He said that he would look throuh copies of the weekly local paper, starting three months before and working back, but he knew that it would be no good. The Baltasay Times was a week old by the time it reached Kinness, but everyone took it. If there were any mention of Elspeth in the paper, it would have been noticed and talked about. He needed one of the Scottish papers, based in Glasgow.

The librarian brought the files of the newspaper to him and he sat at a round pine table to read them. The artificial light and the background hum of the central heating reminded him of the office where he had worked before his retirement. The newspapers were a fascinating record of island life and he would have enjoyed giving them more attention, but they contained nothing which interested him.

He took the newspapers back to the desk and the little woman must have sensed his disappointment.

“You don’t want to go further back?” she asked.

He shook his head. He had read copies back to the beginning of the year. For Elspeth’s face to have lodged in the Woollie Man’s memory she must have been on the television very soon before he began his sales tour of the Northern Isles. That, too, would have fitted in with Elspeth’s arrival on Kinness.

It was quarter to eight. It seemed unlikely that there would be more visitors to the library. George felt sleepy, resigned to failure, but he was enjoying the comforting, familiar warmth of the building. Perhaps the librarian wished that he would go so that she could close and have an early night, but she had gone to the trouble of gathering together that week’s national papers for him to look at. He had missed seeing a newspaper on Kinness—no one bothered taking a daily there—so he sat back at his table and prepared to read them.

Elspeth’s face stared out at him immediately and he was astounded. The paper was only four days old. She was on Kinness then. How could she be making news? He looked back at the paper, afraid that he might be mistaken, but it was certainly Elspeth, staring straight at the camera, her hair dragged from her face.

It was the Scottish edition of a daily paper. The headline above the photograph read: CHILD ATTACKER NOT TO BE RELEASED. The article was a report of an appeal judgment. Gordon Bain had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the previous March for ill treating his son. He had appealed against his sentence and the article reported that the appeal had been dismissed. The newspaper seemed to have run a campaign after the original case, calling for an inquiry, and had interviewed doctors, social workers, and teachers at the time of the trial. Now it was using the appeal to renew the campaign.