Fin nodded his understanding. “I’ll bet though, that if he could, he would want to tell you everything, Marsaili. All the things he’s kept inside all these years, all the things he’s shared with no one. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.” He ran a hand back through tight blond curls in frustrated empathy. Who could ever have guessed the truth behind the facade? “We walk into that nursing home, and all we see are a lot of old people sitting around. Vacant eyes, sad smiles. And we just dismiss them as . . . well, old. Spent, hardly worth bothering about. And yet behind those eyes every one of them has had a life, a story they could tell you. Of pain, love, hope, despair. All the things we feel, too. Getting old doesn’t make them any less valid, or any less real. And it’ll be us one day. Sitting there watching the young ones dismiss us as . . . well, old. And what’s that going to feel like?”

Guilt burned hot in her eyes. “I’ve never stopped loving him.”

“Then believe in him, too. And believe that whatever happened, whatever he did, he did it for a reason.”

Visibility over the north-west corner of Lewis was almost zero. The rain blew off the ocean in obscuring sheets so fine it was like a fog. Only the vaguest hint of white breakers smashing over black gneiss could be seen beyond the machair. Even the powerful beam of light sent out into the dark by the lighthouse at the Butt was barely discernible.

Marsaili’s mother was startled by their arrival, huddled together, sheltering under Fin’s coat, already soaked through on the short dash from the car to the kitchen door.

“Where have you been?” she said. “Fionnlagh said you’d gone to Edinburgh.”

“Then why are you asking?”

Mrs. Macdonald tutted her irritation. “You know what I mean.”

“It was personal business, Mum.” Marsaili and Fin had agreed on the drive up to Ness that they would say nothing to her mother of what they had learned about her father. It would all, no doubt, come out one day. But for the moment they had decided it would serve no useful purpose.

Fin said, “We’d like to look through Tormod’s things if that’s possible, Mrs. Macdonald.”

Colour rose on her cheeks. “Why?”

“We just would, Mum.” Marsaili headed off through the house to her father’s old study, her mother trailing in her wake.

“There’s no purpose to be served in that, Marsaili. That stuff’s no more use to you or me than it is to him any more.”