I watch him go, until I realise I’m doing it, and then I make myself get up and fast-march back towards the bar instead. Kelly is perched on a stool, legs crossed and grinning, holding out another full glass of prosecco.

‘Oh, girl,’ she says, in an American twang. ‘You in trouble.’

I take the glass without answering. Swallow half of it as ‘Hellbound Train’ reaches a crashing crescendo.

‘Play “Highland bloody Cathedral”,’ someone shouts.

Kelly goes on grinning, nudges me as she nods towards the young woman still sitting with Isla Campbell and Fiona MacDonald. Her arms are folded and her narrow face furious as she glares in our direction. ‘So apparently, Sheena MacDonald has wanted Will Morrison since the Big Bang. She runs the community shop – better watch out for laxatives in your milk and nails in your Pot Noodle.’ She laughs again. ‘Oh, boy, have I told you how glad I am that you’re here, Maggie Anderson?’

*

‘Maggie?’

Charlie smells of the outside: smoke and cold. His shoulders are hunched, and that same wide-brimmed tweed cap is jammed on top of his head.

His eyes slide away to glance up and down the bar, and when he rubs his forefinger under his nose, I realise that it’s a sign he’s nervous. ‘Come over here a minute,’ he mutters.

Kelly raises her eyebrows as he turns away, and I shrug at her before I get off my stool and follow him. He walks to the only red wall not lined with tables and chairs; the one crowded with all those photos of landscapes and people. When he gets there, he turns furtively round as though we’re co-conspirators in a crime. He won’t look at me, and he doesn’t seem to want me to look at him, so I look at the photos instead. The black-and-white ones are mostly of islanders at work: fishing, farming, weaving, and peat-cutting, but the more recent ones are of parties and holidays. Ripped Christmas hats, raised glasses, and grins around these pub tables; group shots taken in the same street beneath coloured bunting and a wide Stornoway Whisky Festival banner strung between two lampposts; windy-looking picnics on a beach that I now recognise as Long Stride. The faces change less than the hairdos and fashions, and when I recognise many of them, including Charlie, it gives me a surprising pang. In Blackheath, I don’t even know the names of my neighbours.

‘I told everyone,’ Charlie says in a low voice. ‘And I also told them that you just wanted to write a story, one story, and that would be it. No sideshow.’

‘Thank you so much, Charlie. I—’

‘The Morrisons are busy preparing for a shooting party on the estate next week, but Isla, Jimmy, Jaz, and the MacKenzies have agreed to talk to you Monday.’

‘That’s great. I mean … so they all knew Andrew?’

Charlie finally looks at me. ‘Aye. Much as anyone did.’

‘Thank you for doing this, Charlie. I really appreciate it. I was going to ask, if it’s not pushing my luck … do you think there’s a way I could talk to Mary too? What happened to her after Andrew died?’