Sandy must have gone to his room first and then waited until David Gordon had left the kitchen before coming in.

‘Is that tea in the pot?’

He sounded cheerful, normal, and Willow thought that by comparison the rest of them were being affected by the nature of this case, becoming introspective and frustrated by ideas that seemed to dance away from them like shadows in the fog. ‘How did you get on with your teacher?’

He seemed to blush slightly.

‘Sandy Wilson, have you fallen for her? Do tell.’ Teasing him as if he were a kid, because that was what they needed now. A bit of harmless fun.

‘It’s nothing like that.’ He paused. ‘We went out a few times when we were at school. I don’t think I treated her so well.’

‘Is she holding a grudge?’

He smiled. ‘I don’t think she is. She has a tough time at the moment. Her mother has dementia and Louisa is caring for her at home.’ He paused. Willow decided he’d been thinking of this since he’d left Yell. ‘Louisa was adopted. I’m not sure I could do all that intimate stuff for someone who wasn’t my flesh and blood.’ He looked up at them, realized they were both waiting for relevant information, and turned his attention to the case. ‘She couldn’t tell me anything useful, though. She didn’t think her bairns had learned the song, but there’s a specialist teacher comes in to teach music. A guy called Joey Rickard. She gave me his phone number. I’ve just phoned him and he said he hadn’t done the song with the Meoness kids, though it’s the sort of tune they’d more likely get from parents and grandparents.’ He poured himself tea and sat between them. ‘How did you get on with David Gordon?’

‘We might have found our Monica,’ Perez said.

Willow was surprised by this. ‘Really, Jimmy? There are lots of Monicas in the world. Probably a few in Shetland. It could just be a coincidence, don’t you think? An artist, originally from London, with an exhibition in a gallery in Yell. There was no link with Eleanor, as far as I could see. And only a tentative one to Charles Hillier.’

She looked at him and wondered what she’d missed. What had Jimmy Perez picked up from the conversation?