A car drove down the narrow road behind me now and pulled me back to the present. I turned away from the track so the driver wouldn’t see my face. He’d notice that this was a hire car and have me down as a visitor. Simeon, whoever he was, wouldn’t have followed me from Scalloway, but best to take no chances.

Billy had been a friend of mine, despite the difference in our ages. He’d been a surrogate brother, almost a mascot. He’d lived in the croft just up the road from ours and we’d played together from when he’d been tiny. Me the bossy one, and Billy not caring that I bossed him about. He’d been an only child too, but his parents were very different from mine. Throughout his childhood he’d lived with their desperation. There hadn’t been much money to be made in scratching a living from the poor land. My mother worked as a nurse in the Gilbert Bain hospital in Lerwick, so we always had a regular income, even when sheep prices were poor and the subsidies fell away. But the Andersons only had what they could produce and sell.

Billy’s father was a drinker, one of those angry drinkers who pick fights in bars and then stagger home to shout at the family. He was stocky and strong, with a bright red face, his cheeks marked by burst blood vessels. I never knew, but I suspected he took out his frustrations on his wife, Eileen. I’d see her sometimes with a bruise to the cheek, and once she dislocated her shoulder. The police thought that Billy might have killed himself because of troubles at home, but that never made any sense to me. He’d lived with his father’s rages and his mother’s weakness since he was a peerie boy. Billy never talked about problems at home to me, but I felt that he shut them away at the back of his mind as soon as he walked through the rotting gate that marked the end of their land. Away from his house, he was quite a different person: a clown and a joker.

On impulse I walked away from the car now and down the track to the Anderson place. Billy would fly up there to catch the bus to school, always waiting until the last minute, until he’d seen the bus on the brow of the bank, before leaving home. He’d be out of breath when he arrived, his face nearly as red as his father’s. But laughing. Away from the house, Billy was always cheerful. Which is why the suicide idea seemed so strange to me. The bizarre stories in the newspapers provided one explanation, I suppose, but I had them down as fantasies.

The sun was round and orange and I had to squint against the light as I walked east towards it, so I didn’t see the Anderson house until I was almost upon it. It hadn’t changed at all in the ten years I’d been away. They could have been the same skinny and apathetic hens poking around in the yard. The same heap of rotting metal – a clapped-out car, a wheelbarrow with a hole in the bottom – rested, as always, against the door of a shed. Now I hesitated, suddenly scared. I’d assumed there would be new residents, that the place would be tarted up, just as my old home had been, but it seemed that Billy’s parents still lived here. They’d sold their story to a Scottish tabloid and blamed me for what had happened to their son. And perhaps they were right. Perhaps I could have prevented it. I might have been the cause of the tragedy that night. So how would they feel to see me today? The Internet threat didn’t seem their style, but who knows? We’re all online now. I wanted to turn and run, but stood, fixed to the mucky, pitted concrete. I’d come here to face the past. I should face these people too.