She touched the button of his shirt. Finn looked at the hand, imagined it gripping a knife

Maddie thought for a moment. “I don’t believe Claire killed Kev.” Finn answered: “Well, if you didn’t and she didn’t, who did?” “Kev was into a lot of bad stuff. As well as the salvage scam and the deliveries, he was into some dodgy stuff with the Sanderson brothers. God knows what else. I didn’t want to know the details.”

Even Finn had heard of the Sanderson brothers, Kirkwall thugs bringing in cocaine and heroin from Russia, according to pub rumour. Finn glanced at the bag on the floor. “Maybe losing a hundred grand didn’t do him any favours.”

Maddie stared at the bag. “Just a thought,” Finn said. Maddie shook her head. “No, the money was his, he didn’t owe anyone.”

“You sure?” She looked down at the floor. “No.” Finn pushed his chair back and stood up, hands on the edge of the table. “You have to take all this to the police.”

“They’ll just say I killed him. They won’t care about anything else. They’ve got his body, me on the run, the wronged wife, the bag of money. It stinks.”

“It does.” Maddie tilted her head and reached out but Finn was too far away. “You believe me, right?”

“Would you believe me, if the situation was reversed?”

“I like to think I would.”

“I don’t even know you, Maddie.”

Complicated

“You know me as well as anyone. I felt it yesterday at the airport, I know you did too. You get me, we’re the same.”

“We’re not the same.”

“We were both leaving, escaping.”

“I wasn’t escaping, I was going home.”

“To your girlfriend?”

“Leave Amy out of this.”

“Is that why you were chatting me up the whole time?”

“My relationship with her is nothing to do with this.”

“I know you want sex.” Finn laughed. “Are you offering me that to keep me on your side?”

“I’m not offering anything. And you’re already on my side.”

Finn gave her a look and walked to the door. He glanced across the hall at the Neolithic exhibitions, the skulls and skeletons. He wondered if things were as complicated back in their day, if this kind of chaos came into their lives. He imagined being a corpse pegged out on the cliff, waiting for eagles and buzzards, seagulls and crows to come peck out his eyes, tear at his flesh, until he was nothing but a pile of windswept bones.

He turned back to Maddie. She was standing close enough that he could smell her, perfume and sweat, a vague stink from the cowshed, stress oozing from her pores. Behind her, the cup of tea she’d begun to make sat stewing.

“If you won’t go to the police, I’ll speak to them,” he said. “I’ll tell them to talk to Claire.”

Maddie had her hands on her hips. “They’ll know the information came from me and that we’ve been in contact since the crash. Then you’ll be in trouble.” “I can’t get in any more trouble than I already am.” “Think about it,” Maddie said. “They presume we were both responsible for the plane. If they find out we’ve been together since then, why couldn’t we have been together before yesterday as well?”

“But we weren’t.”

“They don’t know that. If they think we’re working together, maybe we were both involved in Kev’s death.”

“That’s ridiculous, I’ve never met him. I don’t even know where you live.”

Connection

“Do you think they care?” Maddie took a step closer. “They’ve got a dead body and two people they already blame for the crash. It’s not a big step to pin his death on us.”

Finn felt the doorframe against his back as Maddie stepped closer. She spoke in a hushed voice. “You’ve helped me so much. You’ve already saved me once. I needed you this morning and you came through. We have a connection, I know you feel it.”

She touched the button of his shirt. Finn looked at the hand, imagined it gripping a knife. The smell of her was in his nose now, musty and feral.

“Go and see Claire,” she said. “Find out what happened. If we’re going to sort this out we have to do it together.”

He thought she was going to kiss him again. He wanted her to, wanted much more than that. But she didn’t lean in, she just stood looking at him with big eyes, her mouth straight, her hand on his chest feeling his heart under his shirt.

Finn edged the car along the winding lane of John Street. Stromness was just a handful of steep lanes straggling between Ferry Road and Back Road up the hill. To his left were the tiny vennels sloping down to the water, the tenement houses end-on to the sea, each with its own ancient jetty going back to fishing times.

These days the town was mostly a ferry port, the huge MV Hamnavoe sitting in dock now, Finn catching glimpses of its monstrous white bulk down the alleyways as he drove.

The roads were built long before cars and there was no room for traffic to go both ways, no pavement either. But the system worked, mainly because no one ever came here. The shops were an odd mix of ancient brown places, unchanged in 50 years, and shinier blue and white properties turned into art galleries, workshops and cafés by recent incomers.

Survive

Ageing hippies came here to find quiet and be inspired by the sea, making things out of flotsam and driftwood, painting unrealistically tranquil seascapes. Finn passed the Pier Arts Centre, closed for renovation. Seemed like the whole island shut down in winter. Sleet spattered the windscreen, the wipers smearing the slush into the corners as he crawled along.

In the window of a bric-a-brac shop he saw a police poster for Project Kraken, with a cartoon of a blue merman-beast on it. “Protecting the waters of the Highlands and Islands,” it read. “If you suspect it, report it,” then a number to call. Finn wondered if anyone ever phoned.

That wasn”t the way things were done around here. This far away from the centres of power, in this remote landscape, people had spent thousands of years doing things their own way, doing what they must to survive the harshness of the conditions.

If someone was smuggling in bricks of dope or bags of pills, there were hundreds of miles of empty coastline to do it in, and who could blame them? If folk were out at night stripping the sunken fleet of copper and steel, taking valuables that might make a bit of money on the black market, fair play.

If people were out poaching, as long as nobody got hurt, where was the harm? The idea of authority felt so remote here. The idea that you’d do something because people in Edinburgh or London told you to was ludicrous.

More tomorrow.