Somewhere and some time before she moved to Strath Horne, she decided to learn the art of building bonfires, of filling the sky with smoke. He always assumed she had learned in Edinburgh, the same time – in her teens – when she had started to learn reiki and EFT. She used to work at Napier’s, an old herbalist, and the Forest Café. She began to make friends with students who studied in the Georgian university buildings near by and she became more than friends with some, he guesses now, kissing rich English boys with lip piercings who volunteered for People and Planet.

He bases this idea on a few small details she told him in passing. He remembers it made his skin flush with jealousy and a quiet, heavy anger that surprised him. He prefers to think of her alone at seventeen, spending the long summer evenings on a wide expanse of grass called the Meadows. He imagines her among the drumming circles and poi dancers and tightrope walkers, reading palms, eating apples and getting high as the shadows lengthen, her blunt Highland vowels changing.

From Edinburgh, she moved to Strath Horne, to work at the Castle Hotel and, as she always said, for a change of scene. The town was a wild, unknown place to her. He heard later her mother Lillith was from the west coast and part gypsy, but maybe that was after Christine started telling people’s fortunes. She said she had the sight. People in Strath Horne didn’t act like that. He had always thought Edinburgh was the place that formed her, but maybe she learned it from her mother.

He opens his eyes in his bed and, keeping his head still on the pillow, reaches out and switches on the radio. He turns the volume down and listens to the wind rise up, the sound growing louder than the football phone-in. The window is a light-grey square. The spare bed sheets pegged out in the garden will be wet now.

The radio hisses with static and cuts into a squeal, like a faulty microphone. An electric pain hits him behind the eyes and screws itself into his head. He slams his hand on the radio and it topples off the table, but the noise is unrelenting. He swears and props himself up on one arm to lean over and unplug it from the wall.

Niall falls back on his pillows, clammy with sweat, and folds a third pillow behind his back. The room tilts slightly. He sees the mug of tea Lauren has brought him and looks at the time. Nearly noon. Now the tea is cold and grey, but he sips it all the same and appreciates its sweetness.