People back home complained that photos never got printed anymore, that they sat idle and unlooked-at on hard drives, but that wasn’t true. Cabinet tops were clustered with framed holiday pictures, and school portraits trailed up stair walls. Bleached-out studio sessions looked down upon kitchen tables. Viola’s mother had gone around their house after the tragedy and taken down every single picture, not able to cope with the way a gaze might catch your eye and seem so alive. She’d put them all in a box, shoved behind the vacuum cleaner in the understairs cupboard, perhaps so Viola would not find them and be tempted to put them back. Her mother did not realise that that cupboard was the first place anyone would look.

Viola had found them, of course, taking one framed photo for her suitcase – all four of them in an open canoe, oars aloft, victorious. It was taken the summer before; the family at its zenith, joy unsullied, because no one in that picture knew that it would soon end.

The only other photos Viola has seen on the island, apart from this staged mantelpiece portrait, are on the wall of the Customs House – historic pictures of the estate.

And, of course, there are the pictures that Mr Hailey took.

It occurs to Viola that Mr Hailey might have taken pictures of Leah too. It feels good to think of the teacher by just her first name. The Eldest Girls still called her Miss Cedars out of habit; Viola always hit the L hard, demeaning her, making her small.

She heads upstairs, cautiously, as if someone might be sleeping there. The stairs are steep and the landing is but a metre squared. To the left, there is a step that leads down into a bathroom with a pastel blue curtain around the tub. Viola enters, feeling the air still misted from an early-morning shower. She opens the cabinet above the sink, finds very little, just moisturiser, aspirin, an almost empty tube of steroid cream. She presses a muddy boot to the pedal of the small bin by the toilet and is hit by the stale smell of blood. Inside are sanitary towels soaked through, bright red – too red, almost. She exclaims and backs away.

Across the landing is the bedroom; the curtains are open here, the window framing the tallest bobbing masts of the harbour. On the outside of the glass, there is a small spray of red paint spots from the main splash of it below. A crudely carved wooden heart hangs on a length of brown cord wound around the window catch. The object is almost as lumpy and malformed as an anatomical heart, rather than smooth and symmetrical, like the symbolic one it is supposed to resemble. That Leah Cedars would display this in her home and not be reminded of all that has happened only deepens Viola’s mistrust of the woman.