Outside it was clear and the sea was sparkling with reflected sunlight. Polly saw that Ian and Perez were still strolling along the beach, deep in conversation, but she turned in the opposite direction, away from the shore, and neither man noticed her. The road was narrow, with a fence on one side and occasional passing places on the other. A sheep wandered into her path. She could smell the grease on its fleece before it scrambled away, and the scent of crushed grass. A great skua, sitting on the hill, hook-beaked and scary, seemed to be staring at her. Meoness was a sprawling community of croft houses with land attached and an occasional new-build. Between Sletts and the other houses there were skeletons of old buildings, walls and boundary dykes half-hidden by cotton grass and wild iris. Where the track joined a slightly wider road, there stood an old red telephone kiosk and the community hall. A couple of cars were parked outside and there was the noise of a Hoover coming through the open windows. She pushed on the door and went inside. Lowrie stood on a stepladder in the main hall and was taking down the bunting. In London he worked as an accountant for a big retail chain, and was always very respectable in jacket and tie. Now he was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a round Fair Isle hat shaped like a pork pie. He grinned and waved. The sound of the vacuum cleaner came from a smaller room, where they’d eaten supper the night before. It stopped and Caroline came through.

‘So you’ve come to help at last!’ she said. ‘About time too. We’ve nearly finished.’ She was big-boned and blonde. ‘We were just about to have a drink to celebrate clearing up. Apparently that’s traditional too.’

‘Is Eleanor here?’

‘No! Isn’t she sleeping off her hangover?’ Caroline took the string of bunting from her husband and started to wind it into a ball.

‘She didn’t sleep at Sletts last night,’ Polly said. ‘We don’t know where she is. Ian was so worried that he called the police. A couple of officers came from Lerwick and the inspector’s talking to him now. The coastguards are doing a search of the cliffs.’

Lowrie climbed down the ladder. ‘She’ll surely not have gone far.’ He sounded so matter-of-fact that Polly could tell he thought they were overreacting. City people, so sensitized to crime that they saw it everywhere. Perhaps he was embarrassed that they’d caused this fuss, dragging police officers across two islands and two ferries because a woman had wanted to experience the strange Shetland night alone. But now it was lunchtime and there was still no sign of Eleanor. And she’d sent that weird email.

‘She sent me this message,’ Polly tried to keep her voice calm, ‘saying not to bother looking for her. Saying that we’d never see her alive again.’ And at that point she began to cry.

They took her into Lowrie’s parents’ house and sat her in a tall wooden chair in the kitchen and made her tea. After the sunshine it seemed very dark in the house, all shadow and dust. There was a rack over a Rayburn where dozens of tea towels were folded and hanging to dry. Presumably they’d been used the night before and already washed. The room seemed to Polly to be impossibly cluttered. How could they find anything in the chaos of fading magazines, knitting wool and vegetables? There was a faint smell of sheep and mould. She hated disorder and found it physically repellent. Weren’t they embarrassed to bring guests to a house that was so untidy?