‘Doing what?’

‘Just standing there. On the beach. But …’

He glances away from me, looks out the window instead, where the rain is tapping against the glass. ‘You’ve been out there? To Big Beach?’

I nod.

‘Half of it was gone. Just gone. The sky was black, and the storm clouds were racing inland from the horizon like smoke from a wildfire. And the waves.’ He shakes his head. ‘Even from the bluffs they looked terrifying. Between forty and fifty feet high in hundred-mile-an-hour winds, they said later.’ He looks at me. ‘You’d have to have been a madman to go down there. And he was just standing there.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I shouted, but that was pointless. And there was no way I was going down there too. When the wind and rain got worse, I went back to the dig.’ He stares out the window again. ‘And then I went back to my bunkhouse.’

‘Most of the roads, particularly in the west, were flooded,’ Charlie says, still crouched beside Isla. ‘Rest of us had to stay overnight in Stornoway, till the worst of it passed. By the time we got back the next morning’ – he squeezes her fist – ‘they were both gone.’

I take a fortifying breath. Think of Will’s I’ve always thought it was weird. Why would anyone walk into the sea in the middle of a storm? ‘Did none of you ever think that Robert – or Lorne – could have been murdered?’

The atmosphere changes in an instant, and I want to take the question back. But how else can I move forward? How can I even start to prove anything at all if I can’t even ask that one question? Or get an answer?

‘No, we didn’t,’ Gillian says, her cheeks pink. ‘You already know that we didn’t. Don’t. The sea took them.’

Charlie straightens with an audible pop of both knees. ‘She’s asking because she has to. It’s what the papers latched on to when she was a kid – her saying that Andrew was murdered.’

I give him a grateful look that he doesn’t acknowledge.

‘If someone wanted to do it,’ Bruce says, his face not flushed like his wife’s, but cool and still, ‘to murder either a wee defenceless boy or an angry fit young man – they picked a black dirty night to do it. They’d have been just as likely to drown themselves.’

‘But how do you know for sure that they drowned?’ I say. ‘Or that they even went into the sea at all? Will said their bodies were never found.’

‘If the tides and currents are right, a body can wash up further north on Lewis,’ Jimmy says, expression impassive. ‘Cliff Beach in Valtos has seen a few over the years. But, more often than not, in storms or high seas, bodies are washed out deep and never seen again.’ He shrugs. ‘Unless it’s in a fisherman’s net.’

‘We found Lorne’s dinghy a few days after it happened,’ Charlie says, leaning a shoulder against the mantelpiece. ‘Across the sound. Washed up on Hollow Beach.’