‘Dougie, you mean? I doubt it,’ said Frank. ‘He’s spiteful enough, for sure, but I can’t see him working out who to call at the council and then going through with it.’

Anna sighed. ‘Well, whoever it was, they’ve got what they want.’ She rolled up Cathy’s poster. ‘There’ll be no lunch club here.’

‘Oh love,’ Pat said. ‘I’m so sorry. What can we do?’

Anna briefly considered telling them what Belinda Turner had suggested, about her serving from their kitchen, but dismissed the idea. It was supposed to be ‘Lunch at the Fishergirl’s Luck’, not ‘lunch made somewhere else and carried to a bench that happens to be beside the Fishergirl’s Luck’. Anna had been looking forward to serving out of the tiny puzzle box that was her own kitchen, not suddenly having to adjust to use someone else’s. Besides, if someone around her besides Douglas McKean was upset enough about her plans to stoop to such sabotage, did she really want to provoke them further?

‘Yes,’ she said, forcing a brightness she did not feel. ‘You can help me round up the Usual Suspects for dinner at the bench later. I don’t want all the ingredients to go to waste and I can’t eat everything myself. We’ll have our own dinner party instead.’

That evening, Anna served the meal she had been intending to give her first guests to Pat, Frank, Rhona, Robert and herself.

‘I’m so sorry, Anna,’ Robert said, his forehead furrowing into a deep frown once she’d filled in him and Rhona. ‘Maybe I should go and have a word with Dougie?’

‘We don’t know for sure it was him,’ Anna told him. ‘Frank seems convinced that it couldn’t have been.’

‘It doesn’t seem his sort of thing, complaining to the council,’ Frank said, with a brief shrug. ‘It’s not as if he’s a fan of bureaucracy in any form, is it?’

‘True,’ Robert agreed, ‘but he wouldn’t be above stirring up trouble. You know what he’s like once he’s got a bee in his bonnet, and he really seems to have one about Anna moving into the Fishergirl’s Luck.’

Anna paused in the motion of refilling his glass. ‘What do you mean?’

Robert grimaced slightly. ‘I didn’t want to tell you about it if I could avoid it. He’s been griping about the ownership of the place again. Firstly to me, and when I told him to knock it off, to anyone else he thinks might listen. Barbara said he’d called her the other day.’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ Rhona said. ‘Daft old coot. So any one of the people he’s been bellyaching at could have taken up the cause and used the lunch club as a way to put the boot in?’