She looked up sharply, but didn’t ask what he might want with her husband. ‘He’s out on the croft somewhere. This time of year he can’t bear to be inside. It’s like a disease for him. A sort of claustrophobia. Maybe it was all that time he spent in the lighthouse. On a rock station you’d be cooped inside for most of your shift. Having to get on with the other men. Sometimes I think it’s given him strange notions about things, made him almost compulsive.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, nothing harmful, Jimmy. Nothing that would lead to murder. He always sits in the same chair, uses the same knife and fork and gets put out if I give someone his mug. If we go into town he has to check three times that the hens have been shut away. In the lighthouse everything was routine. Perhaps there’s a thin line between that and ritual. Superstition. It gets worse as he gets older. Sometimes I think I should get him to see a doctor.’

Perez didn’t know what to say and Grusche seemed not to expect an answer. He just nodded at her and went outside.

George was working in his vegetable garden just like David. Like everyone in the islands with a bit of land at this time of year. He was hoeing between lines of plants, his movements easy and regular and seeming to take no effort.

‘Aye-aye.’ He stopped and rested the hoe against the fence.

‘I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘You’re not doing that, Jimmy. I was ready for a rest.’

‘These stories of Peerie Lizzie. It was your niece who was supposed to have seen her.’

‘Vaila,’ he said. ‘She was last in the line when they were handing out the common sense. Not a bit of malice in her, but she was always kind of daft, even as a bairn.’

‘You don’t believe in the ghost then.’

He didn’t answer for a moment. ‘I was brought up to go to the kirk every Sunday,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure I believe in miracles, either. Only in what I can see with my own eyes.’ But he turned away as he was speaking. Perez remembered what Grusche had said about his superstition and wasn’t sure that he was telling the truth.

‘You’ll have been brought up with stories of Peerie Lizzie too,’ Perez said. ‘Was it one of your relatives who was supposed to have been minding the girl when she wandered off to the shore? I was told she was a Malcolmson.’

‘She was my Aunt Sarah, my father’s older sister.’ He paused. ‘She was only a girl herself when Elizabeth Geldard was drowned. Fifteen years old, taken into the big house to mind the child.’

‘Did she talk about what had happened?’