‘There’s not much to steal, you know.’

I whipped round, grazing my palm on the stone sill. A man was walking towards me, the dawn light behind him, hands jammed in his pockets, a woolly navy-blue hat down to his ears. I’d walked from one stupid thriller into another. Probably a slasher movie. Oh God.

‘I’m sorry – no, I’m not trying to …’ I straightened up, my voice high and tight, backing into the wall. ‘I’m really sorry. I’m totally lost.’

‘Aye, you must be.’ He stopped a couple of metres from me. It was the man who’d found Tyger. Birdkiller. Fuckfuckfuck. He scratched the back of his neck, a rasping sound louder than it should have been. ‘It’s normally quite hard for people to find this place.’ He lifted his chin slightly and looked along his nose at me, one eye crumpling up.

I shifted my weight to my other leg and sneaked a look at my grazed palm. There were two little lines of raised, pale skin below my thumb.

‘What are you up to out here, then?’ he said.

Past him, the hills were moving like low, migrating animals. ‘I was at a bothy, up – quite a way up there. With some people. There was, like – there was a party. Sort of.’ My voice didn’t quite sound like mine. I looked back at him. ‘It went a bit wrong. There was a guy and he came in from nowhere, I don’t know how he could have known, but then he was just there, and it got messy and he had, I know it sounds stupid, but he had a gun, a small gun, but a real one, or at least we all just assumed it was a real one, I mean you didn’t really want to ask and he was really, really scary and – God, I thought we were all going to get shot, and—’ I gulped a big, notched breath.

He was eyeing me quietly, patiently, like I was reading him the bus timetable. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

The words tripped out of him so lightly, all consonants – the skimming stones on the loch. Nausea was starting to hover uncertainly in my chest. I squinted up at him from under my fringe. He probably wasn’t going to rape me and stab me to death. I was so fucking cold. I nodded.

He walked past me and opened the door. ‘Come on, then.’

It was a house with an identity crisis. One large room, stuff everywhere. Nothing seemed to quite fit or hold together.

The floor was just concrete with some rugs chucked about. A fireplace was roughly made with three thick pieces of blackened wood, maybe old railway sleepers. There were matchboxes stacked like Jenga pieces on top. Books were piled up on the floor on one side and logs on the other. A bag of coal.

There was a bed on a wooden mezzanine at one end, high in the eaves of the roof. A thin metal ladder rested against the wall next to it, and a couple of lanterns hung underneath.