‘Yes. It seems to be recording the site workers employed on the tower’s build.’

‘This McCreedy worked on the site? Does it say as what?’

Toby pointed further along the line to where the name was listed. Rachel leaned forward and looked closely.

‘Day labourer?’ she queried. ‘Not architect?’

‘Not according to this. There’s more – this ledger says he was dismissed for theft.’

Rachel leaned back, a frustrated look on her face. ‘So – if he wasn’t the architect, the initials must be a coincidence.’

‘Maybe,’ Toby said. ‘Unless James MacDonald lied on this ledger.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘No idea. I think I need to need to do some wider research.’

Rachel smiled, standing and passing him the laptop. ‘I love that the journalist in you is still alive and well.’

Toby didn’t answer, already engrossed in this new quest, and for a moment Rachel wished she had known him when he was still out there chasing stories around the world instead of just around his keyboard.

Toby spent a few days searching through newspaper archives, downloading and collating articles. This meant disregarding plenty of people who bore the McCreedy name but who clearly had nothing to do with Newton Dunbar or the lighthouse. It was then that he began to notice how often Dora McCreedy’s name popped up. The archive he used didn’t only record journalistic articles, it had digitized and indexed whole newspapers, including public notices that appeared in the ‘Classified’ sections: planning permissions, land acquisitions and items of a similar nature. Her name appeared frequently. That wasn’t surprising – after all, she was one of the biggest development magnates in this area of Scotland. Still, there was something nebulous about the placing of these notices that pricked at Toby’s journalistic senses. It lurked there, a question not yet fully formed but still taking up space in the shadowy part of his mind where connections tended to form without him even realizing it. He began to bookmark mentions of Dora McCreedy too, not with any particular intent but simply because experience told him that there was the vague shape of a story there somewhere.

As far as Edward McCreedy went, the little that Toby found only seemed to compound the mystery.

‘This is interesting,’ Toby said late one evening as he and Rachel sat together in the bookshop, the remains of a shared takeaway between them. ‘James MacDonald evidently brought a criminal case against Edward McCreedy for the theft that the ledger mentions as the reason for his dismissal. There’s a report about his day in court here. He was convicted of stealing bricks and sentenced to five years’ transportation to Australia.’

‘For stealing bricks?’

‘Harsh,’ Toby agreed. ‘Although we don’t know how many bricks it was. Could have been more than it sounds.’ He frowned at the page. ‘I feel like there’s something we’re missing, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there would have been hundreds of these sorts of cases going through at the same time. There could have been up to thirty in front of this judge on the same day that McCreedy’s was heard. Why did the paper decide to focus on this one?’