She moves so quickly that I almost let out a cry when her fingers close tight on my wrist, spinning me round.

‘When I said you should leave, it wasn’t only for my mum and dad.’ She’s talking in a low almost-whisper. There’s still hostility in her eyes, maybe even some small measure of that fear I’d seen, shining and dark, on the night Alec attacked me in the phone box. She glances down at my wrist, the skin pinched white around her fingers. ‘You’re not safe here.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I shake her off so that she won’t know my pulse has quickened.

‘I don’t know. I just feel it.’

And it’s so close to Mum’s People like us, Maggie, we have to listen to our bad feelings that I gasp and step backwards. ‘What does that mean?’

But Sheena only shrugs, her eyes glittering. ‘It means you should leave.’

Anger finally comes to my rescue. ‘Is this about Will?’ I say, and I feel a burst of petty satisfaction when her cheeks redden and her hands become fists.

Kelly rounds the end of the aisle, and the expression on her face freezes as she looks from Sheena to me. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Fine,’ I say, even though the smile I give her feels more like a grimace. ‘Everything’s fine.’

CHAPTER 15

Robert

It’s barely noon, but I’m exhausted. The sheep are ill-tempered and loud, and the rain is cold and unrelenting. I woke to rain like this on the morning of the funerals. That day feels very close today. Has felt very close ever since that night in Charlie’s bothan. Its hangover hasn’t left me either. It bangs at my temples, keeps my temper too short.

I remember standing at my bedroom window as the coffins were carried down the main street. I traced their shapes in the condensation, far easier to outline than three boats rigged for fly-dragging.

‘Why aren’t you dressed? We have to go down now!’

Mamaidh’s face was pinched pale, though anger had given her cheekbones two high spots of red. Her black dress for church exposed bony collarbones and gathered in empty folds around her waist. In just two weeks, she’d become so much less. Already, I couldn’t remember what her smile looked like.

I stared back down at that slow, wet procession. I couldn’t hear the mourners, but I could see their faces: drawn down like melted candle wax, or turned up to the dismal sky, distorted by the rain against the glass. And I could hear the piper, already past and out of sight, playing ‘Going Home’.

If ever my father or any of his fishermen had passed a minister on their way down to the boats, they would turn around and go back home. And for fear of angering the Celtic sea gods, he could only ever be referred to as the man with the black coat; his church the bell house. No prayers could be said on board a fishing boat. Instead, whisky was thrown over the bows and salt over the decks. And every spring, my father would sain the boats by setting a bucket full of old rags dipped in diesel on fire and carrying it around the decks, above and below, smoking out every corner. All of it the same as carving Norse runes into a keel, or offering sacrifice to Njo˛ rðr, the god of fishing and the sea. The same kind of faith, the same hope, in something unseen. A common ground between us that he chose to never see.