‘Perhaps I was a bit curious.’ Evie stopped, watched the tide suck at her toes, the tiny eddies in the sand. ‘But I didn’t see him.’ She focused on a gull tugging at a bit of seaweed on the shore. ‘I’d been besotted with him, you know. Part of me was afraid that all the old feelings would come back if we met, that some of the old attraction would still be there. I didn’t need the complication. And I thought he’d want something. Jerry always did want something.’

‘Might Jerry have contacted John?’ Willow thought if the man had been desperate for Evie’s forgiveness, he might have asked her fiancé for help in setting up the meeting. Jerry had been at Sullom Voe on the afternoon of his death. John Henderson had been working there, just across the water from the terminal. She imagined how that conversation might have gone: I took advantage of your woman, got her pregnant and dumped her. Please help me to put things right. You’d think that Jerry Markham would have realized that the right thing to do just before the marriage was to leave things alone. To stay away. But then Markham had always been self-absorbed and self-indulgent. He’d probably be selfish even in this.

‘John didn’t say anything about it,’ Evie said at last. ‘If Jerry met him or phoned him, John didn’t tell me.’

‘And things were just the same between you? Those last few days of John’s life?’

There was a silence filled with gulls screeching.

‘I don’t know!’ Evie screamed louder than the gulls. ‘I was busy, about to be married, anxious about dresses and flowers and crazy stuff like that. And about work. If he was different, I didn’t notice. Don’t you think I wish I’d stopped? Dropped everything. Spent every last second with him.’ She stopped abruptly. It was as if the needle had been lifted from a vinyl record mid-track. When she started again, the voice was almost a whisper. ‘We never made love. Came close a few times. But we thought we had years ahead of us. Let’s wait, we thought. Make the marriage night something special. And now? Now, I wish we’d never got out of bed.’ She turned towards Willow and there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘Then I might have been pregnant. Now I’ll never have a child.’ Willow put her arm round her shoulder and walked with Evie back up the beach.