She turned, and there on the table was Newton Dunbar, resplendent in the dipping sun. There was the filigree spread of houses, the pub with its garden of tables amid roses, there was the Co-op and the doctor’s surgery. As Rachel watched, a tiny silver car drove along the main street, right from one end to the other. The trees of Dora McCreedy’s forest waved their leaves in a breeze. The whole village was displayed in perfect, moving microcosm on the white marble disc, as if Rachel were watching a film shot on someone’s phone and broadcast via the Internet.

This was why, Rachel realized, the lighthouse had no lights. It had never been built as a lighthouse at all. The words in her head were camera obscura. She had been inside another one like this once, at the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, where she’d had to contend with a dozen Belgian teens for a glimpse of the castle projected with shocking clarity onto a wall.

Rachel’s mind reeled. The tower was almost two hundred years old. Had the camera obscura been here all this time?

She looked around the room and saw something on the floor – a piece of paper. It had ploughed a furrow in the dust but was not dusty itself, as if it had drifted there recently, perhaps disturbed from the tabletop when she had opened the hatch. Rachel went to pick it up and found it was an envelope, folded from yellowing paper. She turned it over to find words scrawled in a looping, archaic hand on the front.

To You Who Finds Me, it read.

Ten

‘Please tell me you’ve made progress.’

Toby rubbed grit from his eyes and looked blearily at the clock. He’d finally fallen asleep on the sofa after another broken night, and now here was Sylvie waking him up. It was barely 9 a.m.

‘Good morning to you too,’ he mumbled, struggling out from beneath the blanket he’d dragged over himself. ‘What are you doing awake at this time? Don’t tell me that for once you were in bed at a reasonable hour?’

‘Don’t goad me, Toby,’ Sylvie said impatiently. It sounded as if she were taking puffs of a cigarette. He remembered the rare Sunday mornings he’d spent at home, waking to find his wife smoking a Benson & Hedges above the sheets as she scanned pages from someone else’s magnum opus. She somehow managed to make it seem elegant, another thing about his ex-wife that he’d never been able to understand. ‘Tell me how the book is going. Tell me, for example, that you have actually started it.’

Toby had managed to free himself from the blanket and was making his way towards the kitchen and coffee. He glanced to the dining room table, at which he had not dined once since his arrival, and that had instead been turned into a desk. His laptop was surrounded by paper, books and mugs bearing the remnants of cold tea and coffee.