‘Aye. They do.’

‘Finn says you know everything that’s happened here. I thought you might know about – a murder. Twenty years ago? A guy’ – it hurt to say it out loud. ‘Shot his girlfriend.’

She didn’t look the slightest bit surprised. ‘Oh, aye.’ Her voice was cashmere, a blanket over my shoulders. ‘Everyone has their own version of that one, I expect.’ She didn’t elaborate, simply wrapping her hands around her cup. Her veins marbled her knuckles.

‘So … ?’ I said.

‘Well, if you’ve heard about it, what do you want to know from me?’

‘I don’t know, I thought, maybe – I just didn’t understand it.’

She looked at me for a long time. ‘Every story has another, hidden away. Maybe more than one. Who’s to say what the real one is. People say I’ve got a few screws loose, for living the way I do.’

‘But you just like it?’

‘Well, I’ve got very used to it. I’ve been here thirty years.’

I felt like I could swim down into her eyes, find seahorses and squid and those fish with serious underbites and antennae that glow in the dark. I waited. And she told me her story.

She had always lived here, in this corner of the Highlands, but once she’d had a proper house, where she’d brought up her kids. She showed me a photograph of her husband, a small, stout man who looked like he had a hot water bottle stashed under his shirt. He was standing on a moor with two small children under each arm – one of them Finn and Becca’s mum – like lambs or baby pigs he was rescuing, and his grin was as broad as the sky behind him.

Sandy had worked on submarines further south, she said, and would often be away. He would return with oil still under his nails and a smell of the sea, but not the normal smell – something ingrained, speaking of depths and darkness. It sweated out of him. She didn’t even swim.

One night, his submarine – on a training exercise somewhere off the west coast – had never come back up. Reports had been mixed, even though she and other wives had camped outside the base and raged for days, weeks. Almost certainly an accident, flooding or a weapons explosion. Gran-gran said that when subs failed, they sank to their crush depth – words that sounded soft and muffled but were surely anything but. Skulls caving in like the metal of the hull. I imagined the dented sub lodged awkwardly in sand and rock at the bottom of the sea, a giant version of one of Benji’s old bath-time toys. The skeletons of men eroding there in the water. Human coral.

One night, she’d woken up with a fever dried on her like sea salt and got into her car in her nightgown. Driven miles and miles to this beach and stood, facing outwards, with the wind all over her like fingers. Goosing her good, she said to me, a distant lighthouse flash in her eyes. And she’d looked out at the booming, hushing darkness and – I shivered – he’d been there. A feeling of weight next to her, calm and smelling of oil and cigars, and she could hear his words, woven in with the wind.