He yanks me hard towards him without warning. His breath is warm and sharp with whisky.

‘I know who did it, Maggie,’ he says. His eyes are suddenly very clear. ‘I know who murdered Robert.’

When the door of the pub bangs open, loud and sharp like a gunshot, Charlie flinches and lets go of me. My chair rocks backwards on its legs. The music stops; Donnie’s bagpipes cut off with an indignant squeal, and in the ensuing silence, Femi stares back at us all from the windy, sun-filled doorway. Instinctively, I know something’s wrong. He’s lost all of his London bad-boy swagger. His face is drawn, almost comically agitated; he searches the room with a kind of desperation.

‘Femi?’ Miko says, moving to stand between him and the bar.

He looks at her with some measure of relief. ‘Miko.’

‘What is it? Are you okay?’

‘No. I – we …’ He shakes his head.

‘What is it?’

Femi takes in one long, shuddering breath. And then another. ‘We found a body,’ he says, in a low almost-whisper that I still manage to hear. Charlie goes still beside me, his knuckles suddenly white against the table. ‘At the dig. We … we found a body, Miko.’

And I can tell that he doesn’t mean a three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old bog body.

Robert. I see him standing and unsmiling against a green hillside.

‘It looks like a …’ Femi seems to register for the first time that everyone is looking at him. He appears to shrink, hunching down as if bracing himself for whatever he thinks is coming his way. His gaze flickers over Charlie and me, and then he looks only at Miko. ‘It’s a child.’

CHAPTER 25

Will and I go back to the pub two days later. The rain is cold and heavy, the sky and sea a battleship grey. We hold hands but we don’t speak. The road is otherwise empty. The opened peat banks with their dragon-scale spines look like fortified earthworks, as if the island is under siege. We’ve certainly spent the last two days holed up at the farm as if it is. Having a lot of sex. Mostly, I suspect, because it takes away the need to speak. And, if I was feeling less miserable, because it’s a way of saying I love you or I’m here, without having to say why it needs to be said. Without having to mention out loud the dead child.

But I am feeling miserable. All of the air has been let out of my happiness, and, selfish as it is, I feel cheated. Disappointed at its fragility, when I’d thought it was finally here to stay. I used to see signs in everything; it was, ironically, one of Dr Abebe’s warning signs. Probably because I rarely saw them when I was content, when I was in control. Today, as we walk through the low wet clouds and the miserable cold, I see those signs everywhere, and not just in the peat banks. I see them in the weather and in our silence. In the dark shadows of Terror Mountain and the Valley of Ghosts, the violently flapping blue-and-white police tape strung across the road into the cemetery and Cladh Dubh, and in the shrill alarms of the crows returned to the ruined church. It feels like the end of something that was just beginning.