At this point, Camille got out from under the table – mobile phone still pressed to her ear – and walked towards the door, not caring about the photographer any more – indeed, she had forgotten all about him. Thus, she was momentarily unprepared for the dazzling cacophony of shutters clicking, for the ten reporters who held up their recording devices and screamed over each other. She froze, still unsure what was happening. Until one voice – a voice that she would never forget as long as she lived, for it was the voice that made everything clear, a posh, Oxbridge-educated, youthful voice, belonging to a woman – said,

‘Are you going to leave him, Mrs Vane?’

CAMILLE: I never mentioned Eva to him. I felt sorry for that later. Because what I was busy feeling was this huge relief. I was thinking: I’m going home.

The island gossip made Zoe cry, for Camille and the children. Alice wasn’t the only one he had propositioned, apparently; other women had come forward, or were rumoured to have done, one by one, in pairs, in threesomes.

NINA: Really, that man.

ZOE: I guess he was ringing to tell me. To alert me. All the journalists. That was good of him, I suppose.

JUDGE: Maybe he realised—

ZOE: Maybe.

STELLA: Like father, like son.

NINA: It was too much, after Eva’s disappearance.

RUTH: Once the coroner’s report was released, the solicitor was able to begin settling the estate. In the meantime, the family arranged Eva’s memorial service. By then I was really worried about Zoe.

The rain rattled down on the roof of the church, causing the vicar to clear her voice, and the sons, who were doing most of the readings, to speak even louder than normal. The women scattered themselves throughout the church, Jen and Inga near the front, Zoe’s schoolfriends and teachers and colleagues from the museum café dotted here and there, Ravi (honorary schoolgirl) near the font, Zoe herself sitting with Nina (new haircut) and Ruth (in her uniform) in the pew behind Sebastian and his children, his brothers and their offspring, all dressed in smart black coats from Paris or New York or London. It was – Camille said later – a severely buttoned-up affair, literally, figuratively. Who cried? she said. Zoe. Zoe wept noisily, in gulps, her judders audible to everyone, even to Stella and Tara, twenty pews behind. She wept and wept so that her nose streamed and her hanky turned to mush and Nina and Ruth took it in turns to hold her and soothe her.

CAMILLE: The church was packed like that because people loved her.

INGA: Because of the mystery.

JEN: People were shocked. There were rumours that she’d been seen. There were theories about how she might have survived. Some hero-types went and searched the English skerries, even, which are uninhabited. But most people respected her and, whatever the outcome, they wanted to show that. All the good work she did, it went beyond the college, the Archipelago Women’s—