‘Looks like embers from the fire probably set the rug alight first before jumping to the curtain,’ Detective Constable Lachlan Scott –‘Call me Lockie’ – says, waving around the square leather notebook that he hasn’t opened once. ‘Heavy-lined curtains can go up like torches if you’re not careful.’

He had much the same response to the dead birds in the rucksack when I showed them to him while Will was picking Kelly up from Blairmore, giving both the birds and me a similarly dismissive frown. ‘Dead crows,’ he said, as if expecting me to argue. ‘You never seen ’em before?’

‘Not on my doorstep. Not in my bedside drawer.’

‘They look stuffed,’ he said, giving one a sniff, although I noticed he didn’t touch them.

‘I think maybe someone is messing with me—’

The sound of a car door slamming had me closing the rucksack and shoving it under the dining table.

‘Don’t say anything about them,’ I said, as Kelly pushed open the door. ‘Please.’

And Detective Scott had given me another very long frown that perhaps he reserved only for tourists from London who’d rather invent a crazy local than admit they’d nearly set their holiday cottage on fire themselves.

‘’Course, neither would’ve happened if the fire guard had been where it was supposed to be,’ he says now, looking down at the fireplace.

This rankles as much as – more than – the if you’re not careful, because I have always been careful. All that wood panelling has made me nervous enough to go without a fire at all, more often than not. ‘I put the guard back. I always put the guard back.’

‘All right, Lockie,’ Kelly says, rolling her eyes, and in a tone of voice that suggests he’s not only a detective from Stornoway Police Station to her.

His cheeks flush red to prove it, and he pushes his notebook into his pocket and folds his arms. Looks at me with raised eyebrows.

I shouldn’t have phoned the police this morning. Even before he arrived, I knew it. And everyone in the village now doubtless knows too. But I’d done it without thinking. I’d got up before Will, walked down to the phone box in Blairmore, and phoned Stornoway Police Station before I’d even thought about why I shouldn’t. Not because I was scared. And not because I was worried that it was all in my mind; that perhaps I just didn’t remember not putting out the fire or putting back the guard. I’d done it because I was hopeful. Hopeful that someone really was after me. That someone was trying to make me leave. And that someone – as ridiculous as both the idea and hope was – had been in the blackhouse not once, but twice. Because that hope diluted the What if Mum lied to me? It revived the theory that someone like that – no longer content with only hiding in the shadows or leaving behind dead birds – might well have murdered Robert Reid too.