Sarah Pollexfen stood with a lamp in the open doorway. ‘You said to come and say goodnight.’

‘Did I? D’you know, I’d quite forgotten that.’

‘I woke you. I’m very sorry.’

‘No, you didn’t, not at all. Sit down, Sarah. Sit where I can see you. We have not talked to one another for years.’

From her bed she watched while the lamp was placed on the dressing-table, not close to the one that was no longer alight but on the other side of the ornate looking-glass. Sarah Pollexfen sat within the glow the single lamp threw, her back to the scent bottles and the ivory hairbrushes of the dressing-table, her fingers touching on her lap.

‘The wretched journey to a woman’s bed, the empty marriage, guilt begetting guilt. Sarah, do you understand?’

She must have closed her eyes because when she opened them she saw that Sarah Pollexfen was shaking her head. She said she wanted it written down. She wanted it in Sarah Pollexfen’s diaries, so that the truth could be passed on. Or left behind, whichever way you looked at it.

‘They terrified him, Sarah. Day after day, all summer long, they hunted that child as an animal is hunted.’

Carriglas, December 12th, 1931. Earlier, that morning, she had told me of a dream: about being in a gondola in Venice on her honeymoon and how the gondola had become the boat, bedecked with ribbons, that took her back to the island which was to be her home. One after another, she shook the servants’ hands on the steps of the house. ‘All that you found lovely about Carriglas was lovely for me too, Sarah.’ There was no ferryboat then; when people fell ill on the island they came to the house and the house looked after them. She described the town as it had been, its business premises thriving, the pretty bandstand given by the Rollestons to decorate the promenade.

But when I sat with her in the evening her mood was different. I knew, of course, about the occurrence that appeared to haunt her. After all, I had been here at the time. And I, too, had been angry with the children.

‘“Come and get the rabbits,” their father used to say when they were tiny. And then he’d lift Villana up so that she could reach the shotgun down from the wall. Off they’d go, he and his children.’

‘It’s best forgotten, Mrs Rolleston. It’s all too long ago.’

Her breathing softened; her eyes closed. Gently I put more logs on the fire and when they blazed up my own eyes faltered also. For a minute or two I dozed.

‘I’ have dreamed too often of that red-haired child. Too often, Sarah.’