‘She took me into the bird room, made a big show of locking the door behind her. I . . .’

‘Mother was still in the building!’ Perez interrupted because he couldn’t face hearing the details of his father and Angela Moore having sex. That was more information than he needed. But still he imagined it. The smell of wood and birds, the hard desk, the excitement and the urgency, the need to have it over before they were missed.

‘And that was the only time?’ Perez asked. He supposed his father was right. One hurried encounter hardly counted as an affair. Fran and her London friends would probably dismiss it as a trivial mistake.

‘I dreamed about it happening again,’ James said. ‘I wanted it to. But it never did.’

‘You tried to persuade her?’

‘I made a fool of myself. I see that now.’ He looked at Perez. ‘We’d chatted at parties before it happened, flirted a bit. I hadn’t thought she would do that with me if she didn’t care for me.’

Perez saw for the first time that his father was an unworldly man. Throughout his childhood he’d thought of James as having great knowledge and experience. But of course his father had never lived away from the Isle. He’d been too young for National Service, had never been to university. Angela would have found him an easy target.

Perez found his anger was already starting to fade, replaced by the inevitable understanding. He didn’t want to understand – that was for social workers, for weak indecisive people who made excuses for criminal behaviour. But he could never quite find it in him to condemn. Perez saw that as a failure, a kind of cowardice. Now he began to see how his father had been tempted. A long marriage. A life of routine – the rhythm of the croft, the boat, the kirk. And along had come a young woman, sexy and famous, appearing to find his father attractive. Of course he’d deluded himself.

James continued: ‘She was all games. This was a boring place for her. She needed more excitement in her life. I told her I loved her, bought her presents. I suppose it was a kind of amusement for her. Maybe she was flattered by it.’

‘Did she ever talk about her other men?’

Silence.

‘You must have known there were others.’

‘It seems that I knew nothing about her.’ James paused, turned to Perez again, his face scarlet. ‘I told her I’d leave my wife for her.’

Just like Maurice, Perez thought. He’d said all those things too. Had he come to his senses finally? Had he decided he could no longer live with a woman who made a fool of him?

‘And what did my mother make of all this?’ Perez asked, keeping his voice cold and hard, because Mary had been tempted in the past too but had never betrayed his father.