Later, when questioned by the police, Fiona gave the time she passed the Baird house on her way to the bins as around 5.35 P.M., and the second time as six P.M. She hadn’t looked at her watch during the walk, but she did remember looking at the clock in her kitchen shortly after arriving home, and it was 6.20 P.M. It was about a fifteen-minute walk between her own house and the Bairds’. Fiona’s information proved important. She was the last person to see the family alive.

When Nicky and Tommy Baird didn’t turn up for school the next day, their teacher, Aileen Brown, tried to call Katrina at home. There was no answer. Aileen tried again at intervals throughout the morning, but still nobody picked up. As the single permanent teacher in a school with only five pupils, Aileen had no one to consult, and as the morning wore on, she became more and more uneasy. It wasn’t like Katrina Baird to keep her boys home and not call in.

During the last lesson before lunch, while Angus and the Wilson twins were working on their Viking longboat models, Aileen dug out the number of the firm in Oban where John worked as an accountant. But the receptionist who answered sounded surprised. She said John hadn’t worked there for some time.

After lunch, Aileen cracked and rang her husband at his surgery, asking if he could drive round to the Bairds’ house to check everything was all right. Greg Brown thought his wife was overreacting, but he didn’t want her worrying all through the afternoon—once she’d got an idea in her head, it tended to get stuck there—and although he was the island’s only doctor, he had no patients that day. He set off immediately. It was a twenty-minute drive to the Bairds’ house on the other side of the island, and he arrived there shortly after two P.M.

Later that day, once the worst of his shock had worn off and he’d had several cups of sweet tea and was sitting with two police officers in the McKenzies’ house, Greg would try to reconstruct very carefully what happened upon his arrival at the Bairds’ house. Still, there were some parts he was unable articulate, even once Aileen had arrived and was sitting next to him, ashen faced, holding his hand. Some things you could not put into words.

When there was no answer to his ringing of the doorbell, Greg had waited for a couple of minutes and then rung again. It occurred to him that perhaps the doorbell was broken, so he tried banging the knocker a few times. Still there was no answer, and Greg concluded that the family must be out for the day. Nevertheless, and mainly so he could tell Aileen he’d done a thorough job, he decided to go and knock on the back door.