As he walked he recalled the stages of their relationship, the seasons of their passion. This too was a ritual performed on every visit. He’d met her in winter, with snow on the ground and hungry ravens tumbling in a frozen sky. He’d made love to her in midsummer, when the cliffs were raucous with seabirds and there was a carpet of wildflowers in the meadow below her house. In early spring she’d proposed marriage to him. He stopped for a moment, dizzy with the memory of it, and the sky seemed to tip and wheel around his head, and he couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began. Her challenging smile. ‘Well, Jimmy? What do you think?’ And she’d died in the autumn, in a storm that battered his Fair Isle home, sending spindrift high into the air and cutting them off from the outside world.

I’m mad, he thought. I will never be sane again.

From the cairn he could see the sweep of the North Mainland. Fran had loved it because she said this summed up Shetland in one view, the bleakness and the beauty, the wealth that came from the sea and the hard, barren land. The past and the future. In the distance, in a fold in the land, the oil terminal at Sullom Voe, in this strange silver light looking almost magic, a lost city. Everywhere land and water, and land reflected in water. To the south the line of giant wind turbines, still now. Below him the settlement of Hvidahus, three toy houses and a pier, and almost hidden by trees the crofting museum at Vatnagarth where he’d left his car.

It was six months to the day since Fran had died. He thought he wouldn’t come back here until Fran’s daughter Cassie was old enough to understand. Or he felt up to bringing her. He hoped the cairn would still be there then.