That night Sarah found it hard to sleep. She sensed in the islanders a deep panic. Life on Kinness ran according to routine. It was ruled by certainty. People did what was expected of them, according to the season and the weather and what they heard in the kirk. There was no longer any certainty. Murder broke a rule so fundamental that they might almost believe that other laws could be broken—that they would not bother to take the boat out to Baltasay, that they would not work together on the harvest, that the kirk would be empty on Sunday. As she had rushed round with George she had felt the islanders’ fear. They regarded their neighbours and even their families with suspicion. They’re like children, she thought, who lose their innocence. She remembered the newspaper article she had first read about Kinness. Now paradise had been lost.

Chapter Ten

George received no news from the police the next day. Would it have been different, he wondered, if I were doing this for a living, if I were being paid for it? Perhaps then there would be more resentment from the authorities and the job would be even more difficult. At about nine o’clock a plane came in. He expected that it would be the police, and when Alec’s car went past the school house towards the airstrip, the theory was confirmed, but the women who had brought their children to school, and stood gossiping in an excited huddle, told him that it was the Woollie Man.

No one knew why he was called the Woollie Man—none of the clothes he brought into the island were made of real wool. Perhaps the islanders thought he must come from Woolworth’s, because that was the only cheap department store many of them had heard of. He was Sikh. No one knew his real name and he seemed not to mind. He arrived in his chartered plane every autumn, laden with goods to sell as in old days traders from the East must have arrived in Europe with silk and spices. In his boxes and suitcases there were denim jeans, cheap jersey dresses, nylon underwear, and machine-washable sweaters, but to the islanders they seemed just as exotic. He hired the hall and piled the trestle tables with his wares. He put a screen in one corner to make a changing room, because he knew that he would sell none of the skirts and dresses unless the women could try them on. He had a Glasgow accent, and a slick patter laced with good-natured humour, as he tempted his customers to buy the cheap, gaudy things.