When Perez arrived back in Lerwick, he called in to his office. It had a sleepy feel: most of his team were taking Easter leave. He phoned the Fiscal’s secretary and learned she’d be in a meeting for most of the afternoon. He made an appointment to see her first thing the following morning. He was looking forward to getting home early, sticking some clothes in the washing machine, cooking a meal for himself. In the meantime he began to wonder about the best way to track down the nationality of Berglund’s family.

Although he’d planned a quiet evening at home, when he got there he couldn’t relax. He found it impossible to stop thinking about Sophie, rerunning in his head the conversation on the cliff by the golf course. She was right about the note. Of course not all suicides left notes, but Hattie was a writer. If she were planning to kill herself she’d have written a considered letter to Gwen James explaining what she was doing. There wouldn’t have been a panicky phone call. Suddenly he wanted this over. Soon Fran would be home. He didn’t want her to arrive back in the middle of an investigation, to find him distracted and exhausted.

In the end he ran himself a bath. His bathroom was thin and narrow, the bath old and deep with scarred enamel. The room filled with steam and condensation ran down the window. It didn’t matter. The house was damp anyway, what difference would it make? He lay back, trying to let go of the case, but the possible scenarios, the shifting relationships, swirled into his head and out again. He was half asleep. A Dance to the Music of Time. Who had written that? He saw the Whalsay folk past and present waltzing in and out of his consciousness. A Norwegian sailor and a screwed-up young archaeologist, an ambitious businesswoman and an old man disabled by a stroke. How did they all fit together? He shut his eyes and felt he was floating towards a solution.

The phone rang. He wanted to leave it, to continue with his thoughts, but it could be Fran. He’d found it difficult to talk to her away from his own surroundings and now he was desperate to hear her voice. He climbed out and grabbed a towel – he always thought his house on the shore gave him privacy, but he’d been caught out before when a canoeist or sailor floated close to his window. The phone stopped just before he reached it. She would leave a message, he thought. And he’d call her straight back, before she rushed out to meet her friends at some experimental piece of theatre, some gallery opening or smart restaurant.