Downstairs, though, much had been protected. The kitchen, certainly, was virtually untouched, though still cluttered with everything they had dragged across from the Weaver’s Nook. Even the bench table beneath the stairs had been spared the brunt of the rain thanks to the staircase – which Anna thought would probably need replacing. Anna looked up at her cookery books, still snug in their narrow bookshelves overhead. She reached up for one of Taymar Zetelli’s, wondering whether it would be damp. She couldn’t reach, but before she could find something to stand on, a voice spoke from behind her.

‘Let me help.’

It was Robert MacKenzie, strangely smart in a suit and jacket, although he’d taken off the tie he’d worn for the funeral. He came to stand next to her and reached up to pull down the book she’d been reaching for, handing it to her without a word.

‘I wanted to see if they were wet,’ she explained. ‘I wondered whether the damp had got into the floor upstairs.’

Robert looked around. ‘It’s not safe to be here.’

‘I needed to see it again,’ she said. ‘To be sure.’

He turned back to look at her, his eyes in shadow. ‘To be sure? Of what?’

‘Of what to do with the Fishergirl’s Luck. It needs so much work.’

There was a silence. In it he turned away. ‘What will you do? Sell it?’

‘I don’t want to. Really, I don’t. But it needs so much repair. I can’t let it go to ruin. There’s so much history here. I can feel it, can’t you? It’s in the walls. It’d be wrong to let it rot because I can’t afford to fix her myself.’

Robbie didn’t answer, and for a few minutes there was nothing apart from the faint snicking of the tarp, the flickering of the strange blue light.

‘Pat said you’ve put money into the Inn,’ Anna said.

Robert nodded, still not looking at her. ‘Dougie’s going to need somewhere to live.’

Anna looked at him in astonishment. ‘Douglas McKean’s going to live there? Do the others know that? Does he know that?’

He laughed at that. ‘Yes. There’s nowhere else for him to go, Anna. He’s never lived anywhere but Crovie. I can’t make him go into a home, at least not for a while yet. I couldn’t do that to him, not now.’

There was another brief silence. ‘Maybe he should live here.’

Robert froze for a second, then turned towards her. ‘Sorry?’

‘Once the roof and whatever else needs repairing is fixed, Douglas McKean could live here, at the Fishergirl’s Luck. Do you think he would?’

Robert MacKenzie didn’t say anything. He turned his head away, towards the light visible through her kitchen window. Anna watched him.