After the midwife went, Anna Clouston sat in the window of the living room and looked out over the water. She carried James with her and sat with him lying lengthways along her knee. It was unusual for her to be alone with him and she felt that he was a stranger; she couldn’t believe it was the same child she’d been carrying in her body for nine months. Perhaps that was because they’d had so little time on their own since they’d come back to Whalsay from the hospital. The house had been full of well-wishers, people bringing presents and cakes and casseroles. And then, this morning, the police had come.

Anna had struggled to adapt to living on Whalsay. It wasn’t the isolation that was the problem; that she relished. She liked the drama of living on the island. It was the feeling that she had no privacy, that her life was no longer her own and she was crowded with people telling her how to run it. What was most difficult was finding that she’d become attached to a family so entirely different from her own.

Her parents had started a family in middle age. Anna’s father was a junior civil servant, bookish, reserved and a little distant. She had the feeling he’d been bored at work and had felt undervalued. His work had been routine and he wasn’t the sort of man to put himself forward for promotion. Her mother taught in a primary school. Anna and her sister had been brought up in a family where money was saved, thrift was encouraged and academic achievement was valued but not flaunted. Treats were only obtained after hard work. It was a suburban, respectable life of church-going, music lessons and weekly visits to the library. Nobody put their elbows on the table at mealtimes. Restraint was taken for granted.

Of course at university she’d met people from different backgrounds but she’d come out at the end with her view of the family intact – represented by the smell of the Sunday meal as her mother lifted it out of the oven, the sight of her father dead-heading roses in a late-summer garden, her sister dressing the Christmas tree with the faded baubles brought out each year. Anna had imagined that she’d replicate it in her turn, with a few minor changes: certainly she’d be more assertive than her mother – you wouldn’t catch her cooking a roast dinner every Sunday – and she’d marry someone a bit more exciting than her father. But the basic pattern would be the same. What other was there?