Fin sat by the fire, nursing a mug of dark, sweet tea, and gazed from the small, recessed window out across the beach below. All his instincts told him that he was looking down on the scene of the crime. That this was where the young man whose body had been taken from the peat bog in Lewis had actually been murdered. He still had no idea yet who that young man was, although if he held his breath and listened to the wind he could almost hear it whisper that he was within touching distance now.

“Mr. Macleod?”

Fin turned his head towards the table.

The old priest smiled. “I think I might have found who knitted this.”

Fin stood up and crossed the room to join the priest at the table, and found himself looking down at an old black-and-white photograph of an Eriskay jersey. It was pin-sharp, and placed next to Gunn’s fax of the artist’s sketch it was possible—eyes flickering back and forth from one to the other—to make a direct comparison between the patterns. The old man indicated all the points of correlation. There were too many to be in any doubt that they had been knitted by the same hand. They were, to all intents and purposes, identical.

Fin stabbed the fax with his finger. “But this wasn’t a jersey.”

“No.” The priest shook his head thoughtfully. “I think it was a bed cover of some kind. Knitted squares sewn together. It would have been wonderfully warm.” He traced the faint outline of the right-angled corner of one of the squares, and Fin thought that a dead man would have had no need of warmth. “You still haven’t told me where you got this.”

“I’m afraid,” Fin said, “that I’m not really at liberty to say just yet.”

The old man nodded with the fatalistic acceptance of someone whose life had been built on faith.

But Fin couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. “Whose knitting pattern is it?”

The priest turned over the photograph, and written on the other side in a neat hand and faded ink was the name Mary-Ann Gillies. And the date 1949.