Charlie doesn’t reply. Lifts up a fistful of white sand and runs it through his fingers.

‘And even if all I can do is write my story, of coming here as a child, it’s not as if anyone’s going to help me fill in the blanks, is it?’ I glance at him again. ‘I mean, you were in the pub last night.’

‘Well.’ Charlie huffs out briefly visible breath. ‘People talk, is all. And, in the general scheme of things, not a great deal new ever happens here.’

‘I’m not going to write anything awful, Charlie. If that’s what you think – if that’s what everyone thinks – I’m really not. I just need someone to talk to me.’

He stretches out his legs with a wince. ‘You know, this place is only beautiful because it’s seen centuries of hardship. It’s only empty and wild because rich men who owned people as much as the land realised they’d get even richer if they replaced tenants with sheep. And because bloated mainland fisheries emptied that sea of everything but shellfish, forcing men who’d fished here for generations to leave too. Christ, even tourists only think they want splendid isolation, and then, more often than not, complain when they get it. I give those new archaeologists a day before they start whingeing about the lack of Wi-Fi in the bunkhouses and the island price of red diesel.’ He slides me another almost-smile. ‘Folk come here to take, Maggie. Rarely to give. Always have.’

‘I’m not here to take,’ I say. Which I manage to sound remarkably sincere about, considering it’s the worst lie I’ve told so far.

Charlie fixes me with a look, a long look. And then he sighs and gives a very solemn nod. ‘Wee Lorne was Alec and Fiona MacDonald’s son.’

‘God.’ I think of Fiona’s pale, freckled face. Alec’s narrow and furious eyes.

‘Alec’s an arse. He’s always been an arse – he’s a rigger; spends more than half his life offshore on the BP oil fields west of Shetland – but after Lorne died, he became an arse with an excuse. It’s not you he has a problem with. It’s pretty much everyone.’

‘So people might talk to me?’

The surf has picked up. Charlie looks out at the horizon just as a big green wave breaks against the shoreline.

‘You ever see a spectre ship?’

‘What?’

‘They’re famous round this coast. People see them all the time. Lost fishing trawlers, lobster boats, yachts. Old steamships bound for Canada.’

I look out at the flat horizon, as if I expect one to spontaneously glide into view.

Charlie pauses, looks down at the palms of his calloused hands. ‘Whole of my thirties, every time I walked west at either dusk or dawn, I used to think I could see a funeral procession walking the Coffin Road alongside me, carrying a black coffin. Always at the corner of my eye; if I looked they were gone. Sometimes I thought I could hear them, like the sound of the wind around the cairn at the top of Ben Wyvis. Got me believing it so much, I stopped going west at all. Thought it meant one day I’d not be making it back to the slipway at Sheltered Bay; one day I’d just be another dead fisherman, another name on a stone with no body under it.’ He pauses, clears his throat. ‘Because somehow, I always knew that black coffin was empty.’