I think of her spitting fury outside the pub all those months ago. Those cracks of gun fire across the Morrison estate that day in the Big Hoose, and those shotguns inside two cherrywood cabinets. Spindly black wings like ribs and feet like claws, and a cool soft belly pitted with birdshot.

‘She made the vándr-varði, didn’t she? You said that she was the one who told you about them. She left them outside the blackhouse. Inside the blackhouse.’ Those talismans to protect against evil. To protect against me. The me who’d once said she was Andrew.

‘I only found out what she was doing after that day you showed me the vándr-varði down on Big Beach,’ Charlie says. ‘I went to tell Euan and he said that sometimes she’d slip out at night, and he’d find her outside the blackhouse, or on her way there. But he didn’t know about the vándr-varði – not until I told him.’

‘Someone took them,’ I say, something a little more complicated than anger quickening my heartbeat again. ‘Someone knew where I’d put them, and they took them.’

Charlie has the grace, at least, to look both sorry and guilty at the same time. ‘I told Euan that you’d been keeping them in a rucksack in the mudroom.’

I think of that figure hidden inside the dark bathroom doorway, looking at me in the light before throwing that dead crow, bloodied and slick with rain. Cora. And then I think of the standard lamp’s click in the instant before everything was plunged into blackness; that someone else in the dark, close enough to me that I could hear their too-loud intake of breath before they held it. Euan.

That something more complicated than anger flashes brighter, tries to gather more outrage.

‘Did Will know? Did he know what—’

‘No. No, he didn’t know, Maggie,’ Charlie says, his head shaking violently and his mouth a tight line. ‘He didn’t know what Cora was doing. He didn’t know any of it.’

And then, of course, I get it. Far too late. ‘No. Oh no.’ Because all I can think of is Will. Will. I find myself squeezing Charlie’s arm hard. ‘No.’

He looks at me, grabs hold of my hand. ‘Maggie. Robert made us promise to look after them,’ he whispers. ‘We couldn’t do anything but that.’

I snatch back my hand, press it shaking against my hot face. ‘Does he know?’ I’m whispering too. ‘Does Will know that Cora is Mary? That he … he is Calum?’

Charlie shakes his head, eyes red. ‘When Cora started getting sicker and all of … this started, we knew we’d have to … Just – I know I’ve no right to ask – but just give us the night, Maggie. Let us tell him. Please.’

When Miko comes back in through the door, I flinch.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I … Will said you’d need these, Maggie.’ She holds out a pill bottle. It’s my lithium.

Exhaustion suddenly swamps me. My heart doesn’t just ache, it hurts. ‘I need you to go now, Charlie.’