I shrugged. “You didn’t,” I said. “I mean, it’s sad, but I don’t believe in ghosts. It’s just history.” 79

Cailean looked thoughtful. “Guga hunters are about the least superstitious people you’ll ever meet,” he said. “You know why?”

I shook my head.

“There’s an old sailors’ legend that says seabirds are the dead souls of drowned men, and that you bring the worst luck in the world down upon yourself if you hurt one, let alone kill one. But us hunters kill thousands of ’em every time we come to Bird Rock for the harvest. So if any one of us had a superstitious bone in their body, then we wouldn’t be coming here to do what we do.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m the same, I reckon,” he went on. “Would quite happily walk under a hundred ladders, or open up my brolly indoors, or break a mirror, or anything else you care to mention. One thing I never would do, though, is cross the threshold into that lighthouse.”

He looked right at me, the beam from his lantern flickering strangely in his eyes. “It’s rotten to the core. And if you lot have any sense, you’ll clear out before it can get its poisonous fingers into you.” He bent down to scoop up his light. “That’s my two pence, for what it’s worth.” 80

I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling annoyed that he obviously took me for some impressionable kid who’d be easily frightened.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said. “But it’s just a building.”

“Well, maybe it is and maybe it isnae,” he said. “All I know is what my own father told me – that Grandad was the happy, hearty, joyful type, and had been all his life until he came to Bird Rock. Three weeks living in that place, though, and he jumped from the rim of the light.”

He glanced past me at the tower looming above us, and I saw in his face that he wasn’t trying to scare me – that he honestly believed what he was saying. I couldn’t help looking up at the top of the lighthouse too, where the blinding electric light pulsed at intervals. It was so incredibly high up that it was impossible to imagine anyone deliberately jumping from it. Just thinking about it made me feel sick, and I had the sudden urge to move back a few steps, as if I was standing on someone’s grave.

“Heck of a mess it was, when the assistant keeper found him,” Cailean went on unhelpfully. “The lighthouse did something to him, that’s what I 81believe, and it’s what I’ll believe until my dying day. So have a care, lassie, that’s all. And while we’re on that subject … I noticed you young people earlier on the cliff path. You were talking to Will.”