Again there was a brief pause before she answered. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Because he told people he was interested in a story on the oil and natural gas, and I thought he might have hoped you could introduce him to colleagues working on the project. He’d shown interest in the wind farm too, and in tidal power.’

‘He would realize,’ she said stiffly, ‘that I’d have very little interest in helping him in any way at all.’

‘Can you tell me about him?’ Through the window he saw a pair of eider ducks on the water. Perez could hear them and thought they chuntered like a couple of old ladies gossiping.

‘He hurt me,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to be objective.’

‘All the same, it’d be useful. Folk don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but sometimes it’s the failings that make them a target for violence. Can you understand why anyone would want to kill Jerry Markham, for instance?’

‘Oh yes!’ The response was immediate. ‘I’d have killed him myself all those years ago if I’d had the chance. But he ran away south.’

‘Would you mind telling me about it? It’s not the facts I’m interested in as much as the man himself. The only sense I have of him at the moment is that he’s a successful journalist. Was he always ambitious, even when he was working on the Shetland Times?’

‘I suppose he was,’ she said. ‘And perhaps that was what attracted me to him at first, the fact that he was so different from my family. He wanted much more out of life than they did. My parents spent their time trying to preserve the old traditions. My father builds yoals – beautiful boats using the old designs. It takes him months of work; he’s a perfectionist. My mother’s family have always been crofters. Now I’m proud of them both, but then it seemed as if they were living in the past and had no time at all for the future or the world away from Shetland.’

Perez said nothing. He could tell she was ready to talk to him. She just needed the time to get her thoughts in order.

‘I was very young for my age,’ she said. ‘I’d been out at the High School and lived during the week at the hostel, but even while the other kids were going to parties, getting themselves invited to the town students’ houses so that they could go into bars, that had never interested me. I was ambitious too, in my own way. I wanted a place at a good university, to make my parents proud.’

Perez nodded and that was all the prompting she needed to continue.