‘We’re OK to carry on walking, aren’t we?’ Fran asked.

‘Sure.’ Poppy smiled again. ‘My mother’s always saying I need more exercise.’ Just like you.

‘Why were you so desperate to leave the island?’ Fran asked. ‘Was it just that you didn’t get on with Angela?’

There was a pause. ‘I used to love coming here when Dad first moved up. I mean, it was a sort of adventure. Mum would come with me on the train to Aberdeen and Dad would meet me there. We’d get the ferry. I was the youngest kid at home and always felt a bit left out, so it made me feel special to have that time with him. The overnight ferry, then the plane into Fair Isle. And Angela made more of an effort to get on with me then. She’d take me out ringing with her. Out in the Zodiac to count the seabirds.’

‘What went wrong?’

Poppy shrugged. ‘I guess I grew up. I could see how she treated my father. Like he was some sort of servant. He was a senior lecturer at the university, important in his own right, before he married her. She had no right to talk to him like that.’

‘So you hadn’t wanted to come to the Isle this time?’

‘They wanted me out of the way.’ Poppy’s voice was becoming shrill.

‘Who did?’

‘My mother, the school. I was becoming a nuisance so they decided to banish me to the far north. Like it was some sort of Russian prison camp. Like I’m some political fucking prisoner.’

Fran didn’t say anything. This is what Jimmy would do. He’d wait. She’s so angry that she’ll just keep talking.

A raven appeared overhead. Fran heard it croaking before she saw it and the noise made her shiver and remember past horrors, distracted her again from the girl ambling along beside her.

‘They don’t like my boyfriend,’ Poppy went on. ‘He’s older than me. Different background. They pretend to be open-minded, but they look down on him because he gets his hands dirty when he works and he doesn’t talk like we do. Just because his parents couldn’t pay for him to go to a smart school. They blame him because I lose it sometimes. But they’re the ones who make me angry. They make me want to lash out.’

‘Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to spend a bit of time apart.’ God, Fran thought, I sound like the agony aunt from a tabloid newspaper.

‘I’ve been trying to text him,’ Poppy said. ‘And phone him. But he hasn’t answered. He’s probably found someone else.’