To some islanders, Eva’s disappearance proved what they had always known; that despite her efforts, she wasn’t local. Nobody who’d grown up in the islands would have gone out in that storm. It was a north-easterly; the wind was at forty knots—

Not when she went out; the wind got up suddenly, out of nowhere. —it could only have been an incomer doing something so stupid. She did other stupid things, too. The sort of people she’d been consorting with recently. Even before she disappeared, there had been murmurings. The nonsense they were feeding the young boys and girls at Ayrness High. The preferential treatment of female entrepreneurs. The secret symbolism of the island flag; how wicked it was, when you really looked at it. The money that became available for the museum to rewrite its exhibits – Neolithic female what?! – destabilising millennia of good solid island history. Not to mention the books in the library. They’d even installed women’s urinals; behind the abbey, of all places. Somebody must have encouraged Eva in these insane schemes and untenable positions.

In the days after Eva disappeared, women were seen going down to the Islands of Women Study Centre, one by one, and in groups. Not just incomers; islanders, too. They walked there, heads down, coats tight around their bodies, cowrie shells in hand. People love honouring the departed with flowers. But these women left a flotsam of seashells outside Eva’s office in the harbour. Shells, being aerodynamic, survive the wind’s scouring better than sunset-pink supermarket tulips, or fragile white lilies in crackly plastic.

Eva had set out from England; but who knows where she ended up. Scotland; Norway; Thule. Despite everything, there were women who continued to say that Eva would return to them. Cwen had taken her; Cwen would give her back.

Others were less sanguine, given the circumstances.

Some – men – found the sight of all those women with their seashells difficult to take. At the supermarket checkout, in the harbour, on the gangway of the ferries, they began calling one another out. Did you ... ? Had you ... ? Some of them had known; might just’ve gleaned it in passing from their daughters or wives. Others denied it. Online, lists of offences were exchanged, magnified. They were changing the street names! The hospital too. And the library. They tried to promote women in fishing, in the fire service, as farmers. Did you hear about Pregnancy Celebration Day? It would’ve wiped out Chri—

The English coroner made her judgement: ‘presumption of death’. Nobody could have survived, out in those seas, for more than a few hours.