And you look so like Jerry, Sandy thought, remembering the photo that stood in Setter. You couldn’t be anyone else’s child.

‘Do you think your father was drowned at sea?’ Sandy asked. The question came into his head unbidden.

Now Joseph turned. ‘That’s what I was always told,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand why you have to get rid of Setter,’ Sandy said. Was he being stupid? Too thick to understand? ‘Why now? When you were so set against selling it, when you hate the idea so much that you’re prepared to set fire to it, to get the insurance instead of selling it on?’ Because it seemed to Sandy that money must come into it somehow. Money was always important in Whalsay.

‘That’s not my story to tell,’ Joseph said. ‘You’ll have to ask your mother about that. Now come home. You can’t stay in Setter the state that it’s in.’

‘I’ll tell Mother it was me,’ Sandy said. ‘A chip pan. She knows I was drinking.’

Joseph didn’t say anything. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder and they walked together back to Utra.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Sandy had to suffer a lecture from Evelyn the next morning about the evils of drinking and frying chips in the middle of the night. ‘You could have been killed. You could have burned the house to the ground!’ He thought about his father and made a pretence of looking contrite.

He hadn’t slept well. The amount he’d had to drink, you’d have thought he’d be out like a light, but ideas had been churning round in his head all night. He’d tried to rerun the conversation with his father. The earlier part of the evening he remembered fine: drinking in the bars in Lerwick, his arm round the shoulders of that fat lassie, the one married to the soothmoother who worked in the canning factory. Then turning up like a fool on Perez’s doorstep. He’d been pretty sober by the time they got back to Whalsay. At least, he thought he had been. But the details of finding the fire, standing with Joseph in the moonlight by the loch, all that seemed harder to pin down. It was as if he’d dreamed it all. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember the way his father had been last night.

Evelyn put a bacon sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of him. Joseph was already out; he’d been gone when Sandy got up.

‘Will you not sit down and have some breakfast with me?’ he asked. His mother was busy with three things at once as usual. She buzzed round the kitchen like a bluebottle trapped in a jar.

‘I had my breakfast hours ago.’

‘Then just sit down and have a coffee!’

She looked at him strangely but she did as he said.