‘You think they’ll be somewhere here then?’ Willow hadn’t known that Vicki Hewitt had a husband and was distracted for a moment, wondering if there were children too.

‘It’s possible.’ Vicki was already bent double again, feeling among the boulders with gloved hands. Then she was lying flat on her stomach reaching into the holes in the sandy soil close to the cliff edge. But she found nothing and stood up and stretched again.

Willow wondered what her husband did for a living, if he didn’t mind these strange call-outs to crime scenes. She herself had never found a man prepared to put up with the frequent and sudden disappearances.

‘I’d get a search team in to look properly,’ Vicki said, ‘but if the killer had any sense the shoes would be at the bottom of the cliff and swept away by the tide by now.’ She walked to the edge of the cordon and began to take off her paper suit, pushing her mask from her face so that she could talk properly.

‘So the killer didn’t panic,’ Willow said. Out at sea a trawler was pitching and tipping over the waves. She felt slightly nauseous watching it. ‘They didn’t hit Eleanor over the head in a blind rage and run away. They threw the murder weapon, the cloak that she was last seen wearing and the sandals into the sea. And perhaps they tore up a photograph and scattered the pieces in the wind. Then they walked back to the road as if nothing had happened. It would have been early in the morning and already light.’

‘How did the phone get to the hill by the hall?’ Vicki was packing up now and had started walking down the hill with the big silver box in which she kept her equipment.

‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t left there to throw us off track. The murderer wanted the body found. Otherwise why not tip Eleanor over the cliff with everything else? If the body had been discovered on the boulder beach at the bottom of the headland we’d probably have put it down to an accident. She’d been drinking, after all. There were lots of witnesses to that. One head wound wouldn’t show up among the others, and nobody would survive that fall.’ Willow thought it would have been no further to drag the body to the cliff edge than to the loch. And it would have been easier because the grass there was so much shorter.

‘Perhaps Eleanor had dropped the phone earlier in the evening?’ Vicki turned to wait for Willow at the stile.

‘But someone sent that email at two o’clock in the morning. What was Eleanor doing wandering around in the early hours? And why go from the stone enclosure near the hall and then walk in the opposite direction to the loch? Too many questions and nothing that makes sense.’ Again Willow thought that there’d been a meeting here. It had been planned. She tried to imagine the scene. The strange half-light of early morning, Eleanor waiting, shivering perhaps, wrapping her cloak around her party clothes to keep warm. Had she dozed? Been surprised in the end by the visitor for whom she’d been waiting? Or had the murderer moved silently over the grass like one of Eleanor’s ghosts and killed the woman without warning?