Christopher woke first the following morning. The curtains were drawn back so that early light flooded into the bedroom. After the claustrophobic incarceration in a cramped cell, usually with a cellmate and only occasionally, when he was lucky, on his own, he couldn’t bear to have the curtains closed at night. Now he could hear the sound of the river – special music to his ears – and smell what Marnie had called the scents of Scotland coming through the open window – birdsong and all, he thought, amused by her mixed metaphor and delighted by her enthusiasm for a part of the world that had always meant a great deal to him. The smell of prison had been a daily endurance but something he’d made himself get used to, and more or less learned to ignore, but the confined space had been an ongoing torture. He glanced at his watch – six o’clock on a May morning – and looked down at the young woman asleep beside him.

She looked very youthful, he thought; very vulnerable – but he also knew now how passionate she could be; how responsive . . . how joyful. He remembered again his mother’s question – so irritating at the time – regarding Nicola: ‘If you look at her, are you moved?’

Very gently he started to trace the contours of Marnie’s face with his finger: her dark eyebrows, wide forehead and high cheekbones; the outline of her jaw and the shape of her mouth.

She stirred drowsily and then opened her eyes. For a moment she looked disorientated, not sure where she was, then slowly remembering, she smiled at him. ‘Oh, hi there,’ she said. ‘Are we still in Scotland? Are you still around?’

‘We’re still here and I’m still very much around.’

‘Oh good,’ she said, ‘how lovely,’ and she turned towards him again.

After breakfast – porridge, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and wonderfully thin, crisp bacon – Marnie said she felt strong enough to try the Reverend Donald McBain’s telephone number. She came back looking triumphant. ‘He answered himself. He’ll see us at ten.’

Cherry Barton suggested that they might like to take a packed lunch with them. ‘Then it won’t matter what the time is or where you end up,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome to come back here, of course, but there isn’t anywhere in Wester Finterie where you’d get anything to eat. There’s a sub-post office at Finterie where you might get a packet of crisps and a tablet if you were lucky.’

‘A tablet?’ asked Marnie, mystified, wondering if secret pill-popping went on in this out-of-the-way place.

‘Scottish for a particular slab of fudgy toffee,’ explained Christopher, laughing. ‘Very innocuous – unless you overdose! I think a packed lunch would be an excellent idea, don’t you?’

‘Perfect. We could picnic in the castle,’ she said happily. ‘Eat it in the dining room and pretend we’re living there already.’

‘Are we going to live there?’ he enquired.