Fin sighed. “Most people spend their lives never knowing what lies beneath the stones they walk on. Cops spend theirs lifting those stones and having to deal with what they find.” He drained his bottle. “I was sick of spending my life in the shadows, Fionnlagh. When all you know is the darkest side of human nature, you start to find the darkness in yourself. And that’s a scary thing.”

Fionnlagh tossed his empty bottle into a box of them by the door, and the dull clunk of glass on glass filled the silence in the kitchen. He still appeared ill at ease.

Fin said, “I hope I haven’t interrupted anything.”

Quick eyes flashed towards him, then away again. “You haven’t.” Then, “Mum went to see Grampa this afternoon.”

“Any joy?”

The boy shook his head. “No. He was sitting out in the rain, apparently, but seemed to think he was on a boat. Then he started wittering on about collecting seaweed to fertilize the crows.”

Fin scowled. “Crows?”

“Aye. He used the Gaelic word, feannagan. Crows.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Fin hesitated. “Fionnlagh . . .” The boy looked at him expectantly. “Better let me tell your mum about your grandfather.” And Fionnlagh nodded, only too happy, it seemed, to be relieved of the responsibility.

The wind whipped and tugged at the outer shell of his tent, straining at the guys, while the inner tent inhaled and exhaled partially and erratically, like a failing lung. The rain driving against the thin plastic exterior skin was almost deafening. The glow of Fin’s battery-powered fluorescent filled it with a strange blue light, by which he sat wrapped in his sleeping bag reading Gunn’s illicit autopsy report on the body in the bog.

He was fascinated by the description of the Elvis tattoo on the left forearm, and the legend, Heartbreak Hotel, although it had been the headplate which had definitively established death as being some time in the late fifties. Here was a young man with a passion for the world’s first rock star, whose intellectual powers had been diminished by some accident that had left him brain-damaged. Related, in some way, to Marsaili’s father, whose own identity was now shrouded in mystery.

It had been a brutal murder. Tied up, stabbed, throat slit. Fin tried to imagine Marsaili’s dad as his killer, but simply couldn’t. Tormod, or whoever he was, had always been a gentle sort of man. A big man, yes. Powerful in his day. But a man with such an even temperament that Fin could not recall a single occasion when he had even heard him raise his voice.