Sandy directed Perez to his grandmother’s house. Perez could count the number of times he’d been to Whalsay on one hand. There’d been a piece of vandalism – one of the yoals they used for racing had been holed and then tipped into the harbour. No one else had been available and he’d come to deal with it out of interest. Then Sandy had asked him and Fran along to his birthday party – a do organized by his parents in the Lindby community hall. Perez knew that the night before Sandy had been out in Lerwick with his younger friends, but Perez hadn’t been invited to that. The party in Whalsay had been an old-fashioned community do – a hot meal of boiled mutton and tatties, a band, dancing. It had reminded Perez of the dances at home in Fair Isle, raucous and good-natured.

His infrequent trips to Whalsay had given him no real idea of the geography of the place or of the relationships there. People from the outside see Shetland as one community, he thought, but it’s not like that at all. How many of the people who live in Lerwick have ever been to Fair Isle or Foula? Some of the Biddista folk managed to keep secrets from the rest of us for decades. The visitors are more adventurous than any of us.

Sandy directed him to take a road to the right from Symbister and soon they were on the southern shore of the island, in the community of Lindby, a scattering of crofts running down to the water, surrounded by the crumbling walls of old abandoned houses. Not a village in the English sense of the word, but half a dozen families, mostly related, separated from the rest of Whalsay by sheep-grazed hill, peat banks and a reed-fringed loch.

Setter took Perez back to the old days at home too, to a croft run by an old man who found the work too much for him but refused to let anyone help.

Someone had let out the hens and they were scratching around in a patch of weeds by the door, looking damp and bedraggled. Everything was untidy and overgrown. An ancient piece of agricultural machinery – quite unidentifiable now – rusted against the cowshed wall. These days, people wanted a better income than this sort of smallholding could provide. In Fair Isle families from the south had taken over some of the crofts and set up small businesses – IT, furniture-making, boat-building. There were even recent incomers from the United States. He knew he was a soppy romantic, but he quite liked the old ways.

‘What happens to this place now?’ he asked Sandy. ‘Did your grandmother own it, or was she a tenant?’

‘It was her own place. It always was hers. She inherited from her grandmother.’

‘What about her husband?’

‘He died very young. My father was just a bairn.’

‘Had she made a will?’