There was a bend in the track and Sandy saw, just as he knew he would, the light in Mima’s kitchen window. Her house was tucked into the hill and you came on it very suddenly. Many of the islanders were pleased that it was hidden from view by the land curved around it, because it was a scruffy sort of place, the garden overgrown with weeds, the windowframes bare of paint and rotting. Evelyn, Sandy’s mother, was mortified by the state of Mima’s croft, nagged his father about it regularly. ‘Will you not go and sort the place out for her?’ But Mima would have none of it. ‘It’ll last me out,’ she’d say, complacently. ‘I like it fine as it is. I don’t want the fuss of you around the croft.’ Joseph took more notice of his mother than he did of his wife, so Mima was left unbothered.

Setter was the most sheltered croft on the island. The archaeologist who’d arrived last year from a university in the south said people had been living on that land for thousands of years. He’d asked if they might dig a few trenches in a field close to the house. A project for a postgraduate student, he said. One of them had an idea that there had been a grand dwelling on the site. They’d put the land back the way they’d found it. Sandy thought Mima would have let them on anyway. She’d taken to the historian. ‘He’s a fine-looking man,’ she’d said to Sandy, her eyes glittering. Sandy had seen what she must have been like as a girl. Daring. Shameless. No wonder the other island women were wary of her.

There was a noise from the field next to the track. Not gunshot this time but a muttering, ripping and stamping of feet. Sandy turned, saw the silhouette of the cow just a few feet away. Mima was the only person left on Whalsay who milked by hand. The rest had stopped decades ago, put off by the work, and the hygiene regulations, which prevented the milk being sold. There were people though who still liked the unpasteurized milk and fixed Mima’s roof or slipped her a bottle of whisky in return for a jug of the yellow liquid every morning. Sandy wasn’t sure they’d be so keen if they saw Mima milking. Last time he’d seen her do it, she’d blown her nose on the filthy tea-towel she went on to wipe the udders with. As far as he knew, though, no one had gone down sick as a result. He’d been brought up on the stuff and it had done him no harm. Even his mother scooped the cream off the top of the churn and put it on her porridge for a treat.