He watched her in silence until she looked around at him.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Something.’

‘How do you know there are a lot of photos of me online?’

She looked back at the bookshelves, shrugging as she pulled out one of the books.

‘Did you google me?’

‘Might have. Just out of due diligence.’

He found himself smiling. ‘Of course.’

‘Don’t be smug,’ she said, still with her back to him.

‘I’m not. For the record, though… since we are all about the records today… Even if she were old enough, Stephanie would not be my type.’

‘You have a type?’

‘Just recently I’ve begun to think so.’

The room sank into silence. Rachel didn’t turn around. Then there came the sound of footsteps, growing closer this time. A moment later Stephanie Warren backed through the door carrying two large and evidently heavy archive boxes.

‘Sorry,’ she said, out of breath as both Toby and Rachel went to help her. ‘Here we are. There’s one more to come down, and then that’s everything we have for Braecoille between 1812 and 1816.’

They stayed at the Great Dunbar Historical Society all afternoon, looking through papers but finding nothing obvious connected to the camera obscura.

‘You know what’s interesting,’ said Stephanie, who seemed to find the old sheaves of paper they pulled from the boxes deeply intriguing. ‘They don’t seem to have done any entertaining at all between 1813 and 1816.’

‘Is that unusual?’ Toby asked.

‘For a stately home like Braecoille? Yes, very, I would have thought.’

‘How can you tell?’ Rachel asked. ‘That they didn’t do much entertaining, I mean?’

Stephanie fanned out a pile of handwritten receipts. ‘From looking at the yearly expenses from the kitchen, for a start,’ she said. ‘They had a standing staff of almost fifty working at the house. Most of the food ordered in was staples, and month to month they hardly varied, except at Christmas. If there had been house guests and dinner parties, there would have been spikes in the orders for groceries. But the last one of those was in the middle of 1812, when it looks as if they must have had a party staying for a few weeks. After that – there’s nothing. I wonder why?’

Toby glanced at Rachel, and knew what she was thinking. After 1812 Eveline MacDonald had no longer felt like giving grand parties for her peers.

‘Maybe that’s when James MacDonald’s wife began to get sick,’ Stephanie suggested, oblivious to the silent exchange between Toby and Rachel.

‘What do you mean?’ Rachel asked.

‘Well – you know the old story, about her being mad and burning Braecoille down,’ said Stephanie. ‘That can’t have come out of the blue, can it?’

‘I suppose not,’ Rachel said. ‘Is there any mention of her in these receipts? Have either of you noticed anything like that as we’ve been going through these papers?’

‘No,’ Toby said, ‘there’s nothing.’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘It’s almost as if she didn’t exist,’ said Rachel quietly.