‘Any time,’ he said. For a second it looked as if he might want to say something else, but instead he nodded to them both, glanced over at Pat, and went.

Liam drove Pat and Anna to Gardenstown and made them both cocoa in Robert MacKenzie’s kitchen while the two women sat together. Anna wasn’t sure that the events of the past hours had really sunk in for Pat. They hadn’t for Anna, either. Despite her grief, Pat was exhausted, and at length Anna managed to persuade her into bed. She sat on the thick quilt in the MacKenzies’ cosy attic room and held the older woman’s hand as she drifted into sleep.

‘I can stay, if you like,’ Liam said as Anna crept back down the stairs with blankets for herself.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Anna told him. ‘All I want is to sleep.’

Liam nodded and then pulled her into his arms, resting his cheek against her hair.

‘When I think about what could have happened—’ he said.

‘But it didn’t,’ Anna pointed out softly. ‘Thanks to you.’

After he left, Anna lay down on the sofa beneath her nest of blankets and listened to the storm raging outside. She imagined Robert MacKenzie on the lifeboat. The thought of him out there, in the very midst of the storm, terrified her. She drifted into a fitful sleep, filled with dreams of darkness and ruin. In the middle of it all stood the Fishergirl’s Luck. She woke with tears on her face, disoriented. There was a weak morning light pushing in around the curtains, but still the wind blew.

‘Hey,’ said a soft voice.

Robert was sitting in the armchair opposite the sofa where she lay. He’d changed into his usual clothes. His face was lined with exhaustion, dark smudges beneath his eyes. Anna said nothing, but reached out her hand. He took it, his thumb smoothing over her skin as they looked at each other. They sat like that for a long time, until Anna fell back into another unsettled sleep.

It took two more days before the storm had exhausted itself, and even then the rain still fell. When it had died down enough for a person to be able to stand upright, the tattered remains of the Usual Suspects assembled in Gamrie harbour and looked across the grey waters of the bay to Crovie. Even from this distance it was possible to see the huge scar of the landslide, a wide slash in the cliff behind the village. It was hard to see how any of the houses would have avoided the onslaught. The row was clearly still standing, but it was impossible to tell what damage the individual houses had sustained to their rear walls and foundations.