I do scream then, loud and long. And back away from the door too fast. I end up tripping on my own feet, hitting the wooden floor with a heavy and painful thud. When I get back up again, there’s only silence. I can’t even hear the wind or the sea. How long I stand there, I don’t know. But afterwards, I can’t bring myself to get back into the bed. Instead, I turn on every light in the room before curling into a ball on the sofa, where I shiver and shake and stare at the walls and curtains until dawn.

*

When I wake up, I’m stiff and sore. Slices of daylight stripe the pine walls through gaps in the curtains. I think of Ravi’s belligerent You sure you’re okays; you don’t sound rights masquerading as concern. Have you been taking your meds?

‘I’m taking my meds, you arsehole,’ I say to the ceiling.

The particular roll of his eyes that would make me feel so small, so defenceless. Yeah, you sound pretty rational.

But I’m not hallucinating. I’m not imagining things. This isn’t a dead man come back to haunt me. And it isn’t a demon in a crematorium either; it isn’t the dark fear that I now drag around. It’s not inside me, it’s outside me. And the only danger is in how I react to it, how I choose to deal with it.

That creeping and tapping in the night was not a ghost. It was a person. Perhaps – probably – the same person who left dead birds on my doorstep and followed me in the dark. A person who hopes I will leave. Maybe even the person who murdered Robert. And I will deal with that by taking control. By trying to find out who. And why. It’s the reason I’m here after all.

The day is cool and still. There are no dead birds on the path, no marks on the cottage walls. No indication at all that anyone was ever here. I open the wheelie bin, look down at the bag containing the two dead crows, warily open it. They look completely unchanged; they don’t even smell, and something makes me want to hide them, to keep them as proof of what that person is doing. I pull the bag out and take it back to the blackhouse, where I shove it inside an old canvas rucksack behind the coat rack in the mudroom.

When I walk over to the farmhouse, Will opens the door with a welcoming smile, but whatever he sees in my face is enough to make him blink, frown.

‘You still up for going to Stornoway?’

I nod. ‘I just – there’s something I need to do first. To get.’

‘Get?’

I’m fidgeting, and make myself stop. ‘I noticed some photos, back at the pub. Of the Stornoway Whisky Festival? Charlie said that in ’94, the people who went to the festival couldn’t get back until the day after the storm.’ When Will only looks confused, I make myself say it. ‘So they can’t have had anything to do with whatever happened that night.’