‘Tell me about it.’ He’d come to the house angry, prepared to demand answers from her. Now he just wanted to hear what she had to say.

‘Money was always tight,’ she said. ‘You can’t understand what it was like here. The fishing families with their cars and their fancy clothes and their holidays in the sun. And only seeming to work a couple of months a year. And us, struggling to manage on what Joseph could bring in from Duncan Hunter. Jackie Clouston looking at me as if I was a piece of muck on her shoe. I believed I deserved the little bit extra I could make. That was how it started. I was working for this community and earning nothing. They kept everything they made for themselves. It just didn’t seem fair .’

Is that how corruption begins everywhere? Sandy thought. Politicians and businessmen persuade themselves that the extra, the kickbacks, are owed to them for the risks they take and the contribution they make. And he was no better than the rest of them. He’d once let Duncan Hunter off for drink-driving because he thought the man could make trouble for his father.

‘How did you work it?’

‘I just boosted my expenses a little. I applied for Amenity Trust grants for a couple of projects – the community theatre was the first. I set up a bank account in the name of the Island Forum, submitted receipts for expenses and had the cheques made out to the new account. Maybe some of the expenses weren’t entirely project-related, but nobody checked. Nobody realized. It grew from there. I took more chances.’

‘You took more money.’ Sandy felt a pit open in his stomach. His mother had brought him up to be honest. He’d once stolen sweeties from the shop in Symbister and she’d sent him back to own up and apologize.

‘I was working for nothing,’ she cried. Her face was red with the effort of trying to convince herself. ‘I saw it as a wage.’

‘The Trust gave you a small grant to pass on to Anna Clouston to develop her workshops,’ Sandy said. ‘She never saw it.’

‘A loan,’ she said. ‘I planned to pay it back. Besides, she owed me. She took my ideas and my patterns and she wouldn’t even have me as a partner.’

‘How were you going to pay it back, Mother? Why did you never ask me for help? Or Michael? We would have sorted it out for you. You know we’d have worked together to do that.’

She put her face in her hands and didn’t reply.

‘Is that why Dad changed his mind about selling Setter? He saw it as a way for you to clear what you owed?’

‘I had to tell him,’ she said. ‘He knew something was wrong the evening of Mima’s funeral.’