The red-headed woman wasn’t as quiet as Vera and it was easy to hear her coming down the lonnen. Vera slipped behind a drystone wall and waited. The woman walked up the path to the cottage and tapped lightly on the door. Now there was a light inside. Not electric. It flickered. Perhaps the place was so isolated that it had no electricity. A tilley lamp perhaps, or Calor gas. Hector opened the door and the woman went inside.

‘You’ve decided then?’ Hector’s voice. Triumphant. A tone Vera knew well. She didn’t hear the woman’s answer. Or perhaps his companion knew better than to speak when he was in this mood. But how well did she know him? The door was shut. Vera glimpsed him briefly through the window, closing the curtains.

She climbed from her hiding place and back to the track. It was almost dark and there were no street lights here. She didn’t want Hector to bump into her as she stumbled back to the Land Rover. After all, she didn’t know how long he would be. How could she explain that she’d been following him?

She didn’t take the direct route to the car park. Instead she made her way towards the village. She could always tell Hector that she’d got bored of waiting and wandered out in search of a cafe for tea. Her head was spinning with questions and, remembering the woman standing at Emmanuel Head, the collapse in will and posture as Hector had walked away from her, Vera felt the stirring of anger and defiance. Until then she’d blamed herself for Hector’s attitude to her: if she were prettier, thinner, more compliant, he would be different towards her. But the red-headed woman had been pretty and thin, and still, it seemed, he felt the need to bully.

Vera didn’t want to picture what might be happening in the cottage with the rusting iron roof. Instead she focused on detail. How had Hector got the key? Did the place belong to one of his shady friends: the bizarre and eccentric brotherhood of illicit falconers and taxidermists to which he belonged? Had he stolen it? Blagged it? Hector could lie for Northumberland and he had no shame. And how had he met the bonny redhead? What could she possibly see in him?

The pub in the main street was already open and Vera stood for a moment looking in through the window. Inside there was a fire, and a game was being played. A strange game involving a quoit strung from a rope attached to the ceiling. The players swung the quoit towards a pair of horns fixed to the wall and attempted to loop it onto one of them. An islander pushed his way in from the street and through the briefly opened door Vera heard laughter, smelled beer and the smoke from the driftwood fire. She would have loved to go in, but on the Holy Island of the 1970s she knew she wouldn’t be welcome. The pub wasn’t the place for a young woman to enter alone. Not a stranger. She wandered back to the Land Rover.