‘And Robert? Did anyone actually see him going into the sea?’

‘My husband, Kenny,’ Isla says, looking down at the palms of her hands. ‘When the Unity wasn’t fishing, he’d work on the creel boats out of Carnach. He came back later than usual that day; Moira and I had just realised Lorne was missing and were going spare. I’d tried phoning the police, but the lines were down, and Kenny couldn’t even raise the coastguard from the boat. He took our collie out, gave him Lorne’s wee hat to scent. But it was too wild, too windy.’ She sighs. ‘He said later that he saw a man going into the sea on Big Beach, but by the time he managed to get down there, there was no one, nothing. The storm was so black ferocious by then, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it.’

‘Robert told his wife he was going out to check on the sheep,’ Bruce says. ‘She didn’t raise the alarm until he’d been gone a couple of hours.’

‘But why did he go into the sea?’ I say. ‘Did Kenny see anyone else? Is he – could I ask him?’

‘You’ll have a job,’ Bruce says. ‘He passed.’

‘You pass a bloody bowel movement,’ Isla scowls, her small, wide-set eyes almost black. ‘My husband died. He’s dead.’

Charlie throws me a look of reproach I pretend not to see.

‘You pass bloody bowel movements, eh?’ Jimmy says. ‘Want to get yourself to a bloody doctor, then.’ When he winks at Isla and gives her an astonishingly charming grin, her shoulders relax, and she huffs out a low breath.

‘Kenny said the man was running,’ she says eventually. ‘He thought later – we all thought – that Robert went in to save Lorne. That’s what we told Mary and the police. Kenny didn’t see anyone else, that’s what he told me. And whatever else he was, Robert wasn’t a man to kill himself. Not that way. If you’d seen the sea that day …’ She shudders, and her voice loses some of its weight. ‘No amount of despair would have driven a person to that.’

She catches Charlie’s eye, and I don’t miss the nearly imperceptible shake of his head.

‘What?’ My heartbeat quickens. ‘Charlie?’

He frowns. ‘It’s nothing. Some folk said—’

‘Alec said,’ Gillian snaps.

‘There were … we’d had a bit of a run of bad luck on the island,’ Charlie says. ‘The dig … they found some mummified bodies, disinterred them. Stupid superstitious nonsense, but—’

‘What kind of bad luck?’

He shakes his head again. ‘The weather was bad. Fodder crops failed. The storm season arrived late, but when it did …’ He clears his throat. ‘A few weeks before Robert and Lorne died, some sheep were lost too.’

‘Lost?’

The atmosphere in Isla’s living room has changed again. It feels opaque and oppressive. No one, I realise, is looking at anyone else.

‘Killed,’ Charlie says.

‘Killed?’

‘It happens. Dogs or polecats, even feral cats can attack sheep. And Hebrideans are a much smaller breed than the Scottish Blackface.’ But he doesn’t sound convinced. I think of brown hollow wing shafts, black eye sockets, deep and oval and empty.