“That’s foolish,” her father said gently. “You stay until you want to go. We want you here.”

“You want to keep an eye on me. You don’t trust me.”

“That’s foolish,” he said. He and Annie shared the conspiratorial, slightly superior look of doctors coming to a decision about a difficult patient, which Elspeth recognized and resented. “There’s no point opening the shop this morning. Everyone will be in the hall. We’ll all go.”

So she agreed to go with them, because if she had refused she would have been thought neurotic and ungrateful. They hardly let her out of their sight now. She longed to be alone. She had hoped that her time on the island would bring a kind of peace. She found it occasionally when lying on the short grass at the top of the cliffs watching the seabirds. She was drawn to the cliffs, and never spent as much time there as she would have liked. Her parents filled her day with chores and visits and she had little time to herself.

Sometimes she wished that everything were out in the open. Then, at least, they would allow her to be alone. But she felt unable to take the active step of telling anyone about Gordon. She justified her silence by pretending that it was to protect Ben and her parents, but she knew that not to be true. She had never taken any active step in organizing her life. She drifted, like a fulmar hanging on the currents just below the cliff edge, and left everything to fate.

Jim told Sarah about the Woollie Man when he came in for breakfast. She laughed.

“Isn’t bringing jumpers to Kinness like selling coals to Newcastle?” she asked.

“You’ll not want to go, then?” He was a little surprised. All the island women looked forward to the sale.

“I don’t suppose I’ll buy anything, but I’ll go along.”

She did not like to admit it to herself, but the thought of a day at home bored her. She had become used to the drama of George’s investigation. She looked at Jim—at the square, uncomplicated face and the square rugby-player’s body—and wondered, horribly, if she would ever be bored with him.

“What else will you do today?” he asked.

She was surprised by the question.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going out with George again?”

“I hadn’t planned to. Would you mind?”

He considered.

“It doesn’t make it any easier for me,” he said. “Alec was going on about it this morning.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said that it was your business and I trusted you to do what was right.”