The whiteness of her skin is exaggerated by the black she wears. Her skirt billows in the breeze and occasionally lifts so she is obliged to push it down to keep herself covered, but not before he gets a tantalising glimpse of her legs beneath. Soft thighs. Narrow calves and slender ankles. Heavy boots emphasising their slightness, like delicate saplings rooted in clods of earth, he thinks.

She stops briefly to pluck a head of lilac heather and, as she walks, she crumbles the heather between her fingers and lets the tiny pieces of colour fly off in the wind. This picture of her is almost more bewitching to him than the one of her in the pink bikini which has filled his thoughts these last few days. Since helping her with her mother he hasn’t been able to get her out of his head. The desperate vulnerability in her eyes when she’d looked up at him from the floor, the way she talked so frankly, the pain in her voice, had pierced him.

‘How far is it, Jay?’ She throws the naked heather stalk away and glances over her shoulder at him.

If anybody else called him Jay he’d hate it, but from her it sounds right. Her own personal name for him. She is mesmerising and he is impossibly attracted to her.

When she came out onto the terrace that morning, he’d angled himself so he could watch her while he worked. It had taken a while for him to pluck up the courage to ask what she was reading.

She held the book up to show him the front cover.

L’Etranger by Camus.

He’d never heard of it and felt stupid and uneducated.

It’s French. It means stranger.

Then she told him this book – L’Etranger, she repeated, her voice honey-coated with an exotic accent – was the inspiration for ‘Killing an Arab’.

Do you like The Cure?

He lied.

Yes.

Now, on the cliff, he lowers his eyes when she looks back at him. He doesn’t want to be caught spying on her, even though this is what he’s been doing all day, stealing glances at every opportunity, his body firing at the slightest thing, a revealed shoulder, her hand brushing a fly from her knee, a shift of weight in her chair.

‘Not too far,’ he says, in answer to her question.

‘Our dad loved this walk,’ Tamsyn says, but Edie doesn’t respond to her.

They walk down past Cape Cornwall. The water is wild and angry, pummelling the rocks and throwing fireworks of spray into the air. They stop to watch for a while, face the sea, close their eyes as the water catches on the wind and spritzes their faces.

‘You see those rocks?’ His sister taps Edie on the shoulder and points out towards the twin peaks that break the surface of the sea a mile or so offshore.