RUTH: Island people turn out for each other, we’re good that way.

LUCIJA: She touched many lives, as the phrase goes.

NINA: The service was properly big.

STELLA: This was the moment we realised – because of the numbers of women who attended – there were crowds of people in the churchyard. We saw how her work had become bigger than herself.

TARA: It transcended her. It was awesome.

Lucija, too, was in tears as she sat in the church. She was there with the other nuns, but she was also representing Mariam Maher, who couldn’t be present until her legal situation was regularised. Lucija was there for herself, also. These past few weeks, watching Mariam pray in her bedroom at the convent, with her hands and face and feet clean, and her hair tucked away in a headscarf, Lucija admired but was unable to take part in the purity of this solo act of worship. The concentration, the hallowed whispered words, the bending and prostrating and lifting and kneeling and standing. Mariam had promised she would pray like this for Eva, while the service was going on at Harcourt. Lucija wished she could do the same, sitting here in the church. But it was impossible to pray now that Eva was gone.

It is true that Eva’s disappearance, plus the son’s political–sexual scandal, and all the gory details in the tabloids, had drawn people out of their winter lethargy and into the pond-stillness of the old island church. It was her they had come for, of course, but there was something else. Before the inquiry was announced, and islanders were invaded and scrutinised by the mainland, there was a moment of gradual, dawning collective knowledge. Islanders felt that Eva – who was theirs – should be recognised for all the good she did. Her service to the college. Her support for the paper (Ursula King had published a gushing editorial). Her success on Skellar, with the Archipelago Women’s Club, which drew in tourists from as far away as London.

And also to defend what she stood for from her sons – mainland men.

Islanders who might not normally have considered squeezing themselves into their black funeral suit with its old-fashioned bum flaps, and ironing a bright white cotton shirt – such as Eva’s dentist, for example – or brushing the dust off a heavy tweed overcoat which smelt strongly of mothballs, and removing from the buttonhole this November’s poppy – such as the head of Ayrness High’s Board of Governors – for a person with whom they weren’t exactly on dining, let alone regular-telephoning terms, nevertheless made this effort. Women who, during Eva’s life, had not counted themselves her friends, felt moved by the articles they read in the paper. They recalled chance meetings with tenderness. The statements put out by Inga at the council, the discussions on the radio, the usual internet community chatter, all testified to Eva’s general goodness. When a call went out from somewhere to bring shells to the church, as a symbol of how Eva was lost to the sea, and to whom she belonged, every mourner who knew held a shell in their hands to leave at the foot of the altar.