‘Evie lives off the back road not far from Sullom. If he was going that way and she was out, he could have seen her.’

‘But that’s just about chance, and I don’t see this as a random attack.’ Willow grabbed her jacket from her desk. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘Where are we off to?’

She was already out of the door. ‘I need to find where the man was murdered,’ she said. ‘We’ll drive from Sullom Voe, on the route Markham would have taken towards his parents’ hotel.’

Sandy was about to say that he’d just come back that way. But he saw that it would make no difference to Willow and, whatever he said to her, she’d make him do it again anyway.

A damp drizzle had blown in from the sea. It wasn’t the thick fog that there’d been the day of Markham’s death, but it blurred the outline of the hills and there was the sense of being closed in. Usually Shetland was about low horizons and long views, and today Sandy was reminded about his one trip to London and how trapped he’d felt by the buildings there. He was driving and he took the road slowly. Beside him, Willow was so tense that she made him feel anxious too.

‘So what was it like where you grew up?’ he said. He couldn’t bear the silence. ‘Did you look after your own there too?’

‘I was one of the outsiders,’ she said. ‘I was born in North Uist, but we never really belonged.’

Sandy thought she’d stop there. She didn’t seem the sort who would confide about her personal life. But perhaps she needed to fill the silence as much as he did, or perhaps she needed distracting. This was her first case, her big chance, and so far nothing was going to plan. So while he inched north along the smooth road that had been bought by the oil money, she started talking about her early life in the Western Isles, and by the time the giant tanks of Sullom Voe lurked out of the gloom he thought he knew all about her.

‘My parents were hippies,’ she said. ‘After the good life. And they were good people. With some friends they bought a house in North Uist. A place big enough for a couple of families and outbuildings that could house more.’

‘You grew up in a commune?’ He sounded shocked, but he couldn’t help himself. Communes were for dropouts and druggies, not kids who grew up to be cops.

‘Do you find the idea amusing, Sergeant?’ But she was joking too and not really angry. He liked that about her. You felt she wouldn’t take herself too seriously, even now, when worry about the case was eating into her.