“They glow at night when the lights are on,” Morag said as she and Dino got out of the driver’s side. “It’s like walking on light.”

Plaster statues of naked ladies guarded the steps to the deck, while life-sized deer stood or lay in the garden, and a bronze mermaid draped herself over rocks around a small pool. Fin saw tubular neon lighting strung along the fencewire, and blocks of terracotta tiling among clumps of heather and a few hardy flowering shrubs that seemed somehow to have survived the wind. Windchimes sounded all around the house, a constant cacophony of bamboo and steel.

“Come away in.”

Fin followed Morag and Dino into a hallway where thick-piled tartan carpet led up a broad staircase to the first floor. The walls were covered with prints of Mayflowers and Madonnas, sailboats and saints. Chintzy ornaments stood on Greek columns, and a sleek, full-sized silver cheetah stretched itself out just inside the doorway to the living room and bar, a room lined by picture windows on both sides, and French windows out to the patio. Every available laying space, shelves and tables and bar top, was covered in china statuettes and mirrored jewellery boxes, lamps and lions. The tiled floor was polished to an almost reflective gleam.

Morag tossed her jacket on to a leather recliner and slipped behind the bar to pour their drinks. “Beer, whisky? Something more exotic?”

“A beer would be fine.” Fin had drunk less than half of his pint at Am Politician. He took his foaming glass from her and wandered through the bric-a-brac to the French windows and their view north across the Sound towards South Uist. Immediately below was the little bay with its tiny stone harbour from which the boat had come and gone across the water to Ludagh in the days before the building of roads had required the car ferry. “You were born here?”

“No. But I did most of my growing up here.”

Fin turned to see her taking a stiff pull at her gin and tonic. The ice in her glass sounded like the windchimes outside. “And how does a girl from Eriskay come to be a famous actress?”

She laughed uproariously. “I don’t know about famous,” she said, “but the first step for an Eriskay girl to being almost anything other than an Eriskay girl, is to leave the damned place.”

“What age were you when you left?”