“Most likely it would have been the secondary at Tarbert.” She smiled and gave him strong eye contact, and he remembered Marsaili once telling him how all the girls had had a crush on him at school. He’d never even been aware of it.

“Do you have an address for him?”

“I can find out.” She smiled again and disappeared into another room.

Gunn turned to Fin, a half-smile playing about his lips. Envy maybe, or regret. “Never works like that for me,” he said.

The Macdonald croft sat about half a mile back from the shore, in an elevated position with views across the sands of Luskentyre and Scarista. A long, narrow strip of land ran all the way down from the crofthouse to the roadside, delineated now only by the stumped remains of decayed fenceposts, and the barely discernible texture of the land, altered by years of cultivation and grazing.

But there was no cultivation or grazing any more. The land had gone to seed, long abandoned and reclaimed by nature. The crofthouse itself was a shell. The roof had collapsed years before, the chimney at the north gable reduced to a pile of blackened rubble. Long grasses and thistles grew where once the floor had been. A floor of beaten earth, covered with sand that would have been changed daily by Tormod’s mother.

Gunn thrust his hands deep in his pockets, gazing out across the expanse of golden sand below, to the streaks of turquoise and emerald that marked out the distant shallows. “It’s a dead end.”

But Fin was looking across the hillside towards the figure of a man stacking peats beside a freshly whitewashed cottage. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what the neighbour knows.” And he set off, striding through the long grasses, fresh green pushing up through winter dead, flowers of purple and yellow reaching for the sky to herald the start of the spring season. The grass moved like water in the wind, ebbing and flowing in waves and eddies, and Gunn waded through it almost at a run in an effort to keep up with the younger man.

Everything about the neighbouring croft seemed to have been renewed. The paint, the roof, the fencing. Doors and windows were double-glazed. A shiny red SUV sat parked in the drive, and a man with a thatch of thick greying hair turned from his task at the peats as they arrived. He had the weathered face of someone who spent time out of doors, but his wasn’t an island accent. He replied to Fin’s Gaelic greeting in English. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak the Gaelic myself.”

Fin reached out to shake his hand. “No problem. Fin Macleod,” he said, turning as the breathless Gunn finally caught up. “And Detective Sergeant George Gunn.”

The man seemed a little more wary now as he shook their hands in turn. “What does the polis want up here?”