She put her glass down on the bar and held on to it, as if she thought she might fall over if she let go. Then she looked again at Tormod.

“I’d have gone to the ends of the earth with you, Johnny,” she said. When Tormod returned a blank stare she looked back to Fin. “The widow O’Henley used to take me with her when she went up to stay with her cousin Peggy on Harris during the holidays. Easter, summer, Christmas. And she took me to the funeral there when Peggy’s boy was drowned in the bay. I’d met him a few times. He was a nice lad. Anyway, the house was full of relatives, and I slept on the floor of his room. Couldn’t sleep at all that night. And someone, maybe his parents, had laid out his birth certificate on the dresser. I decided that with all the business of the funeral no one would miss it immediately. And when they did, they would never connect it with me.”

“But why did you take it?” Marsaili asked.

“If we were going to run away together, me and Johnny, I thought maybe he would need a new identity. There’s not much you can do without a birth certificate.” She took a long reflective draw on her cigarette. “I never knew, when I took it, the circumstances in which it would be needed. Certainly not in the way I’d intended.” She smiled then. A tiny smile tinged with bitterness and irony. “As it turned out, it was far easier for me to change my own name. Just register a new one with Equity and I was no longer Ceit anything. I was Morag McEwan, actress. And I could play any part I wanted, on or off the stage. No one would ever know I was just some poor abandoned orphan girl, shipped out to the islands to be a widow’s slave.”

A silence laden with unasked questions and unspoken answers settled on the room. It was Tormod who broke it. “Can we go home now?” he said.

“In a while, Dad.”

Fin looked at Ceit. “Peter was murdered on Charlie’s beach, wasn’t he?”

Ceit pulled in her lower lip and bit on it as she nodded.

“Then I think it’s time we all knew the truth about what happened.”

“He made me promise never to tell a soul. And I never have.”

“It was a long time ago now, Ceit. If he could tell us himself, I’m sure he would. But Peter’s been found. Dug out of a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis. There’s going to be a murder investigation. So it’s important we know.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t Johnny was it?”

“Oh God, no!” Ceit seemed startled by the idea. “He would have died himself before touching a hair on that boy’s head.”

“Then who did?”