When was the last time he had seen her? Four years? Five? They’d been booked on the bill of the same gig in Perth, a Scottish independence thing he’d found himself doing. It had been a surprise to turn up there and see her name on the list, have her run up to him and bury her head in his shoulder like the years hadn’t gone by and she was that wee girl again. Their connection wasn’t one he thought of often, any more – after the failure of that album she’d drifted away from him, spun out into space, and Morna’s family, with a new baby every couple of years or so and a vacant space where a grandfather should be, had reached out to anchor him. This, here, was where he belonged, looking out of the window to the islands beyond as he washed the dishes from the guests’ breakfasts, keeping himself active, still playing the fiddle on Sunday nights in the big hotel up the way every couple of months.

There had been a line-up reshuffle at her request, her childlike insistence hanging awkwardly in the air, at odds with the older woman it came from, while the young event organizer looked at his feet. They’d sung together – a couple of their old Burns rejigs, ‘A Man’s a Man’ – him knocking time on his fiddle while her voice cut the air, the audience rising to its feet at the end, but she’d been loud and vocal in the bar area afterwards, surrounded by a crowd, while he hung about awkwardly, eventually drifted back to his B&B.

And then nothing at all until last year, November. Just a few months ago. He’d driven back from a St Andrew’s Day gig in Garve in the night – he liked driving at night, liked the blackness, even though Morna wished he wouldn’t do it, not at his age – and Morna had still been waiting up for him in the kitchen when he fumbled the latch in the dark.

‘You had a visitor. Malcolm’s girl. Cliodhna.’

‘I – what?’

‘She came up with the school bus from Ullapool. I told her you weren’t like to be home till now, and so she walked up the road to the hotel, presumably sat in the pub for three hours till the bus came back.’

‘You didn’t ask her to stay? We’ve room.’

‘Well, of course I did, Donald Bain. No matter what I think of her I’m not going to turn away a visitor, am I now? She wouldn’t. She said no, she had somewhere else to be. I told her if she’d just phoned ahead – but she said she wanted to surprise you.’

Donald didn’t know what to say. Time had folded in on itself and a teenage girl in bright red stilettos was clacking down the stairs to his old bothy.