Dot was acquired as a guard dog – Deborah Kendrick’s first tentative step towards building a total defence against an unfair world, before the idea of Lark reached her consciousness. The error was clear as soon as the puppy arrived – tiny, incontinent, as fallible as a human baby. How would a miniature Schnauzer defeat all their unseen enemies – lick them into submission?

Dogs are not protectors on the island, they are not even considered companions – they have no soul. Viola disputes this absolutely. Dot has a soul, she can feel it now, emanating from the soft, warm creature on her lap, filling her with much-needed determination as they ride the rough track, seemingly harbour-bound, instilling her with the courage to speak.

Any resolve she has falls away as the road does, steeply, the East Bay revealing itself beneath them. The back end of the vehicle competes in the gravel to become the front, and Viola clamps Dot ever tighter, gripping the seat beneath her, fingers slipping into the foam insides where the leather has split. As her driver steadies the Land Rover in its skid, he is the one who finds the wherewithal to say something.

‘How come you knew where to find him?’

‘Huh?’ Viola is unprepared, still gulping away fear from their slide down the hillside. ‘Who?’

The driver snorts, abusing the gears. He wants to appear scornful, all-knowing, but Viola can see how his hands tremble on the wheel.

‘Oh, the body,’ she says. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know.’

A new set of mainland rules bobs obligingly to the surface. The rules for how bad things happen, how they come to be known.

‘It’s always the dog walker who finds the body,’ she tells him, because this is a truth.

The dog walker is the first voice in the story. They stare, pale-eyed, down the journalist’s camera lens, describing how their usual morning became exceptional. Then, the revelations begin.

Her driver won’t know this. He won’t have spent weeks, months, away from school, ostensibly to mourn, had mainland television deliver the news with each mealtime, had Radio 4 fill a kitchen with tragedy every hour on the hour. Here on the island there is only static, a foreign voice if you’re lucky, calling through the storm as you gently turn the dial. You might hear a snatch of a song you thought you once knew.

He also won’t know that a third of accidents happen within a mile of your home, that relatives asked to make public pleas for the return of their missing loved ones are often the prime suspect and, for all the advice about strange men and cars, that most perpetrators are well known to their victims.

‘I think you went looking for him,’ says her driver. A challenge.