The sight of the blood spatters, the boots, the coat submerged in ferns… it rises up into Viola’s vision, bringing the heart-flutter of panic, a spike of guilt. She won’t have it. She pushes it back.

‘I was just walking my dog,’ she says, as breezily as she is able. ‘I didn’t expect to find anything.’ A lie. The dog walker is always primed for discovery. Sometimes, darkly, they wish for it, for their usual morning to become exceptional, for something to flip the day’s routine. An escape – from the silence of a dilapidated farmhouse perhaps, from two-step linear equations and exponential functions that must be learnt alone, without the help of a teacher and the camaraderie of fellow classmates. From the miserable sight of an expanse of abandoned soil, a flaking veranda, still waiting for love and repair.

‘I think you went looking for him,’ the driver persists.

Viola shakes her head.

The mist has lifted on a sea that has calmed at the arrival of the sun, a rebellious child who quietens when the adults show up. At the limit of the dogleg stone jetty, the large metal cross stands dull and grey, reflecting back none of the trifling light. Today, it suggests, God is out-of-office.

‘You knew they’d done this.’ He spits when he talks. ‘Maybe you even put them up to it.’

The Land Rover swings, too fast, past the harbour loading bay and the smokehouse. The herring gulls gather on the railings, barbing, jostling – half a dozen or so, not enough to signal the imminent return of the three-day trawler. The driver brakes to a halt outside the Customs House.

She must speak, take control, decide how this will play out. The revelations must dance to a tune of her picking. Otherwise what was the point of such an early start? Why be the only dog walker on the island?

He kills the engine. They sit quietly for a moment, listening to the gulls’ disputes.

‘Well, if you think that I’m in on it –’ these are the words she eventually chooses ‘– what does that say about you?’

She reaches for something inside her mother’s long, quilted coat, exciting interest from Dot who knows that treats live in that pocket too. Saul looks down at the object she places onto the scuffed and empty seat between them. She keeps her hand tight upon it.

‘You can give me that back,’ he says.

She shakes her head, tightens her grip. He is the one to peer out of the window now, checking for people, early workers on the harbourside, anyone who might witness this scene: Viola Kendrick, the red-haired coycrock girl, and Saul Cooper, Lark’s almost-forty-year-old Customs Officer and sometime policeman, sitting together in a stand-off in a steamed-up Land Rover just after 7 a.m.

There is no one there.

Saul’s eyes return worriedly to the object. It is one half of a set of walkie-talkies.