The ruin stood in an elevated position on the hillside, almost lost in long grass that bowed in the wind. The top half of the crofthouse had fallen down years before, the front door an opening between two crumbling walls. Small, deep-set windows on either side of it remained intact, although all wood and glass were long gone. Chimneys survived at each gable. One even had a tall, yellow ceramic pot still perched precariously on top of it. The foundations of other buildings around the house remained visible among the grasses: a shed where they no doubt kept the beasts; a barn for storing the hay for winter feed. The strip of land where it would have been grown extended down the hill to the road below. At the far side of the road, sunlight glistered all across the small bay and the Sound beyond it. Cloud fragments raced across the bluest of skies, chasing their own shadows across the hillside. In the tiny, wind-blasted garden of a white cottage at the roadside, tall spring flowers with vividly coloured red and yellow heads ducked and dived among the turbulent currents of air.

Clearly visible from here, on the hilltop opposite, stood the granite church built from the proceeds of a single night’s catch. It had dominated the life of the island for more than a century, and physically loomed over it still.

Fin picked his way carefully through the interior of the crofthouse, a jumble of fallen walls half-hidden by grasses and nettles. This was the Gillies croft that Morag McEwan had pointed out to him yesterday. The home of the boy called Donald John, who had been belted for disobeying his headmaster at Daliburgh school. The home of Mary-Anne Gillies, who had knitted the blanket whose pattern was blanched into the body of a young man taken from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis four hours north of here. More, Fin reflected. For in the days when the body had been buried, the roads would have been much poorer, there would have been few if any causeways, and the ferry crossings would have taken longer. To the folk living on Eriskay back then, the Isle of Lewis would have been a whole world away.

The blast of a car’s horn was carried to him on the wind, and he stepped out of the ruin, knee-deep in spittle-grass and yellow flowers, to see Morag’s pink Mercedes drawn up beside his own car at the foot of the hill. The roof was down, and she waved up at him.

He started off down the hill, treading cautiously through the patches of bog where the land squelched beneath his feet, until he reached the car. Dino barked a greeting from his accustomed place on his mistress’s lap. “Good morning,” Fin said.

“What are you doing up there, a ghràidh?”

“You told me yesterday that was the Gillies croft.”

“Aye, that’s right.”