And Fin laughed. “Not a chance. Souls don’t come any more lost than this one.” He turned quickly away. “Come on. I know a path down to the rocks.” And he headed off along the cliffs, too perilously close to the edge for Donald’s comfort as he chased after him.

After about fifty yards, the land dipped down, cliff giving way to crumbling peat and shale, sheltered from the sea’s assault by a towering cluster of rocks that stacked up from the shore. A ragged path led down at an angle to a protected shingle beach, almost hidden from the sea itself and nearly impossible to reach from either side. Only a matter of feet away, the ocean vented its anger all along the rocky shallows, the roar of it muffled by the stacks that kept it at bay. The clearest of water gathered in pools among the rocks below them, and the spray blew high over their heads.

“This was my secret place when I was a kid,” Fin said. “I used to come down here when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I never came back after my parents were killed and I went to live with my aunt.”

Donald looked around this tiny oasis of calm, the sound of the sea echoing around it, so close and yet so far away. Even the wind barely made it down here.

“I’ve been a couple of times since I got back.” Fin smiled sadly. “Maybe I thought I’d find the old me still here. A ghost from an age of innocence. Nothing but pebbles and crabs, though, and a very distant echo of the past. But I think that’s probably only in my head.” He grinned and planted one foot on a ledge of rock. “What did you come to see me about?”

“I woke up thinking about Tormod, and his stolen identity.” Donald laughed. “Well, after I’d drunk about a pint of water and swallowed two paracetamol, that is. I haven’t had that much whisky in a long time.”

“Catriona will be banning me from the manse.”

Donald grinned. “She already has.”

Fin laughed, and it felt good to laugh with Donald again after all these years. “So what was it you thought about Tormod?”

“There was an article in the Gazette a couple of months ago, Fin. About a genealogy centre down at the south end of Harris. Seallam, it’s called. One man’s hobby that became an obsession. And now it’s just about the most comprehensive record of family relationships in the Outer Hebrides. Better than any church or government records. This guy’s traced tens of thousands of family connections from the islands as far as North America and Australia. If anyone has a record of the Macdonald family and all its branches, it would be him.” He raised his eyebrows. “What do you think?”