Monica ignored the interruption. ‘We left our car at the hall. There were so many vehicles parked there that nobody would notice. Then we camped out in the old house, Utra. Lowrie had told us we could use it, and Grace got changed there. For her it was just a game. Staying up late. Putting on a party frock. Dancing on the beach. She’s like all the women in our family – given to exhibitionist tendencies. I met Charles on the beach. We had a smoke and watched the performance. Afterwards Grace and I lit a fire and rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor, just waiting until it was time for the first ferry to Yell. Early the next morning I dropped Grace at Jen’s and drove on south.’

‘Polly thought she saw the girl on the beach and in the house at other times.’ It was Sandy again. Perez could tell that he thought this artist, with her paintings of dead women, her camping out all night in a ruined house, wasn’t fit to have care of a child.

Monica shrugged. She seemed fidgety and uncomfortable. Perhaps Sandy reminded her of the cops she’d met in the Met. Perhaps she just wanted to go outside to smoke. ‘Maybe Jen took her and the boys to play at their father’s house. He lives with his new wife in Spindrift, that hideous bungalow in Meoness. They’ve been divorced for a while, but it’s all quite amicable. The boys like to see the new baby.’

Or maybe, Perez thought, Polly conjured her own ghosts out of the air. She’d been told that her lover was having an affair with an older woman and she was emotionally frail to start with. He could imagine that she might be haunted by dreams and demons.

‘Who sent the email saying the group wouldn’t find Eleanor alive?’ Willow broke into his thoughts.

‘The plan was for Eleanor to write it, and for me to take her phone and find somewhere with a good signal to send it,’ Monica said. ‘Grace was fast asleep, so I slipped out of Utra and sent the message. We’d arranged that I’d leave the phone in the planticrub, where Eleanor could pick it up later.’

‘And then Eleanor was supposed to disappear?’

Monica nodded. ‘Charles was waiting with his car. He was going to take her back to Springfield House. There was a small room waiting for her.’

But Eleanor kept being interrupted. First by Polly, who’d joined her straight after the men went to bed. Then by Grusche. And in the end Hillier went back to the hotel alone. When Eleanor’s body was discovered, he remembered seeing Grusche coming back from the cliffs alone and knew who must have killed her.