Time moved on, but outside it was still light. Grusche made coffee and the men used that as an excuse to get out the whisky. They’d shifted seats so that they were all at one end of the table, the bottle between them. Polly caught Marcus’s eye and he winked at her. She wondered if he saw this tragedy as just another of his adventures, a story he’d tell to his customers when they’d made camp in the mountains somewhere and were sitting around the fire as darkness fell. A tale about the time he went north to celebrate a wedding and ended up as a suspect in a murder inquiry. Because she realized now that they were all suspects.

At the women’s end of the table Caroline was talking about their plans of moving to the islands.

‘You’re still thinking of that then,’ Grusche said. ‘I wondered if Eleanor’s murder might have put you off.’

‘There’s a lot more violence in London than there is here!’ Caroline’s voice was matter-of-fact and Polly wondered if Caroline was capable of grieving for Eleanor at all; if she herself was the only person who cared. Even Lowrie, who had been so close to Eleanor at one time, now seemed engrossed in a conversation with his father. Of course Caroline worked with statistics and objective proof. Emotion seemed to have no place in her life in any situation. Caroline went on, ‘In fact, this has made me more determined that this is the right decision. When dreadful things happen it’s good to have a close community around you. Of course I have wonderful friends like Polly in London, but somehow that’s not quite the same.’

And so I’ll soon have lost all my companions. My surrogate family. Polly felt suddenly like crying. She loved Marcus and when she looked at him now, holding the men spellbound with another traveller’s tale, she was almost faint with longing, but that contact would never be the same as her relationship with her old girlfriends.

Perhaps Caroline realized that she’d been tactless because she said, ‘And of course Polly will visit. Every summer during the long days. She’ll have her own room in our new house in the islands.’

Polly smiled, but she’d already decided that she never again wanted to come back to Shetland.

‘So have you made any practical decisions?’ Grusche asked. ‘Do we have a time-frame here, for example?’

Polly thought Grusche was delighted at the notion of having her son home and was desperate for details, but didn’t like to seem too excited. She didn’t want to come across as a pushy mother-in-law.