I wonder if they include Carrie. Or perhaps that was just a onetime thing. Carrie is the one I should have asked about it, regardless of whether Fiona was there or not. I should have cleared the air. I can see it now: Fiona wasn’t what stopped me. I was simply too scared to confront her.

“Is this your mum?” I’m suddenly aware there has been a long silence.

“Yes.” He leaves the sofa to join me in looking at it. “She was beautiful.”

“Yes, very.” It’s true, the woman is beautiful, though she also looks as if a stiff wind would blow her over. “What happened to her?”

“She committed suicide. About three years after that was taken.” He shakes his head on my horrified intake of breath. How could I not have known this? “It’s okay. I was very young, not even a year old. I couldnae possibly remember her. Though sometimes it feels like I do . . .” He is still looking at the framed photograph, his face oddly still, though I can see all the things he’s not saying clamoring in his eyes.

I put a hand on his upper arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“I wonder . . . Sometimes I wonder how different things would have been if she lived.” It almost sounds like he’s talking to himself.

“Same.” Jamie is the one looking at me now. “With my dad, I mean. If he had been around . . .” I close my eyes and tip my head back, half laughing at myself. “It feels so . . . unfair.”

“Unfair.” He repeats my word, as if testing it, to see if it fits. “Unfair. Aye, that it is.”

•   •   •

The farmhouse is welcoming, and its occupants, too, but I’m conscious of not wanting to crowd their space, so mid-morning I head to the hotel leisure club. I didn’t think to bring my trainers and sports kit from the Manse, and I’m not sure if the police are finished there yet, so I buy myself a swimsuit and goggles from the shop. There’s a revolving rack of Karen Innes artwork reproduction postcards right next to the till. I find myself turning it slowly whilst the woman rings up the purchase, looking at each of the three sides in turn, seeing not the postcards but the actual paintings themselves, the enormous scale of them, the time and the energy they took. I see my mother, her hair scraped back haphazardly, paintbrush in one hand, utterly absorbed in the canvas. She could have been in a different world. I suppose that was the point.

“Are you after one of them postcards, too, hen?” asks the cashier.

“Oh no, they’re not really my thing,” I say hastily.

“Me neither. All too modern for me. I like a nice landscape. You know where you are with a nice landscape.”

I smile and pay and try to imagine my mother painting a nice landscape. It’s impossible.