Then, in a way, Viola was in their situation. She had offered her body to a pervert in the woods in return for his slaughtering an animal that she was too squeamish to slaughter herself. She saw how easy it was to lose sight of the line – the one that said, on this side is the victim and on this one, the perpetrator. She saw how hard it was to see yourself as blameless.

Viola would have to be the one to do it, or else she would join that list of potential eye-averters and collaborators – the people who just did nothing. She would be as bad as Miss Cedars. In some twisted fashion, it had also occurred to Viola, that if she did do it, she would better understand the girls’ pain, and that would bring them closer together.

The finding of the heart, the girls’ curfew, the death of the gamekeeper – all of this gave Viola a hiatus in which to prepare.

She visited Saul Cooper in his back office at the Customs House. She had a plan.

He would make her a cup of tea, and then, while he was in the middle of a talk on the various capabilities of his radio equipment, a subject in which Viola had expressed an interest as a pretext for her visit, she would throw herself at him. As practice. So she wasn’t completely unprepared for what she was about to do at the stones. So that her first time was with someone kind.

This is how it would go: she’d would move from the chair to the camp bed and pat the space beside her, ask to see what was in his sketchbook and then… What would she do? She would close her eyes and kiss him, focus on his positive qualities, imagine he was physically someone else, younger, substitute his weaselly face for that of a celebrity, if Viola could remember what any of them looked like without a working phone or TV. She could trust him, she thought, to be gentle.

‘Mr Cooper,’ she said, interrupting his lecture on Marine VHF, how it bounced its signal from mast to mast to gain distance across the ocean.

‘Saul,’ he corrected, which was good, a move towards familiarity.

She looked up at him, standing at the counter in front of that great sea-filled window, his fingers resting on the buttons of one of the communications devices, eager to carry on with his lecture – and Viola lost all courage.

He really was kind and didn’t deserve to be used. He deserved to be happy, so she found herself blurting out, ‘I think you’d make a good dad.’ The saying of it made her squirm; how swiftly her thoughts had travelled from one idea to another, how easily she could embarrass herself.

He gave a quick splutter of laughter. ‘Oh, yeah, what makes you say that?’

‘Well, Leah said it, actually.’