No . . . It made no sense. How could that be there? Her mind was racing, trying to find reasons why it should be there.

‘Miss Gillies, have you ever seen this before?’ His voice was more insistent again.

‘Effie?’ Sholto asked, his hand on her arm, desperation in his eyes.

She looked back at them both, her heart a nightingale singing for its life.

The policeman’s pen was poised above the paper. ‘Miss Gillies? If you know, you must tell me. To whom does this brooch belong?’

Acknowledgements

I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time to write this series. I had dallied with historical backdrops in a few of my other books – The Paris Secret, The Rome Affair and The Spanish Promise – but I always felt strangely obliged to root the body of the stories in the present day. In The Spanish Promise particularly, I felt it was the historic characters that were truly the beating heart of the narrative, and the urge to fully commit to another time and place began to take hold.

But when exactly? And where?

In the end, after a few years of waiting, I chanced upon a tiny comment in the newspaper one Saturday morning. The headline read ‘Ninety Years Since St Kilda Gave Up’. I had never heard of St Kilda, but a quick Google search told me it was the outermost of the Outer Hebrides, a tiny archipelago centred upon two-mile-long isle Hirta, one hundred miles off the Scottish mainland. It had been deserted since the islanders requested evacuation in the summer of 1930, but that wasn’t what held my interest. It was the use of those two words – gave up. Had something broken them? Driven them away?

I was in! I read every book still in print about St Kilda, I watched jerky, silent black-and-white cinefilms taken by early tourists and, of course, I travelled there. Even now, it’s an arduous crossing – four hours each way over heavy water, with only a four-hour stay on the island itself, which is nothing.