Perez thought today would mark the end of the investigation, one way or another. He’d woken to fog, so he couldn’t see beyond the Victoria Pier from his living-room window and his first thought was that the planes would be cancelled and there would be no way in for Fran or Gwen James. The star of Evelyn’s show would be absent and Perez would have another day to wait for the woman he adored. Then in a matter of minutes, in the time it took to make a pot of tea, the sun had burned the cloud away and now the weather was perfect – clear and sunny and warm as most days in midsummer. Eating his breakfast he saw a puffin flying low over the water. The first of the season. He thought he should see it as a good omen but he still felt jittery.

In his office he took a phone call from Val Turner.

‘Jimmy, just to let you know that I’m going into Whalsay this morning. I’ll see you in the community hall this evening. It’s all set.’

He tried to make an appointment to talk to the Fiscal but she’d taken a couple of days’ leave at short notice. There was no explanation and he realized again how little people knew about her. She managed her privacy in a way that nobody else of note in Shetland could. Although he didn’t like her much, Perez felt isolated; he missed Sandy’s blundering presence too. In previous cases he’d had Roy Taylor from Inverness to share responsibility and anxiety with. It hadn’t always been an easy relationship but Perez had valued Taylor’s bluntness, his common sense. I take my work too seriously, he thought. I make everything complicated. I need someone else to set me straight and keep things real.

Later he phoned Sandy’s mobile and heard Evelyn’s voice giving orders in the background before Sandy even spoke.

‘How’re things?’

‘It’s a madhouse here. You’d think my mother was hosting the bloody Oscars, not a history lecture in the Lindby Community Hall.’

Perez was just about to say that he’d see Sandy that evening, but the Whalsay man continued talking.

‘I went to see Andrew yesterday. According to him that Norwegian wasn’t buried at Setter at all. After he was killed they took him out in a boat and dropped him over the side.’

‘You said “they” took him out in the boat,’ Perez said. ‘Who are “they”?’ And if that’s true, what is the fragment of more recent bone Val Turner says they found at Setter?