But Fionnlagh kept his focus on his mother. “You looked after Artair’s mother for long enough. And she wasn’t even your own flesh and blood.”

Marsaili turned twenty years of resentment on her son. “Yes, well, maybe you’d like to change the bed every time he soils it, and go looking for him every time he wanders off. Maybe you’d like to feed him at every meal, and be there every time he’s lost or forgotten something.”

Fionnlagh didn’t respond, except with the merest of shrugs, and kept forking chilli into his face.

Fin said, “There’s a complication, Fionnlagh.”

“Yes?” Fionnlagh barely glanced at him.

“They dug a body out of the peat bog near Siader a few days ago. A young man, about your age. As far as they can tell, he’s been there since the late fifties.”

Fionnlagh’s fork paused midway between his plate and his mouth. “And?”

“He was murdered.”

The fork went back down to the plate. “What’s that got to do with us?”

“It seems he was related somehow to your grandfather. Which means he was also related to you and Marsaili.”

Fionnlagh frowned. “How can they tell that?”

“DNA,” Marsaili said.

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then realisation dawned. “The samples we gave last year.”

She nodded.

“I fucking knew it! That should have been destroyed. I signed a form refusing to let them keep mine on the database.”

“So did everyone else,” Fin said. “Except, apparently, for your grandfather. He probably didn’t understand.”

“So they just put him on the computer, like some criminal?”

Marsaili said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?”

“It’s an invasion of privacy, Mum. Who knows who’ll get access to that information, and what they might do with it?”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable argument,” Fin said. “But right now, that’s not really the point.”

“Well, what is?”

“Who the murdered man was, and how he was related to your grandfather.”

Fionnlagh looked at his mother. “Well, he must have been a cousin or something.”

She shook her head. “There’s no one that we know of, Fionnlagh.”

“Then there must be someone that you don’t know of.”

She shrugged. “Apparently.”

“So, anyway, this guy was related to Grampa: so what?”

Fin said, “Well, from a police perspective it makes Tormod the most likely person to have killed him.”

There was a shocked silence around the table. Marsaili looked at Fin. It was the first she had heard this. “Does it?”

Fin nodded slowly. “When the CIO arrives from the mainland to open the investigation, your father’s going to be the prime suspect on a list of one.” He took a pull at his beer. “So we’d better start trying to figure out who the dead man is.”