He pauses for just a moment, and then lets out a low sigh. ‘Her and Calum went back to Aberdeen. She kept in touch for a few years: Christmas cards to Isla and my wife, the occasional letter. But they soon petered out, the way these things usually do.’ He looks across at the photos. ‘Would you want to still be bound to the place that took your husband?’

I glance up at the piece of carved driftwood mounted high on the wall. The sheep will spend its life in fear of the wolf, and then be eaten by the shepherd. ‘You said that he was never happy. That he’d had a bad past. What—’

‘He believed he’d done something terrible. His guilt was like an anchor that one day dragged him down to the bottom.’

My heart stutters, skips a beat. ‘What did he do?’

Charlie’s tone turns impatient. ‘He never said. And I never asked.’

‘Why are you telling me all this now?’

He squares his shoulders and turns back to the bar. ‘Three o’clock, Monday, at Isla Campbell’s house. Last one past Sheltered Bay, ’bout six hundred yards east of Blairmore. You can’t miss it.’

He stops after taking no more than a couple of steps away from me, turns around, and comes back again. His eyes are dark, their pupils big and black.

‘Because it never sat right with me. Any of it. After he died and Mary left, it was like he never existed. And back in ’99, I told you – and everyone who came with you – that that was true. That he never had.’

‘Charlie, I—’

‘Maybe it’s not your story you’re here to write.’ He reaches out suddenly, and I step back until I realise that he’s untacking a small laminated photograph squashed between two landscapes. He hands it to me. ‘Maybe it’s his.’

It’s a grainy colour photo of a young man standing alone in a grassy meadow in front of a hill, the blue sky and sea behind him. Tall and broad, in jeans and a wax jacket, arms folded over his chest. Brown-haired, with a thick beard, deep-set eyes, and a stoic frown.

‘Is that Andrew?’

‘It’s Robert. He never chose Andrew. You want to write his story, call him by the name he chose.’

After Charlie leaves, I look down at that photo for a long time. Those eyes. That frown.

‘Hello, Robert,’ I whisper. And look briefly around the pub before slipping the photo into my pocket.

*

I regret not taking Kelly up on the offer of her sofa only when the lights of Blairmore are gone, and I can see nothing but the bouncing circle of my torchlight on tarmac. The night is dry, but the wind has picked up. I can hear it whistling through narrow spaces, howling around the cliffs and Ben Wyvis, and I imagine this little island shrinking slowly, smaller and smaller, scoured and consumed by the Atlantic winds and waves.