‘You were like Cinderella,’ he said, with a smile.

‘But they weren’t the ugly sisters!’ Joan paused in her knitting. ‘They’d always been bonny little things. Everyone loved them. Especially my father. They could do no wrong, in his eyes.’

‘You were telling me what happened when you were on your way home.’ Perez leaned forward to listen.

Joan replayed the scene in her head. The girls, stupid drunk, egging each other on, taunting the man. ‘Why did you choose her to dance with, when you could have had us?’

Then Mackie had stood in the middle of the track. Quiet and firm, his face lit by the moon. ‘Why would I choose a child when I could have a woman?’

And then Edie had lashed out at him in frustration, the attack shocking and unexpected. She’d always been uncontrollable when she was angry, given to fits of temper. Suddenly she had a pair of scissors in her hand, the sharp scissors she’d brought from home to cut the paper tablecloths. The steel flashed in the light and then they were in the man’s neck. Blood everywhere. They knew death, all three of them. They’d helped kill their father’s beasts.

‘What happened next?’

‘We buried him.’ Joan looked up from her knitting. ‘In the land that Stuart bought from us for his grazing. It never occurred to us that he would build a house there, that the body would ever be found.’

‘You helped them?’ Perez seemed shocked by the idea. He knew her as the former postmistress, a respectable spinster. ‘You didn’t think to tell the police?’

Joan thought about that for a moment and shook her head. It had been an evening for her to remember, but she’d known she could never leave Holmsgarth to go south with James Mackie. She hadn’t lost that possibility with the man’s death. They’d sent Edie away to an aunt’s in Canada and she’d gone on to be a journalist on a woman’s magazine. Famous in her own way. Rich at least. Edie had sent Joan money for a visit, but Joan had never gone. ‘What would be the point in telling the police? Just another life ruined.’

Besides, there would have been something hypocritical in that, when Joan herself was a murderer. She’d killed their father, after all. After his marriage to the new woman from Baltasound he’d treated Joan like a kind of servant, and Joan had had a temper too. In the end she’d had enough of it – being treated like a slave in her own home, while her sisters were spoiled and feted like princesses. She’d felt as Perez said, like a kind of Cinderella.

One morning she’d risen early and drilled holes in his yoal before he set off after the fish they called piltock. She’d stood by the jetty and watched him drown. But that was a secret she’d never tell, not even to the police inspector from Ravenswick with the kind smile and the voice like cream.