“Beinn Ruigh Choinnich. It’s the mountain that shelters the harbour at Lochboisdale. They would have seen it from the ferry, from a long way off.” He reached out a hand to brush stray hairs from her eyes. “What else did he say, Marsaili?”

“Nothing that made much sense. At least, not then. He was talking to Ceit, not me. He said he would never forget their days at The Dean. Or the turrets at Danny’s. Something like that. Reminding them of their place in the world.” She looked at him with pain etched in every line of her face. “And something else, that takes on a whole different meaning now.” She closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly. Then opened them wide. “He said, we didn’t do too bad for a couple of orphan waifs.”

There must have been light in Fin’s eyes, because she frowned, canting her head, staring at him. “What is it?”

And if she had seen light, it was the light of revelation. He said, “Marsaili, I think maybe I know exactly what he meant when he talked about The Dean. And Danny’s turrets. And it must mean that Ceit, the girl who boarded with the widow O’Henley, came with them on the boat.” And he thought, maybe there is someone after all who still knows the truth. He stood, then, and offered Marsaili his hand. She pulled herself up to stand beside him. He said, “If we can get seats, we should try to be on the first flight to Edinburgh tomorrow.”

The only light in the room came from the blue-tinged illumination of his laptop computer screen. He sat alone at the desk, in the dark, the stillness of the house pressing in all around him. The presence of others, in other rooms, seemed somehow only to increase his sense of isolation.

This was the room where he had spent so many hours tutored by Artair’s dad. Where he and Artair had sat, individually or together, listening to long lectures on Hebridean history, or puzzling over mathematical equations. Where the years of his boyhood had passed in suffocating incarceration, freedom glimpsed only occasionally in stolen glances from the window. Marsaili had said he could spend the night on the fold-down settee. But there were too many memories here. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain on the card table where they worked. The rows of books with their exotic titles, still there on the shelves. The smell of Artair’s dad’s pipe smoke, hanging in the still air in slow-moving blue strands. If he breathed deeply the scent of it remained, even if only in his memory.