“O.K.,” Malcolm said. To fill the slight pause that followed, he added, “Sleep well. I’ll be out with Robert in the morning, but back in the afternoon.”

“Right. Night, Malcolm.”

Then Tommy was gone from the kitchen and Malcolm breathed out slowly.

When it came to John, Malcolm could see as well as Tommy that the bare facts of the matter didn’t add up to much. Their father had been hard on them. Their mother had favoured Malcolm. Neither explained why John would take it into his head to murder his wife and children.

Of course, Malcolm knew it would be easy to claim now, to let himself think now, that he and John had never been close, that he had never really known his brother. It wouldn’t be true. Or at least, it would be both true and not true, which seemed to Malcolm to be the case with so many things, especially as he grew older.

He and John had played together as young children. They had always been together. As teenagers, they had begun to go their separate ways, even while they lived in the same house and worked side by side on the croft, but as young boys they had been comrades. They had roamed across the cliffs and the beaches together, just as Tommy and Nicky had done. They climbed over the rocks in the north to watch the seals and in summer they swam in the sea, playing football on the beach to dry off. When they helped their father, it would usually be together too, feeding the sheep or getting them down from the common grazing and, when they were older and stronger, cutting the peat and helping with lambing. They were united in this, the hard work and the shocking cold of the early mornings, trying to warm your hands and shield your face from the wind as the sun came up over the cliffs and turned the machair gold.

Most of Malcolm’s memories were outside, and when he pictured himself as a teenager, holding a sheep while his father sheared it or battling the wind on the hillside or driving the harvester across the low-lying fields, he always saw John there too, even if he knew he’d more likely been alone at the time.