And because I don’t want to lie to him, I say nothing.

‘This place … it isn’t a council estate in Peckham or a back alley in Glasgow,’ Will eventually says. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty danger here. Plenty that’ll kill you. But it isn’t people. The whole Isle of Lewis and Harris, there’s been one murder in over fifty years. What’ll kill you here is the land. Or your own stupidity. And more often, the sea.’ He leans back on his hands again, looks out at the waves, already wilder than when we were down on the shore. ‘Their bodies never washed up – not his or Lorne’s – they were just lost out there forever.’

I don’t want to look at the sea any more, so I lie back, look up at the impossibly blue sky instead. Mum and I used to spend hours on Southend Beach, staring up at the clouds. She’d say that every one looked just like me. I’d always get mad about it; frustrated that she wouldn’t play the game properly, until one day she turned to look at me with an expression so unusually solemn it almost seemed sad.

I see you everywhere, sweetie. On a good day, I even see you in the mirror. Her smile, I remember, had trembled a little, and I’d wondered if she was going to cry. You are always the best thing, my darling, the most wonderful thing in my whole life. At eight or nine years old, I’d squirrelled that memory away. Put it in a box that I seemed to know I would need later.

Now I wonder how many times she felt the same debilitating terror as I did watching that demon crawling into her coffin. How often she lost all sense of control, of herself. Because everything changed for me that day in the crematorium. I don’t know who I am any more. And if you begin to doubt one thing about yourself, you begin to doubt everything. Coming here, I know, is as much an escape as it is a hope for absolution. It’s tempting to start from scratch. To become someone else. Someone with the conviction, the certainty, of that little girl who cried I’m Andrew MacNeil! Someone who has a gift instead of a curse. Someone who has nothing to be guilty or ashamed about. Wanting something to be true might be a very dangerous road to go down, but it is a road. It’s somewhere to go.

‘Shit!’

I turn to see Will lunge for the wine bottle as a strong gust of wind roars in from the sea. When I sit up, I catch sight of something beyond his shoulder. Someone is standing on the cliff above the western end of the beach, where the headland of Roeness starts stretching a narrow finger out into the sea. The figure is tall and straight and perfectly still, like the Fisherman monument at Long Stride. Watching us.