Steeling herself, she rapped on the door, hard. The letter the estate agent had enclosed from the seller had told her he’d meet her here to hand over the key. It wasn’t an arrangement that would have happened in London, but then this wasn’t London and besides, Anna herself had no previous first-hand experience of house buying. That had always been Geoff’s department, in the same way that the places she’d followed him to over the past two decades had always been his choices, steadily growing more opulent as his star had ascended, but never expanding enough to make more room for her than one side of the wardrobe, one side of the bathroom sink.

The wind caught at her hair as Anna waited. She noticed for the first time that on one side of the Fishergirl’s Luck there was an empty stretch of concrete, wider than the pathway and enclosed from it by a rickety little fence and gate. A garden, of sorts, though one that would surely be drowned by each high tide and therefore not suitable for plants, or indeed anything much at all.

Two minutes passed; three, and there was no answer. Perhaps Robert MacKenzie was as deaf as a post. What had that old curmudgeon at the harbour called him? ‘Auld Robbie’? If they were contemporaries, it could certainly be true.

She knocked again and heard a door creak open, though the sound came from behind her. Anna turned to see a woman in her early sixties with short-cropped silver hair and smile lines around her eyes looking out at her from the house directly opposite.

‘Are you looking for someone?’ the woman asked, her accent as lacking in the Scots burr as Anna’s own.

‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone here,’ Anna told her, raising her voice against another sudden gust of wind. ‘Robert MacKenzie?’

The woman looked doubtful. ‘He doesn’t live in Crovie,’ she said, pronouncing it as ‘Crivvie’. ‘He definitely said to meet him here?’

‘I – yes,’ Anna said, the general weariness imparted by the past few weeks catching up with her all at once. ‘I – this is my house. I’m supposed to be moving in today, he needs to give me the key…’

‘Oh!’ The woman exclaimed. ‘Of course! You’re Anna Campbell.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said, a little taken aback.

‘Old Robbie said you’d be coming,’ she said, ‘but I’d thought it wasn’t until next week. It’s not like him to be late, perhaps the boat’s been called out.’

Anna had no idea what the woman was talking about.