They were walking back through Cable’s Wood, Dot making reckless zigzags in pursuit of rabbits, pine needles pluming in her wake. Viola had found the confidence to release her from the lead now, letting her snuffle beneath logs and mark territory as her own.

‘You have to let me watch the girls by myself.’

The boy looked at her, wounded; she’d known that he would.

‘I’d love to keep you with me, Michael, truly I would, but with the terrible fury and everything …’ He gave the faint beginnings of a nod. ‘If I’m alone, I can approach them, be part of what they’re doing, experience it. With you there, that can never happen, because we’ll always be hiding and straining to listen.’

‘But you can’t join in,’ he replied, appalled, his face pale. ‘You mustn’t participate in…’ he whispered it, ‘… witchcraft!’

Viola laughed too loudly; Michael’s wounded expression returned.

‘Look, I don’t think it’s witchcraft,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s…’

She stopped and called for Dot, rewarding her return with a scrap of cold sausage. She refastened the lead, buying herself a moment to think. Michael stood, fists in pockets, pulsing with hurt.

‘I think it’s just girls’ stuff,’ she said, a lie and also not a lie. ‘But we’ll never know for sure unless you let me get closer.’

They continued their walk, Michael still brooding. Viola didn’t want this to be a trade-off – her only friend on the island in exchange for the possibility of three new ones. She wanted to have them all.

‘But we should meet somewhere else,’ she said, ‘to compare notes.’

He lifted his head at this olive branch.

‘I think you could start an investigation of your own.’ She spoke the idea as it formed. ‘You could go and watch, I dunno …’ She sifted through the things she’d seen on her wanderings, the people she’d observed. ‘What about that guy who works in the Customs House?’

‘Saul Cooper?’

‘Weaselly-looking, white shirt with embroidered thingies on his shoulders, drives a Jeep –’

‘A Land Rover actually.’ Michael gave a little skip – another point scored. Viola was winning him back.

‘I go up to the harbour in the mornings sometimes,’ she told him. When I can’t sleep, she didn’t say, when the silence at the farmstead is suffocating and I need to see some people, some movement, anything. ‘And that guy will leave the Customs House, take the alley between the Counting House and the Provisions Store, and wait until this woman comes up the hill –’

‘What woman?’

‘I dunno. Black hair like yours, lives by the harbour, always got an armful of folders.’

‘Miss Cedars?’