‘At least it’s not pouring with rain. I left my spare coat at Mima’s last night and the other one is still wet.’ But Hattie found the mist disturbing too. It slid across the island, changing her perspective and challenging her ideas about the landscape and its history.

She spread marmalade thinly on to a slice of bread, folded it in half and forced herself to eat it. There’d been a stage in her life when food had become a source of conflict between her mother and herself. Her mother had decided Hattie was anorexic, panicked and dragged her off to a specialist clinic. Being Junior Minister for Health made Gwen James sensitive about things like that, sensitive at least about what the press might write if they got the idea that Hattie was unnaturally thin and her mother doing nothing to address the problem. Hattie hadn’t been able to understand the fuss; not eating had been a symptom of her problem, not the root of her illness. Occasionally she got engrossed in her work and forgot to eat. So what? Now she remembered meals as a duty – like taking regular medicine – to keep her mother off her back. She was never hungry and seldom took any pleasure from food, even after a day’s work on the dig when Sophie was ravenous. It astounded her that people could waste time planning what they would cook, that a meal out was considered a treat.

Sophie had already finished breakfast and was brushing her hair, her one vanity. It hung halfway down her back, the colour of a barley stalk. Now she tied it back into a long loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. ‘We ’d better go,’ she said. ‘I suppose we can’t really be late with the boss on the island.’

The boss. Their supervisor, Paul Berglund. Another obsession from an earlier period in Hattie’s life. Now she realized the obsession had turned into an unhealthy paranoia. Sophie knew nothing of this; she hadn’t picked up on the antagonism between them. To Sophie, Paul was just ‘the boss’, someone who turned up occasionally to lay down the law about their methods, treated them to a decent meal out in a restaurant in Lerwick if he was in a good mood, signed off their expenses. She couldn’t know that Hattie was counting the days until he left.