Rosie and I were up so early the next morning that there was no one else in the canteen when we had our breakfast. We wolfed down some dry croissants, then went down to the harbour and waited for the boat that Dad had said would take us the rest of the way to Bird Rock. There were no scheduled ferries or sightseeing tours to the island. Absolutely nobody went there, which wasn’t surprising given there was nothing to see but birds. And apparently, if the weather was bad, you couldn’t land there at all. I wondered if this would be the case today because the grey waves were churning restlessly. Apart from a couple of stray fishermen working on their boats, there was no one else around. Time dragged on, and finally a wiry, middle-aged man appeared in front 28of us.

“You the Oliver girls?” he asked. “Jess and Rosie?”

“Yes, that’s us.”

“I’m Jim. I’ve come to take you to Bird Rock.”

“Oh. Are we actually going today then?” I asked. “I thought the sea looked too rough.”

A strange little smile twisted one corner of his mouth, like a grimace. “That?” He jerked his thumb at the sea. “That’s nothing. About the best it gets around here, in fact. I’d use the bathroom at the café over there if you haven’t already.”

“Isn’t there one on the boat?” I asked.

He smiled again. “Aye, but we’re sailing on that.” He pointed along the pier to a tiny tin bucket of a vessel. “You’ll probably want to go below decks as little as possible. Not the best smell down there, if you get my drift. And four hours on the water is a long time.”

I stared at him. “I’m sorry, what? Four hours?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t know?”

“No! No one said anything about a four-hour boat trip!”

I’d assumed it would be half an hour or so. Rosie looked equally horrified. Jim just seemed amused, 29which only made me feel more irritated.

“If you try to find Bird Rock on a map, you’d be looking for a speck way out in the North Atlantic, about the size of a biscuit crumb,” he said cheerfully. “In fact, it’s so small, it’s not even marked on a lot of charts. One of the remotest islands in the Outer Hebrides is Bird Rock. Heck of a place to get to.”

I felt suddenly furious with Dad. He must have withheld this information from us on purpose.

Rosie and I both used the café toilets as Jim had suggested, then collected our bags and headed towards the small boat. The sight of it reminded me that once we were at Bird Rock we wouldn’t be able to leave again until it came to collect us in two weeks. We’d be stuck there, like prisoners.