‘Has my mother been gossiping to you?’ The tide was on the ebb now and the sand was hard where they were walking. It was hard to tell what Lowrie made of Grusche’s interference. Or what he made of Eleanor’s death after the first dramatic reaction.

‘As Marcus said, you know what mothers are like.’ My mother wants me home too. She’d like me and Cassie in a croft in Fair Isle, where she can keep us safe.

‘I fancied myself in love with Eleanor when we were at university,’ Lowrie said. ‘It seems like a kind of madness now. But I was young and homesick and I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was like some exotic creature from another planet. For the first six months in Durham she filled all my dreams.’

‘What happened?’

‘She slept with me a couple of times for fun and then moved on to more interesting men. Men with more style and influence.’ Lowrie stopped suddenly and looked out to the horizon. ‘She said that I was very sweet, but she was ready for a grown-up.’

‘A bit harsh.’ Perez kept his voice light. He didn’t want to make too much of this and frighten the man into clamming up. ‘But you stayed friends?’

‘I adored her. Better to stay friends than to lose contact altogether, I thought. One day she might need me, and I’d come rushing to the rescue like a knight on a white charger and she’d realize that I was the man for her all along. Then I came to my senses and saw that living with her would be a nightmare.’

‘Ian managed it, though, did he?’

Lowrie hesitated. ‘Ian’s a very different kind of man.’

‘In what way?’ Perez was genuinely interested. He thought that of all the incomers Ian was the person he understood least.

‘He’s very certain. There are no doubts with Ian. Once he knows where he stands on an issue there’s no moving him.’ Lowrie slowed in his walk and turned to Perez. ‘He was like that when he decided that Eleanor was ill and needed to be in hospital. The rest of us couldn’t see it. We knew she’d hate it.’ He paused. ‘I went to see her in there. I didn’t tell the others, but I just slipped in on my own after work. It looked pleasant enough, like a kind of hotel, but she was so miserable. It was making her more crazy than losing the baby. I told her she should leave. She was a voluntary patient. There was nothing to stop her.’

‘And did she take your advice?’

‘Yes. She signed herself out the next day.’

‘What did Ian make of that?’