Earlier the day had been fine and Mima must have done her washing. The line stretched away from the house down towards where the archaeologists had set up the dig. There were still towels and a sheet pegged to the nylon rope. They hung lifeless and heavy, like the sails on a becalmed boat. Other island women would have taken down the washing as soon as the weather closed in, but Mima would probably not have bothered if she’d been eating her tea or reading a book. It was this fecklessness that so irritated some of her neighbours. How could she not care what people were thinking of her? How could she keep such an untidy house?

Sandy walked past the washing to where the students had been working. A couple of poles with string stretched between to mark out the search area, or maybe for measuring. A windbreak made of blue plastic strung on to metal stakes. A pile of turfs, neatly stacked, and another of soil. Two trenches cut at right-angles. He flashed the torch into them, but they were empty apart from a couple of puddles of water. It occurred to him that the area looked like a crime scene in one of the programmes his grandmother liked to watch.

‘Mima!’ he shouted. He thought his voice sounded very thin and high-pitched. He hardly recognized it.

He decided he should go home, switched off the torch and started back to the house. He could phone Utra from there. His mother would know where Mima was, she knew everything that happened on Whalsay. Then he saw that a coat had fallen from the line and lay in a crumpled heap on the grass. He recognized it as one of the students’ waterproofs and thought Mima had probably offered to get rid of all the mud for them. He was going to leave it: wouldn’t it need to go through the machine again anyway? But he stooped to pick it up and take it inside.