‘Oh, you know, the usual Artemis crew.’

Hattie shook her head. The way she was feeling a boat would make her sick, even if it were moored at the harbour. Anyway, she never knew what to say to most of the fishermen with their unintelligible voices and their stories of adventures at sea. Besides, she had other plans.

‘They said I could go out with them sometime,’ Sophie said, looking out towards the Shetland mainland. ‘There’s a spare cabin I could use. It’s got a DVD, everything. Do you think they’d take me for a spin today? The sea’s flat calm.’

She turned back to Hattie, a challenge as well as a question in her look.

‘You should be careful,’ Hattie said. ‘You’ll get a reputation.’

Sophie laughed, her head thrown back, so Hattie could see her long neck, stretched even further, much paler than her face.

‘Do you think I care about that? It’s not as if I want to make my life here.’

‘Shouldn’t you be here when Paul gets in?’ Hattie was thrown by the thought that she might have to deal with Paul on her own. She felt a return of the old panic.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t really want to go.’ Sophie grinned, so Hattie realized the woman had just been winding her up. ‘But don’t expect me back until the morning!’

She grinned again and loped away quite steadily, though she’d had twice as much to drink as Hattie. There was a rip in her jeans and the flesh of her thigh showed through. It reminded Hattie of the fat on the steak Sophie had just eaten. Hattie watched her walking away down towards the harbour. There were times when she hated Sophie for her beauty, her easy way with men, her thoughtlessness. There were times when Hattie wanted to lash out and slap her.

It seemed to Hattie that the walk down the island had a hallucinatory quality. Phrases and ideas came into her mind with no logic or reason.

April is the cruellest month.

Living in the south of England, that had never made sense to her in a literal way. Spring was a time of gentle rain and imperceptible growth. Now she thought of the last ewes lambing untended on the hill with the ravens circling above, Mima lying on the sodden ground at Setter. She repeated the phrase under her breath to the beat of her footsteps.

She wasn’t used to drinking in the middle of the day. Perhaps that was it. She hadn’t slept the previous night, consumed by a recurring paranoia that the shot that had killed Mima might really have been meant for her. The implication of that was so shocking that now she couldn’t bring herself to consider it in any detail and she allowed her thoughts to float away from her.