He spent most of the night by Ranald’s side, had carried up water for him and a cloth wrung out at the spring to cool his swollen face. Three or four times in the dark, Ranald addressed him, or some figure from his dreams, in Gaelic, and each time Lacroix replied, “Orra bhuinneagan, a ghaoil, Orra bhuinneagan, a ghràidh . . . ” It was from a song about potatoes and it was, on his tour of the north, all the music he had managed to collect. He hoped the sounds would be comforting.

He did not dare to sleep. He watched the starless sky, smelled the ground, curled and uncurled his fingers, and in his head made passionate speeches to uniformed men in a large room he did not recognise. The men looked on impatiently. They had heard it all before, many times.

At first light he lifted Ranald on to the horse’s back. He did not look into the small trench, did not tell Ranald who was in there. He led the horse to Jesse Campbell’s house, kept his distance from the kelpers, found the old man milking his fettered cow. Together they carried Ranald inside and laid him on the bed where, immediately, the old man began to tend to him, to tend and to sing. The hook Lacroix had found in the grass he left on a table where it weighed down three of the blue Glasgow notes, money he hoped would be of use to them, feared would not.

Then back to the hill for Calley, who lay in the trench, rigid and boy-small, his pack at his feet, the sawn-down carbine across his chest. There was a black rose between the second and third buttons of his coat, something much bigger than that on the other side. At the house, while the body was still warm, that hour of perfect strangeness that followed the firing of the gun, he had searched Calley’s pack and pockets, hoping for something that would explain him, but all he had found beyond the ordinary, the predictable, was a piece of paper with a list of islands on it, their names strangely mixed in with Spanish names, and in a brass case in one of the coat’s many pockets, a lover’s eye with two grey tears at the crease and certainly stolen . . .