Malcolm’s relief at this didn’t last long. It was almost nine o’ clock by then. Perhaps, he thought, Tommy was simply out on a long walk, needed to clear his head, something like that. But he couldn’t push away the visions of Tommy lying hurt, or in trouble. And beneath it all was a bigger fear that he hadn’t known he carried: he believed there was a chance that Tommy might be a risk to himself. He believed Tommy might be looking for a way out; he believed—but why all these euphemisms? What good were euphemisms to a man who’d seen what Malcolm had seen? He believed that Tommy might kill himself.

So what now? There were no police on the island, and besides, Tommy had only been missing for a few hours. Malcolm did not even know that Tommy was missing. He could ring up his neighbours, ask them to help him search, but where would they search now in all this darkness? He knew what Ross would say, and Davey: Wait till morning. We’ll find him then. They could do nothing before dawn. At night the darkness here was total: dense and heavy, an almost solid thing.

So Malcolm sat in his small kitchen and waited. And as the time wore on, it seemed inevitable that his brother would come to him. There was no escaping John. To be related so closely to someone who had committed such a crime—it was difficult to get your head around.

Sometimes it made things easier if Malcolm pretended there had been a sudden change in his brother: that the man who murdered his wife and children was not the one Malcolm had grown up with. He tried to think of it as the other islanders did, as a bolt from the blue, a moment of madness, all those neat phrases that packaged up what had happened into a more manageable form. But Malcolm knew that not having seen it coming was not the same as being amazed by it.