‘Robert didn’t trust anyone,’ Jimmy says. ‘We figured the least we could do was prove him wrong.’

‘And we didn’t want trouble.’ Gillian frowns. ‘Maybe that was wrong too, but we already had Alec screaming murder to the high heavens, and …’ She shoots me a glare that’s only half angry. ‘It was a bad black time. The whole island was in mourning, and it was enough.’ She closes her eyes. ‘It was enough.’

When Bruce puts an arm around his wife and squeezes her shoulder, I feel a pang of guilt. That I know is about to get a lot worse.

‘Will you tell me what happened? The night Robert and Lorne died?’

For a long-drawn-out moment, the silence is broken only by those crackles of burning peat. And then Isla exhales a loud, resigned sigh.

‘There was a storm. A big one. We’d had a lot of bad storms that winter and well into spring, but nothing came close to it. They didn’t normally have names back then, but they called this one Òrd na Mara, “Hammer of the Sea”. Because it was the sea did more damage than the wind, rain, and lightning combined. It roared over beaches and machair, flooded fields and houses on lower coastlines, swept everything in its path away.’

‘A fair few of us were over in Stornoway,’ Charlie says. ‘That weekend was the annual whisky festival.’

I think of those photos in the pub: years of grinning faces beneath the same wide Stornoway Whisky Festival banner strung between two lampposts.

‘The storm wasn’t expected out here until late on Sunday, April tenth,’ Isla continues. ‘But it came fast and hard on the Saturday instead. I was here with Moira, Charlie’s wife. Looking after Sheena and Lorne while the MacDonalds were at the festival.’ She pauses, takes a breath. ‘Trying to entertain them and my son, David, with Hungry Hippos, if I remember right. And when that didn’t work, with chocolate left over from Easter.’ She stops, and as she pinches the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb, I realise her hands are shaking.

‘Lorne loved a storm,’ she says, staring into the fire. ‘Loved the sea. He had a wee dinghy. He knew he wasn’t allowed to take it out on his own, and even then, only on the freshwater lochs and lochans, but … you could feel the storm coming. It was like a charge in the air, like electricity, and it turned the kids wild.’ She swallows. ‘We put them all down for a wee nap, and he must have snuck out. Neither of us noticed. I was tired, I always get bad headaches before a storm. It was hours before … before—’

‘Isla,’ Charlie says low, going over to the fire and clasping her face in his big weathered hands. ‘It was no one’s fault, a ghràidh.’

‘And Robert?’ I ask, my voice small.

‘I saw him down on Big Beach,’ Jaz says. ‘Couple of us volunteered to finish the storm prep at the dig while the others went to the festival. When the storm arrived early, I went out to check on the tarps and tyres around six p.m., and when I heard the waves – they were like mortar explosions – I couldn’t resist going over to the bluffs at West Point to have a look. And there he was.’