Greg stumbled back to his car and drove to the McKenzies’, the Bairds’ nearest neighbours, to call the police and an ambulance. As he heard himself telling Gavin McKenzie what he’d seen, Greg wondered if this high, panicked voice was really his own.

Since there was no permanent police presence on the island, it was over an hour before the helicopter arrived from Oban and police broke down the door of the Bairds’ house.

Inside, they found the bodies of thirty-four-year-old Katrina Baird, her one-year-old daughter Elizabeth, her ten-year-old son Nicholas and her thirty-seven-year-old husband John. All had died from shotgun wounds. There was one survivor, eight-year-old Thomas, who was found crouching in the wardrobe of his parents’ bedroom in a pool of his own urine, in a state that appeared almost catatonic.

Greg would afterwards say to Aileen, over and over, “I should have gone in and got him. He had to stay there for another hour. Alone in that house. I should have got him out.”

And Aileen would say, “You couldn’t, my darling.”

And Greg would say, “I should have broken a window.”

And Aileen would say again, “You couldn’t.”

The Browns sold their house and moved to Harris two years later, where Greg joined the thriving Harris GP practice. Escaping the claustrophobia of Litta for a much larger island was a relief. They didn’t say they left because of the Bairds, even to each other, but Greg knew he would never get little Beth out of his head if they stayed put, and Aileen knew it too. (Greg never did anyway, not even after their teenage boys finished high school and the Browns left the Hebrides for good and moved to Edinburgh.)

There were many details about the killings that remained a mystery afterwards, but some central facts were established during the early days of the investigation. They were these: some time shortly after eight P.M. on Tuesday, 8th March 1994, John Baird, described by all who knew him as a quiet man who was devoted to his family, took a double-barrelled shotgun and used it to murder his wife and two of his children, before turning the gun on himself.

Tommy, when he was finally able to speak, was unable to provide a coherent account of events, but he was able to identify his father as the killer. John’s brother Malcolm, who lived with his wife three miles away to the west of the island, was brought to identify the bodies and to take charge of Tommy.