‘Then who followed me back from Ardshader?’ I say. ‘Alec was gone by then. Who—’

‘Jaz,’ Charlie says, gaze sliding away. ‘We were keeping tabs on you, that’s all. We just wanted to know what you were doing.’

‘No.’ I think of those scuffling boots surfing a slide of loose stones inside the dark corridor of the Devil’s Mouth. ‘He was trying to scare me, Charlie.’ And my anger roars back because I know I’m right.

‘Maggie, everyone was scared. Is scared.’ He reaches out his hands towards me and then thinks better of it. ‘And no matter what I’ve said to you since you came back, so am I.’

I try not to look at him then, because I don’t want to feel sympathy for him. I don’t want to remember standing inside a peat bog as he squeezed my fingers and muttered Thanks for being here.

‘Alec left the dead birds?’ I say. ‘And the fire? Was that him too? Christ, Charlie, he could have killed me!’

When Charlie says nothing at all, my anger gets bigger. Brighter. ‘He was in my home. He terrorised me while I was sleeping. How can—’

‘God.’ Charlie weighs his head in his hands, stares down at the floor for long seconds. ‘What a fucking, fucking mess.’

And that’s what finally snaps me out of it – my pointless interrogation that’s more like a tantrum. The sight of Charlie holding his head in his hands; the tremble of his fingers against his hair. Because, I realise, this is the one question he was hoping I wouldn’t ask. Unease wakes up inside my chest again, sending nervous shivers down my spine.

‘That wasn’t Alec.’ I look at the crown of Charlie’s bowed head. ‘Was it?’

I think of drowning. Looking down into viscid blackness and feeling nothing but the bubbles of my last escaping breath. I think of Charlie’s It was Mary who told me about the vándr-varði. She was worried about him. He’d had some kind of breakdown in Aberdeen.

The why that I found in the sea, the why that made me think of Kenny’s smile. A storm is coming. The why that was a change in Cora – alien and brittle – that I couldn’t put a name to. It had been her voice. Her accent. No longer English but Scottish. Aberdonian.

‘Oh, God,’ I say. ‘Cora is Mary. Cora is Mary.’

Charlie’s shoulders sag. ‘She never went back to Aberdeen. When the Stewarts bought the blackhouse, Euan insisted that she move into an unused wing of the Big Hoose. Her and Euan, they got … closer over the next few years.’ His shrug looks heavy. ‘And eventually, they married.’

I swallow. ‘She’s the one who was creeping around outside the blackhouse, who came into the blackhouse, God knows how many times? Who set a fucking fire in – did you know? Did you know that she—’

‘No. No, of course not. We all knew she was getting worse, even before you came back. But after … maybe she did it because someone was living in the blackhouse again, and she could see the lights at night. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it was because it was you – the wee girl who’d once said she was Andrew.’ Charlie’s sigh is bone-deep.