillside, a collage made from scraps of woven cloth and two large abstract oils. He would have liked to spend more time with them, but she’d already moved on and had settled on the windowsill in a room that seemed half-sitting room and half-study. There was a desk and the walls were hidden by bookshelves. In one corner an armchair was covered with a batik throw and next to it stood a coffee table made from animal hide. There was a glass on the table and Perez thought that she’d been sitting here when he’d phoned the night before. Now she was framed by the window, so she looked like a piece of art herself. The background was a small courtyard garden, where the sun had been trapped by a brick wall. In the corner stood a tree covered in pink blooms in a pot.

She pointed him to a chair on the other side of the desk, but didn’t offer him tea or coffee. To a Shetlander that seemed so odd that for a moment Perez was unsure how to proceed.

‘Well,’ she said with a touch of impatience, ‘I suppose that you have questions.’ The voice threw him too. It was the voice of the old-fashioned upper classes, of the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day and 1950s radio recordings. Over the phone the cut-glass accent had been less pronounced.

‘I’d like you to tell me about your daughter,’ he said.

That obviously wasn’t what she’d been expecting. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘No.’ He paused. ‘You’ll know what’s important about her. And what might have led to her murder.’

A moment of silence. From the window behind her he began to hear faint sounds. The distant hum of traffic. A blackbird’s song.

‘She was always a headstrong girl,’ the woman said at last. ‘People said she took after me. Bright, of course.’ As if that went without saying.

‘An only child?’

‘My husband left me soon after Eleanor was born,’ she said. ‘He was a child himself and couldn’t bear the fact that he no longer got my full attention. I had other male partners to share my life, but nobody with whom I’d have contemplated parenthood.’

‘And now?’ But Perez thought he already knew the answer. This flat was Cilla’s territory. Nobody else stayed here.

There was a brief pause. ‘There are occasional distractions, but now I live alone and I’m grateful for that. I’ve discovered that I’m too selfish to share my home.’