Willow took in the scene. There was no chance they’d get Vicki Hewitt or James Grieve to Unst before the next high water, so they would need to move the body – Vicki was fastidious about maintaining the integrity of the crime scene, but even she would accept the need for action if the alternative was the corpse being sucked away into the North Sea by a particularly big tide. She pulled out her phone. Miraculously there was a signal. She phoned first Perez and then Sandy. She told Sandy to ask the remaining two guests to find alternative accommodation and to suggest that they leave Springfield House as soon as possible. They were an elderly couple from Bedfordshire; she already had their contact details and they were too frail to walk as far as the beach. Certainly they’d have been incapable of killing Charles Hillier, if this turned out to be murder. She asked Perez to join her on the shore. Sandy was full of questions, which she ignored. Perez asked none.

So she and David Hillier stood on the sand waiting. She didn’t want to send him back to the house alone, and she couldn’t leave Charles’s body to the mercy of gulls, rats or dogs. He stood staring out at the water. ‘I should never have forced Charles to come here,’ he said.

‘He seemed perfectly content, happy even.’ She supposed this was what the man wanted to hear, but she thought it was true too.

‘He was an actor,’ David said. ‘That was why he made such a good stage magician. He could make people believe whatever he wanted them to. He wanted me to believe that he was pleased with the move. But I knew he was bored. He needed more drama in his life than Shetland could give him.’

‘Perhaps it was enough for him to know that you loved it here.’

There was a silence. David didn’t respond to that. ‘How did he die?’

She thought he must realize that she could have no more idea than him. ‘Was he ill?’

‘No. Horribly fit. I was the one who did all the exercise and was careful about what I ate, but he’d never had a day’s illness.’

‘Then we’ll need to wait for the post-mortem.’ In the far distance Willow saw Perez appear from the front door of the house and lope down the stone steps. She felt like the sheriff in an old cowboy movie, waiting for the cavalry to appear on the horizon. ‘When did you last see Charles?’