Anna sat staring at the phone once they had hung up. The thought that Young Robbie MacKenzie had been out amid the storm tide was horrifying. Even if the worst of the weather had passed, the chop was still bad even now. How could a boy of ten navigate a wooden dinghy through such a swell? The cold Anna felt gave way to sweat. She sat on the sofa and put both hands over her face. Did Robert know that his son was missing? She hadn’t thought to ask Barbara. He wasn’t home, so probably not. Unless he knew but couldn’t come back for some reason. If he was stuck out somewhere on a call with the lifeboat, for example. Anna couldn’t bear to think of how awful that would be for him – not knowing where Robbie was, unable to search for the boy himself. Look at how broken he had been by his wife’s death. If his son were to—

‘Oh, Robbie,’ Anna whispered, close to tears.

She thought of the last time she’d seen the boy. It was a few weeks past now. She’d been up on the cliffs walk, headed towards Troup Head, searching to see if any of the wild gooseberries that Bren had mentioned in one of her notes were still growing where she had described. Anna had passed the cove where she’d picked the sea purslane on the day she’d first met both of the MacKenzies together. Young Robbie had been too far away to see her, but the bright flash of his yellow windcheater had stood out so vividly against the grey-green sea, like a pennant calling for her attention. He’d been bringing the dinghy into shore. That was obviously a favourite spot of his, she thought, although that wasn’t surprising, given what he’d told her on that first day, when he and his father had rescued her from the cliff and brought her back to Crovie. What was it Robbie said? That the cove was on the dolphins’ route. Anna had assumed that’s why he’d gone back there again, because it’d give him a good chance to see the pod.

Anna sat up straighter, her heart thumping. What had the boy been doing down there? She recalled him now, leaning over the side of the tiny boat, pulling at something.

A net. He’d been dragging a net out of the water.

Anna grabbed at Bren’s notebook, frantically paging through it until she found the note that had led her to look for the gooseberries in the first place. Bren had made a gooseberry fool with the small, tart fruits, but Anna had in mind to use the recipe as a base for a gooseberry and amaretto semifreddo that she thought would be a perfect way to follow a rich Cullen Skink. But there had been something else mentioned in Bren’s note, too.