He smiles, but he looks a bit uncertain. I can’t think why. “Take a good look at the face, Mr. Macdonald.”

So I look at it, carefully, like he asks. And now that I see beyond the colour of the skin, there is something familiar about those features. Strange. That slight turn of the nose. Just like Peter’s. And the tiny scar on his upper lip, at the right-hand corner of the mouth. Peter had a little scar like that. Cut himself on a chipped water glass once when he was about four. And, oh . . . that scar on his left temple. Didn’t notice that before.

Suddenly it dawns on me who it is, and I lay the photo in my lap. I can’t bear to look at it any more. I promised! I turn to Fin. “He’s dead?”

Fin nods, looking at me so strangely. “Why are you crying, Mr. Macdonald?”

Peter asked me that same thing, too, once.

Saturdays were the best. Free of school, free of God, free of Mr. Anderson. If we had some money we could go up into the town to spend it. Not that we had money very often, but that wouldn’t stop us going. Just a fifteen-minute walk and you were in another world.

The castle dominated the town, sitting up there on that big black rock, casting its shadow on the gardens below. And people all along the whole length of the street, in and out of shops and cafes, motor cars and buses belching great clouds of exhaust fumes into the air.

We had a wee scam going, me and Peter. We would sometimes go up into town on a Saturday morning, wearing our oldest clothes and our scruffiest shoes with the soles flapping away from the uppers, and we hung a little cardboard sign around Peter’s neck, with the word BLIND scrawled on it. It’s a good job we had a half-decent education and knew how to spell it. Of course, we had no idea then how hanging a cardboard notice around our necks would come back to haunt us.

Peter closed his eyes, and put his left hand on my right forearm, and we would move slowly among the weekend shoppers, Peter with his cap in his hand held out in front of him.

It was always the good ladies of the town who would take pity on us. “Awww, poor wee laddie,” they would say, and if we were lucky drop a shilling in the cap. That’s how we got enough money together to pay for Peter’s tattoo. And it took all our ill-gotten weekend gains for a month or more to do it.