Six weeks later

Six weeks later

Fast approaching midsummer, sunrise and sunset on Orkney were currently over eighteen hours apart. Ask Dougie and he would recite the rise and fall of the sun to the exact minute.

All Ava knew was that her curtains weren’t thick enough to keep out the light, either at night or in the early morning. She didn’t care.

She had promised herself that if they were successful in their efforts to bring Nadia’s persecutor to justice, she would bring the girl back here to Orkney for the summer. After which, Nadia could decide what she wanted to do and where she wanted to go in the future.

Already she had made Polish friends in Stromness and was able to use her own language again. She had also been offered work, and had accepted a job in a local hotel.

Her stay at the farm would end soon, when she would move into the accommodation that went with the job.

Ava would miss the person she had become. Gone was the traumatized girl Dougie had rescued from the Orlova. In her place was a girl who would not give up in her attempts to catch the man who had been responsible for the death of her friends.

For that was what had driven her on, despite her fears. Not the deaths of the two people who had chosen to be on the ship, but the deaths of Guido and the others, whose names she had reeled off to DS McNab in her interview.

Standing now by the edge of the water, where the boathouse was already rising from its ashes and the Fear Not tied up nearby, Ava was thankful that the ship that had haunted their lives had finally left Scapa Flow, bound for the scrapping yard.

Crowds had apparently gathered at Houton Pier to watch. Magnus had asked her to join him there, but she hadn’t wanted to, preferring to wait until it had truly gone, that she might stand here and look on Hoy without its monstrous presence spoiling the view.

Since its removal, the world had taken on a different hue.

Dougie and Tommy Flett had come to an arrangement with the farm, which seemed to be working well. As the elder sibling, she was still ultimately financially responsible, but Dougie’s eighteenth birthday had placed him firmly in the adult category and he was living up to her expectations of that.

They had finally visited their parents’ graves in Stromness cemetery together, something, until now, he’d refused to do. They were both healing, as was Nadia.

Her own still-open wound was the loss of Mark. Their plan, Nadia and she, in going to London, had been twofold. To bring Hugo Radcliff to justice and to identify Mark’s killer.