Evelyn said nothing. She knelt up and glared. Hattie felt sorry for her. She’d never known Mima be so cruel. Hattie jumped into the trench beside Evelyn. The bone was protruding from the earth now, largely uncovered. Hattie took her own trowel from her jeans pocket. With intense concentration she stripped away more of the soil, then took a brush. The shape of the bone became more defined: there was a pleasing curve, a sculptured hollow.

‘Pars orbitalis,’ she said. Shock and excitement made her forget her earlier resolve not to show off, to keep her language simple so Evelyn would understand.

Evelyn looked at her.

‘The frontal orbit,’ Hattie said. ‘This is part of a human skull.’

‘Oh no,’ Mima said. Hattie looked up at her and saw that her face was white. ‘That cannot be right. No, no, that cannot be.’

She turned and scurried back to the house.

Chapter Five

Sandy Wilson crossed the field unsteadily. It was a few weeks after Hattie had found the skull, one of those thick black nights that often came in the spring. Not cold, but the island covered by low cloud and a dense, relentless drizzle that hid the moon and stars and even the lit windows of the house behind him. He didn’t have a torch, but he didn’t need one. He’d grown up here. If you lived on an island six miles long and two and a half miles wide, by the time you were ten you knew every inch of it. And that internal map stayed with you even after you’d left. Sandy lived in town now, in Lerwick, but he reckoned if he was dropped blindfold anywhere on Whalsay he’d be able to tell you where he was after a few minutes, just by the way the land lay under his feet and the touch of the nearest dyke on his hand.