They were dirty, sweaty and distressed when they eventually headed back to the house. They’d buried the carcass in the field closest to the shoreline. Dougie had manned the digger, scooped up the calf, dumped it in the hole and shovelled the earth in to close the grave.

When he was a child, he’d always asked for the graves of dead calves he’d seen born to be marked. Not any more. Dougie, she accepted, was a child no longer.

As they made their way back to the house, they could see the Orlova floating like a dark stain on the horizon.

‘What do you think really happened out there?’ Dougie said, his face grim.

Ava wanted to say ‘something bad’, but knew it was more than that.

‘I’m not sure, but I aim to find out,’ she said.

Dougie was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on the track that wound up to the house, his mouth set, a nerve twitching his cheek. His jaw, Ava realized, was squarer, the softer contours of his teenage face being moulded into a man’s.

‘I heard what you told Mark,’ he said sharply. ‘D’you want me to help you check out this Go Wild lot?’

‘You’d want to do that?’

‘I’m part of an online gaming community. If Go Wild’s in the business of selling virtual gaming, I’ll find them.’

After they’d eaten, Dougie headed for his room, to check out his virtual pals and what they might know of Go Wild.

Ava had mixed feelings on this, but couldn’t stop him, and wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

Pouring herself a glass of wine, she sat down in front of her own laptop to transfer the photos she’d taken of the dead calf from her phone. It was weird, she thought. They always lost some calves and lambs, but not normally like this.

They’d walked the nearest fences and nowhere had there been a breakage that might have caused a length of wire to wrap round the calf’s neck the way it had.

Of course, animals were sometimes attacked on purpose. Knives being the usual weapon of choice. Most farming communities had experienced that at one time or another, with no real explanation as to why.

She had good neighbours here. She couldn’t imagine any of them would want to harm her cattle. But what if someone on the island wanted her to give up the farm? Would that have been reason enough?

As she studied the blown-up images, she realized she’d caught Dougie in one of them, behind the dead calf. The way he was standing, the look on his face. What did it tell her? That he was distressed, angry? Or something else?

Might her wee brother know more about this than he was saying?