“Exactly.” Katie paused, twisting up the side of her mouth, as if steeling herself to continue. “The real reason, however, is that I don’t want to be away from the house much anymore.” Dan watched her intently as she once again gathered her thoughts. “You obviously know that Patrick runs his own prawn-processing business.”

“Yes. Seascape.”

“Right. Well, five years ago, in June I think it was, Patrick had been up in Mallaig picking up a load of prawns from the boats, and he was driving back to Fort William in the lorry when he had an accident. It wasn’t too serious. He just drove rather slowly into a ditch. However, when I eventually managed to drag out of him the reason for it happening, he said that he had suddenly got a really bad attack of pins and needles all the way down his right side, and that he had lost control of the lorry. I told him to go straight to the doctor, but he wouldn’t. At that time of year, the factory is at its busiest, and he said that he couldn’t afford to start getting all namby-pamby about his health. Anyway, about two weeks later, it happened again, but this time he lost all feeling in his right leg. Thankfully, he was in the office at the time, because he fell over quite heavily and thumped his head against the side of a desk. The whole episode gave him quite a shock, so he was more than willing to go to see the doctor after that. The consultation lasted five minutes and Patrick was immediately hustled off to Inverness for tests. And the long and the short of it is that he was confirmed as having multiple sclerosis.”

“For heaven’s sakes,” Dan muttered.

“The specialist said that it was early days and there was no way of knowing how fast the disease would develop. However, taking Patrick’s age into account, he said that it was more likely to be the progressive form of the disease rather than the relapsing remitting form, especially as he had already experienced some numbness in his limbs. Having said that, he felt that Patrick would have periods of remission at this stage and saw no reason why he shouldn’t just keep on working as normal. That, of course, came as music to Patrick’s ears. After that, he kept going harder than ever. I never tried to stop him, because I knew it was his release.”

“How did it affect him?”

“Once he was in remission, it didn’t at all, except that he would be exhausted at the end of a working day, but I was never sure whether that was a symptom of the disease or just because he was going at it all hours.”

“Has he had a relapse?”