They asked George to go with them when they went to fetch the body. There had been other accidents around the island—a climber had fallen once from the cliff and someone had drowned after falling from a fishing yawl—and they knew that it meant official questions. If George went with them, he could answer the questions. He was an Englishman and had been a civil servant. He would know how to handle them. George took his camera and insisted on photographing the body before they moved it. They stood awkwardly while he did that, as if embarrassed by his lack of propriety, then lifted her on to a makeshift wooden sledge and pulled her along the shingle and up the rabbit track. He made a note in a small book of the clothes she was wearing. She was wearing the party dress of the night before, and a warm jacket, but not the silk scarf.

He was surprised at how calmly they took the news of her death. Perhaps they had been preparing themselves for it when they had not found her the night before.

“She must have fallen from Ellie’s Head,” Sandy said.

“She must have run up there for some game. She probably thought that we’d notice sooner that she was gone and chase after her. Then she must have lost her footing and fallen. I should have noticed that she wasn’t there.”

He turned to George:

“Do you think that’s how it was?”

But George did not answer him directly.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” George said. “I actually noticed that she wasn’t there. I’d promised to dance with her and I went to find her. I thought that she was hiding somewhere. When did you last see her?”

He spoke to all the men who were struggling to pull the sledge over the sharp rocks: Mary’s brothers Alec, Jim, and Will, her uncle James, and her father. They stopped to catch their breath, but they could give him no satisfactory answer. They wanted to get it sorted out with him so that he could act as their intermediary with the officials from Baltasay, but they could not remember.

“I saw her dancing with Robert,” James said. “But that was a while before the interval. I don’t remember seeing her after that.”

The others shook their heads. There had been too many drams, they said. It had all been a terrible muddle. They could not remember. They lifted the wooden stretcher again and began the climb up the steep grassy slope. George saw that Will was crying.

They took Mary home to Sandwick, and at Agnes’ insistence they took her into her small bedroom and laid her on the bed.