The room was dimly lit, the evening already drawing in, and the tall windows gave onto the shaded garden. A threadbare carpet lay underfoot and there were assorted groupings of high-backed leather chairs scattered about, as though someone had been playing a game of hide and seek with them. A tooled leather-topped reading desk was set in the middle of the room with an atlas opened onto . . .

She checked . . .

Onto the Outer Hebrides. A coincidence? Who had been looking at her home, she wondered. Father or son? Her finger automatically pressed on the tiny green dot amid the blue that had been her life. How small it looked from here. How insignificant. Why should the wider world ever have cared about their woes? It was a wonder to her that anyone had ever heard of her archipelago at all.

She looked around again at the shelves. There were more volumes than one person could ever read in a lifetime, all leather-bound and gilt-leaved. She walked over to the nearest stack and let her finger trip over the spines, feeling the indentations of the hand-stamped titles. She reached for one – Baudelaire’s L’Albatros – and opened it. She couldn’t understand a word but the mottled pages released a distinct and yet intangible scent. Instinctively, she raised it to her face and inhaled, savouring the smell. Several others she tried all yielded the same musty scent too. She walked further around, her hand trailing over the spines and her head tipped to the side as she read the titles, looking for words of interest.

Her attention fell upon a large book further along, set into a niche and placed on display on a wooden reading stand much like the minister had used in the kirk for his sermons. The book was opened onto an illustration that showed a large bird standing with its immense wings outstretched, like a phoenix. The image had been finely drawn and vividly coloured, the calligraphic text unintelligible at this distance. But she knew its contents; in fact, she knew them by heart, for she had the very same book, the very same edition. Right this moment it was carefully stowed in her bag beneath her bed and wrapped in an old woollen shawl that had belonged to her mother.