It’s small talk, this. They are filling the gap, waiting for Ben to start. A small silence falls, and we all look at Ben, who looks round the table at each of us then clears his throat. “Okay. So.” He turns to me. “Ailsa. There’s something we need to tell you.” His gaze drops to the table. “It’s . . . it’s not an easy thing. Just please try to hear us out.”

I look around the table at the three of them. Jamie tries for a reassuring smile. Fiona looks like she’s simply watching. “I . . . Okay.”

“When Jamie and Fiona were little, sometimes they’d play up the river. You know, where the waterfalls are?”

“I haven’t been there. Didn’t you tell me the river path is unsafe at the moment?”

Ben nods. “It is. In summer you can usually get up to the waterfalls quite easily, though. You used to be able to get a lot farther, but there were landslides after a storm one year, and the path has been officially closed, right from the bottom, ever since. Any of us would have got our arses tanned for playing there, which I guess was part of the appeal. Fi and Jamie went there a lot. They would even climb the rocks and head up way past the falls.” Why is Ben relating this story when it’s about Jamie and Fiona?

As if Jamie can hear my thoughts, he takes up the tale. “We found something. It didnae mean anything to us; we were too wee, I suppose. It became part of our game.” He stops.

“What?” I prompt. “What did you find?”

“We found a skeleton,” Jamie says.

I stare round the table wordlessly. Jamie and Ben are leaning in, shiningly earnest. Fiona is sitting back, her mascara-rimmed eyes still watching. “A skeleton,” I say quietly. A skeleton. My father, and not my father. Schrödinger’s cat, again.

Jamie nods. “There had been a storm when we found it. I dinnae ken if some of the earth covering it had been washed away. Anyway, it must have been there for years; it was just bones.”

A skeleton. By the falls. Where my father thought there might have been a memorial. I can imagine him now, perhaps home early from his trip, taking advantage of some free time to do a little research on foot. There’s a heft to the image that scares me. It won’t budge easily. Somehow, my journalistic training kicks in. “Were there clothes? Shoes? Anything?”

Jamie shakes his head.

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

Jamie shakes his head. “We would have had to admit we were up there. We were only kids. We couldnae grasp that it was more important than a skelping.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven, maybe?” He looks at Fiona, but she shrugs. “Around that. We hid them in a sort of mini cave; it was part of our game.”