On the radio in the kitchen, hosts Dan and Grace are playing ‘Win It Minute’ with a land surveyor to the sound of a heavily ticking clock. Catriona starts to put her coat on for work and asks him if he knows the missing girl. Her question sounds forced as she pretends to answer an email on her phone.

‘Aye, I knew her,’ he says. The past tense spooks him and he shakes his head. ‘I know her.’

She looks up, genuinely surprised. ‘So, you stay out there?’ she says.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Out by that forest?’

‘Yup.’

He can feel her examining him with her big brown eyes. Maybe this is the first time she has really looked.

‘She’s at boarding school, isn’t she?’ she says, sliding her phone into her pocket. ‘People are saying she was expelled.’

‘People?’

‘Some kids online – this Diane Armstrong? – apparently she’s gone “viral”.’ Her voice adds quotation marks. ‘And lots of people are talking about it, especially her friends in Edinburgh. Saying she’s lying somewhere in a field. Twitter. The local news, you know.’ She looks at him more intently. He tries to imagine her now as a doctor, talking to a patient about a serious illness.

She pauses. ‘As I’ve said before, people talk a lot here, Niall. A lot. Not just the internet, it’s wherever you go. They’ve been telling me you knew her. And people seem to know a lot about you too. Your past.’ She’s nodding as she talks, as if she has pieced something together, something they both have to accept.

‘Right.’ He turns towards the bathroom.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I just wanted you to know.’

He ignores her, puts down his bag on the cement floor and hears her come in behind him. He switches on his radio. She begins to ask a question but stops herself. When he looks up, she is eyeing the white splatters of paint like bird shit on the radio, trying to choose her words.

‘Here’s a question for you: where does the rock for the Carlin Stones originate from?’ says Grace, the radio presenter.

‘Ballachulish?’ asks Dan, her colleague.

‘No, well, you’re not far off: Ailsa Craig.’

‘I don’t think she’s out in the fields. I think she’s in the forest,’ he says. ‘If it’s no bother to you, I’ll be helping them out this afternoon.’

‘Oh, of course,’ she says in a faraway tone. ‘Go now, if you’d like.’

23

He arrives at the search party, a group of people standing on the track, in the dry air. A woman, a secretary at the primary school, is handing out sausage rolls from a Tupperware box in the open boot of a Vauxhall Astra. She’s saying, ‘The thing is, all that snow is thawing.’

‘What can I do to help here?’ asks Niall.