And so they had continued to head off on their buying trips together, Patrick more often than not falling fast asleep in the passenger seat as soon as Dan had the old Mercedes in motion. As he drove, Dan would study the slumbering form of the man, every day seeing visible changes in his features. His face had lost its weather-beaten glow and the skin on his sunken cheeks had now taken on the colour and texture of putty, whilst the sheer effort of concentrating on the movement of his limbs had produced lines on his forehead that were as deep as plough furrows. Witnessing this decline in Patrick’s health, Dan now had mixed feelings as to whether his decision to come up to Scotland had been the correct one. Patrick would have continued to use a buyer at Mallaig and would not have been capable of getting into the office so much. He would have had to stay at home, using the kitchen table as his workplace, taking it easy, pacing himself, and no doubt every day getting more and more frustrated and angry with the world. So it was a no-win situation. Yet what really upset Dan was to have met this man with whom he had such an immediate and powerful rapport and to be able to do absolutely nothing but watch as this deterioration took place. And if he felt that way after such a short space of time, he could not begin to quantify the emotional turmoil that Katie had to be suffering.

There was, however, an up side to it all. Dan hadn’t felt as exhilarated in a job since the days when he had worked as a money broker on the Stock Exchange floor. He loved the atmosphere of the auction, the wry smiles and cutting banter that were exchanged when he and Patrick had caught out a rival bidder. He loved the postmortems in the harbour café afterwards when they would sit with the other buyers, discussing over a gargantuan and totally unhealthy breakfast the quality of the day’s catch. He loved dealing directly with the fishermen in the smaller boats, watching with incomprehension as the spokesmen for their buying cartel gathered lobster creels into a circle on the quayside and sat in a waft of cigarette smoke while they discussed in Gaelic the various offers for their prawns. A man would eventually turn from the group, there would be a click of fingers, and simultaneously he would point to the purchaser and call out his name in an accent that was as foreign to Dan’s ears as any that he had heard before. “Meester Trrenchard, ye can tek eet feer Seascape the day.”