“Yes. I got the train up to Glasgow yesterday, then on to Oban last night. I wanted to be in good time for the ferry.” He hesitated, then said with a sudden stiffness that made his words sound rehearsed, “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this. I was wondering if I could stay for a while. A week, perhaps. If I’m not in your way.”

“Of course, Tommy,” Malcolm said, hiding his anxiety beneath a heartiness that sounded false, even to himself. “That would be nice.”

“Only if it’s O.K.,” Tommy said, not looking at him.

“Of course,” Malcolm said again. “This is your home.”

Not exactly the right thing to say. Tommy looked at him, and Malcolm, returning the look, thought, All right, I know.

“Let’s sort out your room,” he said. “Then I’ll get started on tea.”

He led Tommy up the narrow staircase and they stopped outside the first door. It was an old crofter’s cottage, modernized in the sixties and pretty much left alone since then. It retained its low, beamed ceilings, fireplace and latched doors, as well as its draughts. There were only three rooms upstairs, barely crammed in under the sloping roof: the tiny spare room at the top of the stairs, then Malcolm and Heather’s bedroom, and then the bathroom at the end of the short corridor. The spare room had been Tommy’s room once, though Malcolm hadn’t thought of it that way for many years now. He and Heather used to hear Tommy through the wall during those few years he lived with them, shouting in his sleep. Tommy never remembered his dreams after Heather woke him. Said he didn’t, anyway. He’d wet the bed too, not every night, but often, certainly, right up until he left the island. He’d be furious in his shame while Heather soothed him, telling him in her sensible way that it didn’t matter, that sheets could be changed, pyjamas could be changed, wasn’t that what washing machines were for? It wasn’t the end of the world, was it? Heather had said Tommy’s bad dreams would stop as he got older and the past got further away, but Malcolm thought differently (he had identified the bodies; he had nightmares of his own).