There was a rugged-looking woman in the passenger seat beside him, about the same age as Viola’s mother. She wore a thick green jumper, her black hair scraped back into a perfunctory bun.

‘Leave her alone, Peter.’ The woman tutted, nudging him in the ribs.

He gave a grunt in response before pulling away, his eyes on Viola as he went, not on the landscape ahead.

His phrase – ‘that mainland of yours’ – had struck Viola. Like a priest was God’s representative on earth, the Kendricks were the mainland’s representative on Lark, defender of its principles, accountable for its actions, unless of course they chose whole-heartedly to convert. Would Viola be up for that? Could she ever be convinced to call Lark her true home?

She made the Provisions Store her next stop, thinking an offering of chocolate or cake – a literal sweetener – might charm the girls, if there was an allocation in the Kendricks’ ration for that kind of treat. Remembering how the bullish women behind the counter felt about Dot, Viola tied her dog to the wooden stocks before going inside and walking among the flat pallets of tins and packets, peering into the fluorescent insides of the refrigerated cabinets. Nothing appealed. She picked up a pomegranate and squeezed it thoughtfully – wondering where on the island it could possibly have grown. There was a myth Viola had heard once, or a ritual, involving the fruit, the dropping of it maybe and the spilling of its seeds, but she couldn’t recall it exactly. Anyway, she swiftly put it down when a snaggle-toothed woman wearing a shop apron bellowed that there was to be no ‘looking with your fingers’. Viola left, shame-faced, empty-handed.

Outside, Michael was on the cobbles, petting Dot. Passers-by stared at his roughhousing of the dog’s ears, and the way Dot spilled onto her back, spreading her paws and baring her gums, submissively offering up her pink-grey belly.

Viola’s heart sank lower. Michael would ask her how she was getting on with the Eldest Girls, expose her for her dithering.

She leapt in first. ‘So, what’s the word on thingumebob and whatshername?’

‘Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper?’ he whispered.

‘Yeah, Leah and Saul.’ She said it at full volume, making him hiss at her to shush as he checked over his shoulder to see who might have heard.

Viola untied Dot’s lead from the wooden stocks, thinking how, in any market town on the mainland, they might have served as a bike stand, but the inclines on Lark made cycling an impossibility.

‘I’ve found an intriguing pattern,’ Michael said, as they made their way towards the white sculpted chimneys of the smokehouse. ‘One that tells me they’re definitely doing it.’

He reached into his satchel for a notepad, flicking to a neatly drawn table of dates and times, filled out comprehensively with light pencil dashes and hard Xs.

‘I’ve been tracking her every move.’