‘Jesus, Maggie.’

‘It’s just … it’d be helpful to know, that’s all. Who they are.’

He looks at me, and I go on trying not to care what he thinks, but it’s impossible. When he finally shrugs, the relief I feel is terrible.

‘Guess you’ll be needing a decoy then?’

*

‘We’re not open for lunch yet,’ Gillian says, when she opens Am Blàr Mòr’s big door.

‘We’re just away to Stornoway,’ Will says. ‘Maggie needs a pee.’

I try on my most convincing in-need-of-a-pee smile, and Gillian nods, stands back from the door.

‘Thanks,’ Will says, trailing her back to the bar. He picks up a flier from a table and shoots me a wink. ‘Pottery Throw Down? You’ll empty the place faster than Donnie doing bagrock.’

I march to the loo, banging its door hard before slinking back into the pub and the long red wall of photographs. I find what I want quickly: a Stornoway Whisky Festival 1994 banner strung between two lampposts. Beneath it, smiling people in waterproofs, waving plastic tumblers of whisky. When I take the photo down, it leaves a very obvious empty space, but I stuff it inside my mac anyway, its narrow frame catching on the zip.

‘All done!’ I say, probably too brightly, as I march back to the bar.

When we get into the car, Will grins at me before starting the engine.

‘We make a good team.’

I take out the photograph so I don’t have to answer. I recognise the view: a cluster of fishing boats moored on the opposite side of the harbour from the ferry terminal, Lews Castle and its grounds sprawled behind the narrow corridor of water. The photograph is blurry, water-damaged around its edges. I squint at the faces.

‘That could be Charlie, right?’

Will leans close, looks at the grinning face beneath a neon-yellow hood and half-obscured by a full tumbler of whisky. ‘Yeah, maybe. Three sheets to the wind, looks like.’ He points to the shorter, darker-haired man next to him. ‘And that’s maybe Bruce?’ He peers closer still – close enough that I can smell his skin, see the slow, steady beat of his pulse against his neck – and points at a tall out-of-focus figure at the photo’s right-hand edge. ‘That could be Jimmy, I guess?’ He shrugs.

I look at another man and maybe a couple standing at the left-hand edge of the frame, but here the photo is damaged and their faces blurred perhaps beyond recognition. I stare at them for a long time as if I expect their features to resolve like a magic-eye picture. When they don’t, I make myself stop looking, and push the photo inside my handbag.

*

The town hall is a vast building. Red brick and red wood, with tall arched windows, and tiled roof turrets topped with gilt banner weathervanes. Will takes me round to the rear entrance on a busy pedestrian precinct, holds open the door.

‘Registration Service is just through there on the left,’ he says. ‘I need to order some feed in town, but there’s a bar and restaurant in the Crown Hotel, down the other end of this street. I’ll wait for you there?’