Reading this made Anna feel as if she were only understanding half of the words. She reached for her iPad to search for information about herring in Orkney and soon found herself looking at old black-and-white photographs. In them she could see lines of women in heavy wool dresses and shawls leaning over long wooden troughs set on busy docks, the sharp knives in their hands catching the strong northern sunlight as they gutted thousands of herring. The women were known as herring lassies or ‘quines’, Anna learned, and in season hundreds of them would travel around the coasts of Scotland, Ireland and England, gutting and salting the huge numbers of herring that were landed by the fishing fleets every day.

Anna pored over the photographs, wondering whether one of them was Bren. Maybe even on the day that Mrs Towrie brought the gutting teams her gingerbread as a ‘piece’ to eat. Some of the money the young Bren earned there had helped to buy the shed that had become the Fishergirl’s Luck.

Half an hour later, Bren’s broonie was in the oven. Anna wouldn’t have time to leave it overnight before cutting, but after reading the note and looking at those photographs, Anna had been determined to make the cake. To serve she would whip soft double cream and drizzle with heather honey.

Once the cake was in, Anna washed her hands, took off her apron, and went outside to examine the bench. By now the sun was fully up and a light breeze, though not too strong, was filtering through the village. The North Sea seemed to be behaving itself, merely teasing the sea wall with its waves, as if it were playing a game of knock-down-ginger with the village’s edge. Anna checked the tide times and predictions and decided that it was worth the risk. The sky was too blue and the sun too warm not to take advantage of Liam’s gift, even if she and her two guests would be sitting on a blank oblong of grey concrete. She wished for tubs of flowers, the flashing scarlet of bright, hardy begonias, but she had no time to search any out, and so the table itself would have to do.

Anna filled a bucket with hot soapy water. An hour later she had scrubbed the worst of the grime from the bench’s sturdy wood and decided it was still strong enough to take the weight of her and her guests. It looked, in fact, as if it could go another fifty years without sagging under the strain. It dried quickly in the sea air, and she laid it with a white tablecloth weighted with silver cutlery that she buffed as she set down, Rhona’s plates, water glasses and wine glasses turned upside down to avoid wind-blown sand and inquisitive bugs.