For Rachel, the day started the same way as every other, with Eustace miaowing loudly in her ear. She opened her eyes and rolled onto her back. Above her the white papered ceiling of her small, circular bedroom looked the same as it had for the past five years. The tower’s windows were small in its thick stone walls and even at this early juncture of the morning the irony was not lost on her: that a lighthouse should be so very lacking in illumination seemed deliberately perverse.

Rachel dodged the cat on the short set of curving steps down to her tiny half-moon of a kitchen. The cat had come with the lighthouse, but Rachel had no illusions that he was hers. Eustace belonged to Cullen MacDonald, just as the tower did and always would, no matter that he no longer actually lived within its walls. Rachel put down Eustace’s food and stroked his old head for a moment, wondering how long it would be until he, like his owner, would find the many stairs too much to manage.

Later, ready for the day, Rachel walked the spiral staircase down to the bookshop, Eustace with her all the way. At the bottom of the curving flight of steps that led down from the two tiny floors of living quarters was a heavy wooden door that let her out onto the upper mezzanine floor. From this level, the staircase down to the bookshop’s ground floor was built of wrought iron and set against the wall. She and Cullen had debated this at length throughout Rachel’s tenure as manager. This place had been built as a library in the first place, so why hadn’t the architect put the stairs in the centre, like a spindle, instead? That would have given more space on the impractically curved walls, and the bookshop could certainly use the extra room now.

Cullen would not hear of changing any aspect of the tower’s internal workings beyond what he’d already altered when he’d originally moved into it sixty years before, and even then he’d modified as little as possible about the cavernous space that housed his beloved books. It was obviously inherited, this adoration of the printed page, a genetic predisposition passed down intact in a way that the money responsible for housing it in such an eccentric place was not.

There were only two additions that Cullen had allowed: the tiny ground-floor bathroom facilities and the semi-circular counter set in the centre of the lower room. The latter housed a plethora of drawers and shelves, full of things both important and forgotten. This included but was not limited to: the till; a lurking explosion of invoices and bills; a laptop as old in computer years as the lighthouse itself; a kettle; the makings for tea and coffee; a toaster, a bread bin and a domed glass cake stand.

Directly behind the counter was the stove, the lighting of which had no seasonal break inside a stone building with walls thick enough to withstand the North Sea. No matter that there was only a river within a mile of this particular lighthouse, and the sea itself was distant to the point of being irrelevant. The proximity of the wood burner to the counter would have been ideal if not for the fact that Bukowski had a habit of lying as close to it as he could get, and was thus responsible for Rachel frequently almost going arse over tit in the middle of the working day. This was, she had often thought, something that the writer for whom the collie was named would have enjoyed.