‘So… she built a lighthouse?’ Toby said, incredulous.

‘She’d always been fascinated by them, hadn’t she?’ Rachel pointed out. ‘All those notebooks – didn’t I say that some of them looked as if they’d been drawn by someone very young? I think she’d always been captivated by them, even as a child, and that fascination had, over the years, led her to learn a lot about how they were built. Then she lost her son and was coping with that terrible grief… Maybe it was James; maybe he told her to go ahead and build a lighthouse in the hope that the project would drag her out of her depression. They had the money to do it, after all, and he obviously loved her very much.’

‘She named the tower after him.’

‘After them,’ Rachel corrected. ‘And because of that, everyone has always assumed it was her husband who built it. Even if people knew the truth at the time, the facts got lost in the flow of history.’

They both fell silent, considering this. Toby looked between the note on his screen and the inscription in the front of the Austen, the lines of fluid handwriting script slanting in distinctly different directions.

‘I should have found a handwriting analyst to look at a sample of this straight away,’ he said. ‘I bet an expert would have seen that the handwriting was by a woman in about ten seconds flat. Why didn’t we even consider that as a possibility?’

‘Because we’ve always been told that the James MacDonald Tower was built by James MacDonald; because we just assumed it was built by a man,’ said Rachel, ‘and because we knew nothing else about his wife except that she was mad.’

‘Do you think she was?’

‘What – mad?’ Rachel asked. ‘I think she was grieving and depressed. That doesn’t make her insane. Although anyone looking at a woman building a lighthouse on a hill miles from the sea might easily be able to say she was if they wanted to.’

Toby looked up at her. ‘Edward McCreedy?’

‘It’s easy to start a rumour,’ Rachel said quietly. ‘It’s harder to stamp it out, especially if the person telling the most interesting story shouts the loudest. Maybe that’s why James MacDonald wanted him gone.’ The weight of all that lost history began to settle on her shoulders, the void it represented. ‘I want to know her story – Eveline’s. I want to know what – how – why…’

‘The answer might still be there somewhere,’ Toby pointed out. ‘There are papers I haven’t scanned. We can keep looking.’ He reached across the table and caught her fingers with his, a simple reassurance, like her hand on his shoulder in the darkness before the dawn. ‘If the answers are there, we’ll find them.’

Rachel said nothing, watching his thumb glide over her knuckle, grateful for him suddenly; grateful that he was there and that she was not alone with this, this awful desire to know.