“He’s gone?” said Calley.

“To Mingulay. If you climb the hill there and look west or somewhat north of west you should see it. On a clear day.” He said it was a hard place to get to and when you got there the effort could not be justified.

“So why would he go,” asked Calley, “when there’s nothing there?”

“I did not say there was nothing there,” said the man. “And the people here did not want to keep him. They are given to superstition. They considered the man unlucky.”

He looked at them, the cool gaze of an appointed man, then, with a final taking-in of the long coats, the packs, the travelled faces, he turned to leave them.

“But someone,” said Medina, “must have taken him.”

“Aye,” said the man. “Neil MacCuish and his cousin. I would not go in a boat with them myself but . . . ”

He walked away along the street they had been speaking on. It was, perhaps, the only street on the island. A cow stood at one end, the other end debouched into the air.

They spent the afternoon hunting down MacCuish. They were pointed towards farms, towards cottages, towards sprawls of open ground where the birds flew up under their feet. They stood on a rock and looked west. There was something out there, a hazy complication of islands, stretching northwards. Then a cloud of insects found them and drove them, beating at their faces, back to the shore. Here they came upon a man lifting a pair of ugly fish out of a lugger drawn up on the beach. On enquiry, the man turned out to be MacCuish himself. He was missing three fingers from his left hand, had an odd dent in his forehead. On one forearm he had a mermaid with a tipsy grin and on the other, in uncertain black letters from the elbow, caledonia.

He had served four years in the Royal Navy—he and two brothers lifted out of their boat by a passing frigate, the boat sent back in the care of an old man, who then had the pleasure of breaking the news to their mother. “We never saw her living again,” said MacCuish. He lit his pipe, worked at it a while. “That might be something you know about,” he said.

“What’s that?” said Calley. When he thought of his mother, of the word “mother,” he pictured a gate. High. Locked.

“The king’s shilling,” said MacCuish.

“We’re engineers,” said Calley.

“You’ll be building us a bridge to the mainland perhaps?”

“We might,” said Calley.