Though curiously I’m less exhausted than I have been for a while. Neither Carrie nor I want to spend a night at the Manse without an alarm, cameras or no cameras, and even in a rush job, the alarm company cannot possibly get one installed any quicker than three days hence, so Carrie has arranged to spend a few nights up in Edinburgh with fellow cast members. For my part, I am staying where I might never have imagined I would: I am staying with Fiona. She and Jamie—and Callum—positively insisted, and one of my splintered selves accepted. The long, low three-bedroomed McCue farmhouse is cramped, with nary a clutter-free surface in sight, but it’s homely and it’s solid and it’s the same all the way through. There’s no version of it that I’d be afraid to find myself in, and the darkness outside is simply nighttime, not a cloak for an ill-defined threat. Callum is sharing his mum’s bed, and I sleep in a narrow single bed with Batman bedsheets and a stormtrooper alarm clock and wake the most refreshed I’ve felt in days. Weeks even. It’s the Manse, I think. The Manse has been leaching my energy, draining my faculties. The Manse has been stealing my very self.

Everybody is up and moving when I wake, despite it being a Saturday, so I make myself a coffee and then wander outside, cup in hand, to watch Callum playing with Toast in the field closest to the farmhouse. He’s trying to train her on a homemade agility course, which currently seems to involve Callum scrambling over the course yelling, “Look, Ailsa, look!” whilst Toast watches him uncertainly, looking rather bemused.

“You’re that way,” a voice calls. I turn to find Jamie just behind me. “The Manse, I mean,” he says. “Just over that ridge there and then down through the woods. If the farmhouse had a couple more stories, you could probably see it from here.” I gaze in that direction and wonder if the police are there now. “Sorry,” says Jamie, touching my arm gently. When I look at him, his mouth is twisted in remorse. “You probably dinnae want to think about that.” Jamie has been incredibly solicitous, though at times I’ve detected a slight excitement within him. I’ve seen it before in my job: the self-important glee at being so very close to the action that can’t quite be hidden beneath proclamations of shock. But for now he says, “Come on up and let me show you my lair.”