Rachel passed him his books. ‘Want a coffee?’

Ezra shook his head. ‘Better get home and check that Georgette is where she should be.’

His gaze strayed behind her, to the bedraggled figure sitting on the floor by the stove.

‘She might not be a troublemaker,’ he said quietly, so as not to be overheard, ‘but she also doesn’t look as if she’s got a very happy life.’

Rachel averted her eyes, and her expression changed so subtly that it was difficult for him to pinpoint quite what had happened. It was no more than a gentle dimming of a light that had previously been somewhere in her features, but it was noticeable because Rachel was always so calm, so collected. She gave the impression of constant grace and unflappability, an impression compounded by her occluded past. Rachel had arrived in Newton Dunbar as if dropping out of the sky. One day she was not there, the next she was, and she fitted so well and arrived at such a perfect juncture that it was as if she’d been made for the purpose. No one knew where she had come from, or what she had been doing, before she took over the running of the bookshop. That also went for Cullen MacDonald himself, unless the man knew her secrets and was keeping them. It was possible, Ezra supposed. Cullen MacDonald was an honourable man.

‘I’m going to talk to her later,’ Rachel said. ‘See if she needs help.’

Ezra smiled and picked up his books. ‘You’ll do the right thing,’ he told her. ‘You always do.’

Outside it was raining. For a moment he paused beneath the lighthouse’s wooden porch. There was only one coat taking up space there now and it was his. Ezra had owned it for years, taking it with him from rig to rig, and for all that time it had been his most valuable possession. It was battered but still impenetrable, made as it was to withstand the worst extremes of the North Sea wind and rain. He thought again of the young woman by the stove, how wet the shoulders of her old red jumper had been.

He left the coat where it was, stuffing his books beneath his sweater to keep them dry and dipping his head against the rain. Ezra went down the hill, aiming for the path that led to the street and so to his front door. The rain blatted in his face, fat warm drops from a leaden grey sky. He glanced into the garden of the cottage on the corner, to make sure that Georgette hadn’t somehow managed to slip back next door, and what he saw made him stop dead, rain or no rain.

Edie Strang was stretched over the roof of her shed, standing high on a ladder that was leaning precariously against its wall. She was wielding a hammer as if aiming to whack a mole with it. The ladder shuddered violently as she brought the hammer down on a tack she was trying to knock into the roof.