‘You wanted to help him?’ Because I’ve no idea what he means. I think of that cool and musty windowless cellar, and I shudder. ‘To help Robert?’

‘Yes.’ He shakes his head hard. ‘No. I … We were in shock. The whole village. It was just a week. We kept him in the blackhouse for a week. But it was … a long week. And then …’ Charlie’s expression changes. All that calm vanishes like the sun behind a cloud. ‘And then Robert started to speak.’

My heartbeat is one slow thud after another, heavy enough that I can feel the pulse beating in my neck. ‘What do you mean?’

Charlie swallows. The look he gives me is almost pleading. ‘Sometimes what we do is far worse than anything we believe in.’

And I know he isn’t talking about a ten-year-old boy firing rocks at a lighthouse while wishing his father dead.

‘Charlie.’ I press my palm against my neck, feel my heartbeat in my fingers. ‘What did you do?’

*

Robert

I don’t remember killing the sheep, but I know that I did. Because there were the overalls stiff with old blood under that workbench in the cellar. And because I don’t remember killing all the birds either, but there were always so many of them, hidden deep inside that old stone fissure filled with green moss. And so I have to believe that I killed Lorne MacDonald too. Not just because Charlie told me so in a voice that shook, tears running down his face. But because I can feel the terrible truth of it, even if I can’t remember.

I sleep, I wake. Once to the sharp smell of bleach and the sounds of people in the kitchen; once to the clatter of metal and plastic, the whisper of voices. I sleep, I wake, the stars bright above me; the Àird Èinis lighthouse a dark shadow in the corner; a memory of slow white light moving across walls, constant and safe. And through it all I’m trapped under the sea; the darkness sweeping over me like a tsunami again, and all I can do is try to surface, try to breathe. But still, I see his black shining gaze like the ewe’s baleful eye, her breath freezing in the air; I feel the strength in rage that I’ve never found in peace. And I know that it’s true. All of it.

Mary comes to see me on the third day, and I’m so glad, I feel some of that darkness lift. Because Mary is who saved me from that last tsunami. She’s the one who dragged me back to land.

She doesn’t come over to the mattress. Instead, she sits on the stool next to my workbench, and looks across at me as if I’m a stranger. She looks like my mother. After. Hunched and small. And full of wrath.

‘Why?’ Her whisper is small too. Her tears are quick, they run off her chin and into her lap. I put those shadows under her eyes, those lines around her mouth. I put that dark tired fury inside her voice.