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came to him suddenly that he was treating this as a potential murder scene and that he had no expectation of Eleanor being found alive. If the phone had lain here for most of the night in a heavy dew there’d be little chance of fingerprints, though, and any of her friends could have touched it over the previous few days. The battery was low, but there was sufficient signal to see the email to Polly in the Sent box and the record of missed calls from Ian. There’d been no other calls or emails sent or received since.
    He looked at the woman, who stood watching him impassively. ‘I suppose you don’t have any idea what might have happened to her?’
    Caroline stared at him, considering the words before saying them. He thought that was how she would always be and, before she had a chance to answer, another question came into his head.
    ‘What do you do for a living?’
    ‘I’m an academic. Human geography. UCL.’
    ‘So are we all part of your study?’
    She gave a little laugh. ‘It would be interesting research. The effect of isolation on island communities under stress. Though I’m sure it’s been done before.’
    ‘And perhaps you’re too close to the subject to be objective.’
    ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Objectivity – that’s a whole new area of research in its own right.’
    ‘Are you sufficiently objective to tell me what happened to your friend in the early hours of this morning?’
    There was another brief pause and then she did reply. ‘I think Eleanor might have been trying to run away from her husband.’

Chapter Six
    Caroline Lawson took Perez back to her parents-in-law’s house. She, it seemed, had not changed her name with marriage. The name-change business wasn’t something he and Fran had ever spoken about, but he supposed that if his fiancée had lived and they’d had the wedding they’d been planning, she would have kept her own name. She was an artist with a growing reputation and it would have been crazy to lose that. Except that Hunter wasn’t the name she’d been born with, but the name of her ex-husband Duncan, who was Cassie’s father. They were part of a complicated modern family. Perez wasn’t sure what he would have made of Fran using Duncan’s name when she was married to him , then thought that he would have gone along with it for Cassie’s sake.
    The door was unlocked, but the house was empty. There was a note on the table in the kitchen: We’ve joined the search party to look for Eleanor. Caroline moved the kettle to the hot plate of the Rayburn to make tea.
    ‘You seem very at home here in Shetland,’ Perez said.
    ‘I love it.’ A pause. ‘Lowrie wants to move back. I might be persuaded.’
    ‘Could you find work?’
    ‘Not in my field. But I’ve always wanted to make time to write my research up into a book.’
    ‘So,’ Perez said. ‘Tell me about Eleanor.’
    The kettle whistled and Caroline made the tea, then sat down at the table opposite him, shifting a pile of Shetland Times to make room for the mug. Perez had grown up in such a kitchen as this. A working space with a wax cloth on the table, a place for baking and knitting and filling in subsidy forms. Not for showing off to the neighbours. A cat wandered through and sat on the windowsill in the sun.
    ‘Four of us met at Durham University,’ she said. ‘Lowrie was in a different college at Durham, but Polly, Eleanor and I were freshers together and in the same hall of residence. On the same corridor, sharing a kitchen, excited and scared shitless, all at the same time. You know . . .’
    Perez nodded, but what could he know of life in a smart English university? The nearest he could come to it was being sent from Fair Isle at the age of eleven to board at the Anderson High in Lerwick. Then Duncan Hunter had been his ally and protector, but he couldn’t imagine being friends with the man now. They rubbed along together because of their responsibility for Cassie.
    Caroline continued to speak. ‘We