‘Who was that bloke with a flowery name we learned about in Primary – one who kept looking at himself in a pond?’

‘Narcissus?’

‘That’s him. Well the senator kept peering at himself in this great gold mirror on the wall and smoothing down his silver hair on either side of his head as though he liked the feel of it. I’ll bet he’s never gone tatty-picking or wrung a chicken’s neck.’ Sheena sounded scornful. ‘You can tell he fancies himself rotten but he’d never get me to vote for him. My dad would say he was a real nancy boy. Rory’d be better off with a jelly piece for a stepfather!’

‘Well, I can’t thank you enough for taking Rory down.’ Isobel couldn’t help laughing but her heart sank for the small boy who had twined himself round her heartstrings. ‘How Rory must have hated seeing you leave! I hope he doesn’t have one of his nightmares tonight.’

Altogether Isobel had a lot on her mind as she drove down the drive at Glendrochatt, but she determined to put her worries on hold and give her visitors as entertaining a day as possible.

The sporran-maker, Judith Auchterlonie, was an unlikely-looking proprietor for a long-established family firm in the Highlands. Marnie had imagined a little, stooped, white-haired man with a leather apron and gold-rimmed spectacles, like an illustration of a cobbler in an old children’s book, but the figure who greeted them was a sensational blonde with a figure like Marilyn Monroe’s, immaculate make-up and an extremely short skirt. When they arrived she was at the front of her house taking delivery of a dead badger that had been run over on the road, but she looked as if she would have been equally at home taming tigers, taking to the high wire in a circus or receiving an Oscar in a Versace dress.

She greeted Isobel affectionately. ‘I have the sporran all ready for you. I think Giles will be pleased with it,’ she said. ‘Please take your friends on through to the workshop and I’ll be with you in a moment.’

The walls of the lean-to shed behind her house were lined with signed photographs of kilted male members of the royal family, bagpipe-playing sergeants of Scottish regiments in full ceremonial dress and various celebrity film stars of Scottish descent; there were pinned up newspaper cuttings of teams of dancers competing at Highland Games and a picture of Miss Auchterlonie herself, wearing an eye-catching hat, shaking hands with the Queen at a Holyrood garden party.

‘You’ve obviously danced reels before, Christopher. Do you have all this regalia?’ asked Morwenna.