What they had was a huge, beautiful, smooth-faced contemporary angel, designed in a gorgeous shiny steel. When you turned the central crank, a vast pair of wings, too wide for the garage, came out and spread for what seemed like miles. They hadn’t even plugged it in yet. It was, Konstantin couldn’t help thinking with a smile, going to blow everyone’s tiny minds.

“I’m not sure these are the fairy lights people were expecting,” said Charlie.

“Good,” said Joel, who thought it was rather fine.

“Shall we give it a shot then?” said Konstantin, pink-faced with excitement.

Joel carefully moved toward the plug socket and put in the European pin adapter. “Okay!” he said, and pressed down.

Every light went out for four square miles.

Chapter 39

M eanwhile, back on the south side of the island, where the lights were still on, in the old rectory, Saif Hussein was staring at his computer and wondering how on earth he had ever believed that he had come to Mure for a quiet life.

There was no doubt that his children were thriving here, even though that sometimes made him a little sad, that they could be Scottish now, British if they wanted, but their Syrian culture was falling away, day by day, however much he tried to interest them in their own background and keep up their Arabic. Frankly, he was working too hard and was often too tired to remember; he spoke to them in English more often than not.

And Lorna. He hadn’t expected to fall in love. The idea of it was so far beyond his concept of what life would be like. Just surviving had been the priority for so long: making it into Europe, claiming asylum, resitting for his exams, being sent to the end of the world. Then when the boys came home, dealing with that: trying to heal their trauma, even as it meant that their memories of their homeland were dropping behind them like a scene glanced from a passing train.

And now he was staring at something on his computer, shaking, trembling. Because everything was about to get a lot worse.

By the following afternoon, he was in Glasgow, back at the same horrible, horrible Home Office police building he’d been to the last time, when they thought they had found his wife, and it had turned out to be somebody else.

He had told Lorna he’d been summoned but that he didn’t know why, and she had longed more than anything to go with him, although they both knew that that was impossible. So he had gotten on the plane, and she had gone to school, as always.

ONE OF THE good things about being a primary school teacher, Lorna had always thought, and was more grateful than ever for today, was that it left simply no time or mental space for pondering or mulling over things. Children didn’t care what was going on in your private life. Children had absolutely no idea that you actually had a private life in fact. Even though they lived in a small community, the little ones still gawked when they saw her out and about at the post office or the grocery store, as if she lived in the school stationery cupboard.