Up ahead now, only another hundred yards, Creed’s bothy sat like a dark stone resting in the bottom of a deep smooth-sided bowl. All around it the tawny ramparts of the hills rose to the sky. There’d been no question this morning of setting off towards anything else; there’d been no question of the nine mile walk along the river to a road where she might sit for an hour and wait without a single vehicle passing. With each step now she felt her own slow, dragging gravity. Across the marshy ground she proceeded with difficulty and sometimes she stumbled.

His yard was bordered by a woodshed and a privy and the L-shaped dwelling part of the bothy itself. Turf and ferns and a spongy blanket of moss grew on the thick shaley roof-slates. The bothy door was painted brown. Bronze lichen grew on his walls like rust. A trio of his black-faced sheep burst out from behind them when they saw her coming, bunching together and jostling each other in their hurry to get away, as if she was something dangerous.

Oh Jesus, what would he say to her? Would he be appalled by the sight of her? Would he know who she was? Would he hold that against her? Would he look past her through the open brown door and out beyond the opening in his yard across the soggy uplands and the pale brown hills and down into the long tapering valley with its scattered emptied farms and ask her how in glory’s name it had happened? Would he turn sarcastic and ask her if she’d had a visit from the Holy Spirit?

At the corner of his yard a rowan tree grew out of the stones. She leaned against it, breathed. The hour’s walk, the climb, had taken her half the day. Her hair felt prickly and dry as gorse. There was bog cotton in it, grass and cuckoo spit. Blood leaked out of her, filling her boots and coating the ground. She’d known since this morning that something was wrong.

She could no longer recall the Scotsman’s face, only his sandy hair and his pale body.

When he was gone she realized she didn’t know his name or the name of his town or what job he did in the rest of his life or if he had a wife and children. She wasn’t used to conversation and they’d hardly talked.