The men sitting at the dining table heard the knock on the door but they continued drinking tea and it was Agnes who opened it. Sarah saw that she had been crying, and the anger disappeared. She did not know what to say.

“Come in,” Agnes said. “You’ll be wondering what happened to Jim. I’m so sorry.”

She led Sarah into the room, where the men were still sitting.

“I didn’t want to intrude,” Sarah said. “Is there any news?”

When she had first seen Agnes, she thought that there must have been a terrible accident, but now, seeing the men carmly at the table, the debris of the breakfast, she thought that she must have been mistaken.

“She’s dead,” Jim said. “She fell from Ellie’s Head. She must have slipped.”

Sarah began to cry. She wished that she was alone in the room, and they would all stop staring at her. Agnes took her into her arms as if she were the child.

“That’s right,” she said. “ You cry. It’s good to have someone shed some tears for her.”

Robert went straight from Sandwick to the post office, the untidy brown dog still at his heels. In the post office Kenneth Dance was serving an old woman. Robert was glad that there were enough people there to give him an audience.

“Mary Stennet’s dead,” he announced as soon as he got in through the door. There was a satisfying response from the old woman, but Kenneth Dance was harder to rouse to interest. He had left the island when he was a teenager, after telling everyone that he was off south to make his fortune. He had been a postman in Glasgow. Occasionally a touch of Glaswegian still appeared in his speech. He had returned to Kinness when Annie, a distant cousin, had inherited the post office. They had married soon after. He still liked to pretend that he was sophisticated, worldly, wise. He looked up from the postal order he was stamping, but he said nothing.

Robert looked at the daughter, hoping for more reaction from her. Her face was white, but her eyes were blank as if she were remembering something painful, and she, too, was silent.

“She was lying at the bottom of Ellie’s Head,” Robert said, exacting as much drama as he could from the situation. “I found her. She will have fallen.”

“From Ellie’s Head?” The daughter looked up sharply, then she said: “ The poor child. How horrible.”

Robert thought that she was a strange girl, and wondered what had really brought her back to the island. Kenneth and Annie said that she had left her husband, but Robert thought it more likely that he had left her. She would be a difficult woman to live with.

“Do you know what they’re doing with the body? I suppose that they’ll telephone the police.”