‘Then when Jerry was drowned and she was single again she was a threat to all the island wives. She was a bonny young girl with her own house and her own land and they were scared their husbands would run off with her. She was still in love with Jerry though – with his memory, at least. She had plenty of offers but she never married again. She enjoyed her independence too much for that.’

‘I’m surprised so many people turned out for her funeral if she wasn’t so well liked.’

‘Oh,’ Cedric said, ‘folk wouldn’t want to miss it. She was a kind of celebrity in her day. And the young ones all liked her. It was her own generation who had the problems.’

‘How did she get on with Evelyn?’

Cedric shot him a sharp look under the hooded lids. ‘Let’s say they never exactly saw eye to eye. After Jerry was drowned Joseph was all Mima had. She used to call him her peerie man. She wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone who stole him away. Mima should have married again. She didn’t have the temperament of a single woman.’

‘Were you one of the ones to propose to her?’

Cedric laughed again. ‘I knew better than to ask her. She’d have thought I was a poor thing after her Jerry. Everyone in Shetland knew he was a handsome man.’

‘Do you think the things that happened all those years ago could have any bearing on Mima’s death?’

‘Of course not,’ Cedric said. ‘How could it?’

Perez looked at him, not sure if he really meant what he said, but Cedric turned away and walked back into the kitchen.

Mark Evans, the psychiatric nurse, said he needed to be sure Perez was who he claimed to be: ‘Mrs James is in the public eye. I don’t want her hassled by a load of reporters. You do understand?’ He had a soft, slow voice and an accent unfamiliar to Perez. Rural. Perez wondered if he’d grown up on a farm; that would give them a point of contact, but he didn’t feel he could ask. Instead he gave the man the number of the police station in Lerwick. ‘They’ll confirm my mobile number.’

Then he waited, looking out over the harbour, for his phone to ring again. After the deserted feeling of the day before, the place was back to normal. There were cars queuing for the ferry and a couple of fishermen were getting a small trawler ready to go out to sea. He supposed Jerry Wilson’s Norwegian friend had sailed a boat of a similar size to Norway.

His phone rang, interrupting daydreams of wartime adventures, grey seas and huge waves. He’d never been physically brave and he didn’t think he’d have had the courage to volunteer for the Shetland Bus.