When we left around 10 p.m., as I hugged Cat and Ruth a little too tightly in our goodbyes, Viola was on the cobbles with her dog, sitting on top of the stocks, her back to us, looking out towards the boats bobbing and clinking in the harbour. She had the air of someone who was waiting. I had only ever seen her in that oversized maroon coat with its mud splatters, dirty jeans underneath. That night she wore a striking furry coat – leopard print. Her hair was not its usual orange halo but shone oily in the glimmer of the half-moon and the string-lights, the curls defined.

She turned at the sound of us on the cobbles, one knee jutting out sideways, revealing heavy boots of the kind Britta Sayers preferred, too big on her feet, and also the hem of a skirt, short and black. Her lips were blood red; she looked like a child who’d been left alone with her mother’s make-up.

‘Viola!’ I called.

‘Leave her,’ said Ben, making a grab for my hand.

They had been talking in the Anchor, the men and their wives, I’d heard them, about what should be done with the coycrock girl. Her mother was a lost cause, but the girl could be saved if she was taken under the Council’s wing. I knew she shouldn’t be out there, dressed like that.

‘Viola!’ I called again, and she stood then, pulling the leopard coat tighter around her, making off towards the smokehouse, hunched over, as if this might render her invisible.

‘Let her go,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t invite more trouble.’

That was how he saw it – the girl making us meet that night at the stones. Not as something fortuitous and necessary.

‘But she was our Cupid,’ I said, as Ben walked me to my door, ‘in the end.’

‘Then how do you explain Saul Cooper turning up?’ he asked. ‘And this?’ The skin on his chin had split nastily, an inch-long laceration that had needed stitches from Dr Bishy, Ben telling the man that he’d tripped during an early-morning run, and no, he wasn’t prepared to have the sewing-up done at the Counting House as a public event.

‘It was a coincidence,’ I’d said, the only explaining I ever wanted to do when it came to Saul Cooper.

Ben and I parted without even a kiss. We knew that we were being watched from the windows of the Anchor. I fumbled for my keys at the front door – since the paint attack, I never left the cottage unlocked – and that was when I saw Luke Signal lope out of the darkness on the path from the East Bay. I saw him look across to the stocks, pause, unsure, then lope away again, back in the direction he’d come from.