‘I’ll pick you up on my way back,’ Jaz says, leaning across the passenger seat as I get out too.

‘No need for me,’ Fiona says. ‘I have to go to Ardroil. I’ll get the bus back.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say, when he looks at me instead. ‘I’d like to walk. There must be a shorter route on foot?’ Ardshader is fewer than ten miles north of Kilmeray, but the winding inland roads, negotiating hills and mountains, lochs and lochans, have taken us easily double that distance.

Jaz looks at me for a long moment, his expression inscrutable. Perhaps I’m still smarting from Charlie’s lies, but something in Jaz’s eyes, his demeanour, the weird near-silent car journey from Kilmeray, has made me feel less uncomfortable than uneasy. I watch Fiona as she marches away along the road, and think of her bad smile, You don’t know the whole story, Maggie. Not yet.

‘There’s no direct path back along the coast, but there’s the Old Glen Road,’ Jaz finally says, pointing towards some foothills maybe fifty yards to the northeast. ‘It’s a narrow pass between two mountain ranges. But it’s six miles, at least. And then you still have to get back to the coast and Longwick. You’ll have no phone signal, and the weather could turn.’ He shakes his head. ‘Be safer if I just pick you up.’

‘Honestly, I’ll be fine. I could do with the exercise.’ I step away from the car. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

‘Locals call the Old Glen Road Beul na Bèist,’ he says.

‘Beul na Bèist?’

‘Devil’s Mouth. From an old proverb: tilg mìr am beul na bèist. Cast a bone in the devil’s mouth, and it will save you.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe keep a look out. Better safe than sorry.’

And then he pulls the door shut and drives off in a shower of gravel.

I walk along the main road around the bay, to where Fiona is standing next to a brown sign, Aird Einish, 1 km.

‘He can be a right fussy busybody when he wants to be,’ she says, with more heat than I would ever have expected from a woman who’s always seemed so timid.

I look down at the long dunes of sand and then the wide-curving bay beyond. The tide is in, but still the beach is impossibly vast, way bigger than any on Kilmeray. The sea is a shallow, hypnotic wash of low waves frilled white. I try to imagine a storm; what it must have been like to stand up here or down there and watch your husband, brother, or father drown. Did Robert watch? Or was he too ashamed, too afraid, of what he’d done?

‘The memorial is just here,’ Fiona says, climbing over a wooden stile into an overgrown grassy meadow. She offers me her hand as I make a far clumsier dismount.

The memorial – polished grey granite, a little over four feet high – sits on the border between the meadow and the rocky cliff down to the bay. The waves, many feet below, sound suddenly loud. Beneath ‘21st of October 1977’ and the names of the boats the Acair, the Marcan-sìne, and the Darach – there are eighteen names etched into the stone, many with the same surname. The oldest and the first is Robert’s father: Douglas MacNeil, 48; the youngest, Malcolm MacKenzie, 18. But what makes my eyes sting, makes those waves seem suddenly deafening, are the addresses listed alongside. There are only two streets, simply Àrd Shiadair and Èinis: 2 Àrd Shiadair, 4 Àrd Shiadair, 5, 6, 7, all the way down to 10 Èinis – and those numbers carved deep into the granite make it suddenly very real. This terrible thing that happened. That spared no one at all.