Jen Mackae was thirty-three when she came to the islands to work with Eva – just the right age, as she joked at the inquiry, to start a mission. She, too, had a young family, and a partner who couldn’t move out to the islands just like that, but none of it put her off. From the start, and almost to the end, Jen and Eva faced the troubles and excitements of their work with exhilaration. Every time you saw them together, you could sense it: the delight which fluttered out from their fingertips, rippled through their voices, emanated from somewhere deep inside them, from the place that must have been their souls.

JEN: She was an imposing presence, you know? Without being overwhelming. I got the impression of a woman who had things to do and accomplish. I liked that. It inspired me. And later, as the project grew, she flourished—

JUDGE: You liked her.

JEN: I absolutely loved her.

At college, Eva and Jen immediately subjected the entire teaching programme to scrutiny. Where individual lecturers were amenable, suggestions were put to them for updates to standard reading lists and teaching schedules. Where lecturers showed themselves unwilling to be swayed, Jen and Eva went ahead and gave out alternative reading lists at the office of the Islands of Women Study Centre. They advertised for candidates to write a theology PhD on the sacred feminine. They hired the young archaeologist (Susie Wells, now at Birkbeck) who had written a paper inspired by Professor Marija Gimbutas’s work on prehistoric matriarchies, and whose consequent reinterpretation of Britain’s Neolithic chambered cairn culture was promoted in the museum, the college and the paper. Susie also received a grant from the Wellcome Trust to re-examine nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century excavations of medieval burials, to verify with modern techniques whether the skeletons were in fact male, as often claimed; and duly discovered that the skeleton removed from Cwen by Professor Turnbull, labelled monk or hermit, and placed in a box deep within the Ashmolean, was in fact easily identified as a woman.

Eva and Jen also set up Archipelago Women in Work, to support female entrepreneurs. By the time Eva disappeared, the fund had helped thirty-seven female-run businesses and organisations get off the ground – such as the women’s community shop on Astrid; the Archipelago Women’s Whisky Distillery (they now make gin as well); Mrs Edna Reynolds’s support network for women in late-life retraining; and, after some heated discussion, the Archipelago Chocolate Factory, set up by Eva’s friend, the trans woman, Lucette Smith. One of the stipulations of the fund was that the newly-created bodies should be fifty-one per cent controlled by women. The rules were very strict on this point.

JUDGE: Had she already decided, at this point, to spend all the family money?