When she starts to march away, I can feel, so strongly, the tower and its shadow at my back that my ‘Wait!’ comes out as a shout.

Fiona stops, turns around.

‘Why did he do it?’ I say. ‘Why did Robert lie about breaking the light?’

‘Why do any of us do anything?’ she replies after a long silence. ‘Perhaps he believed it.’ There’s a kind of grimly determined look to her tight smile. ‘Or perhaps he just wanted someone to write a story about him.’

And that look makes me finally brave enough to ask her what I couldn’t in the cottage.

‘The night they died, do you think that Robert tried to save Lorne?’

Fiona squares her shoulders. Finally looks me unflinchingly in the eye. ‘No. I don’t.’

*

The village of Ardshader is really just a road. Lined with perhaps twelve houses, a small stone church at its end. All are modest white houses, with the occasional ruin of a blackhouse alongside. Many of the white houses themselves are abandoned. A rusted Land Rover minus its tyres and number plates sits in a small garden; behind it, net curtains in the two upstairs rooms billow in the breeze, the glass in the windows gone. Its neighbour has a boarded-up front door.

I’ve never thought about why or even when Robert left Ardshader for Aberdeen. But I wonder now, why did he come back? Even though the sun is piercing the low clouds in spears, turning the beach white-gold and the sea turquoise clear and every stretch of grass or meadow a deep warm green, I still wonder. Because Fiona’s right. There’s a bad feeling here; something that twists at the stomach and constricts the chest. Maybe it’s Ardshader in its ugly dereliction, its bòcain. Kilmeray isn’t here, of course. It doesn’t feel like here – empty and oppressive. But it’s close. You can probably see this headland from Ardcraig. And almost certainly the higher, longer Aird Einish. And the lighthouse itself. I might not know why Robert told Charlie what he did about the lighthouse, nor even why Fiona brought me here to see it, but suddenly I feel a burst of acute pity for Robert, perhaps forever trapped by duty and self-loathing and guilt. We’re the same. It makes something burn inside my chest, a dangerous feeling close to hope again. Like looking into someone’s eyes and recognising yourself.

*

I regret turning down Jaz’s offer of a lift back to Kilmeray within an hour of setting off down the Old Glen Road. It’s less a road than a stony – mostly muddy – track. Away from the coast, the air is thicker and colder. The mountains either side of the track blot out the sun entirely. Every few yards large boulders sit ominously across my path, and I try not to think about where they came from. There are no blankets of deep warm green down here. The only vegetation is either orange-grey lichen or moist dark seams of moss between rocks.