*

The morning was cold, sharp and bright, but Bee knew it wouldn’t last. By three in the afternoon it would be dark and miserable and she wanted Mary Kate to feel at home before that happened. She pulled her coat around her and picked up her basket from the floor. Captain Bob had long since left to take out a trawler from Blacksod Bay and she had been busy with her own cleaning jobs, ensuring that she was finished early so she could get straight round to Angela’s cottage and prepare it for Mary Kate’s arrival. She could dry the sheets on the line and could not have been more grateful for the good weather if Captain Bob had arrived home with a diamond ring.

Angela’s cottage stood on the escarpment looking out over the ocean. It wasn’t visible from Bee’s cottage, which was tucked away up a boreen, protected from the worst of the gales. Having to live so close to her sister’s empty cottage, a continual reminder of the night she was murdered on that very escarpment, had been part of the reason she had fled to Liverpool. The image of Michael with Angela dead in his arms would never fade. Sarah, on her knees, half drowned in the rain of the awful storm, was there too, burnt into her memory, always waiting for her as she turned the corner.

Bee dropped the latch on her own front door and felt the familiar hammering in her heart as she made her way up towards the cottage of the sister she’d loved, the sister who’d endured a life of violence and fear at the hands of her truly evil husband, Kevin McGuffey. Bee had always suspected but never been able to prove that he had also been responsible for the death of her own first husband, Rory.

The bed sheets were bundled in the basket she had strapped to her back and she felt like a mule as she half walked and half ran up to the cottage. She pushed open the door and stopped in her tracks. Someone had been in. It smelt of wood-smoke and body heat. She walked over to the fireplace, kicked the turf with her toe and felt the warmth through her shoe leather.

Her skin crawled with fear as she looked around the cottage. ‘It cannot be him,’ she whispered, her head refusing to accept the fact that McGuffey could have returned after so many years in exile. He was still a wanted man. His crime of murder still stood.

She shook her head. He was mad, but not that mad. Even he wouldn’t be so stupid as to return to the scene of his crime. Then she noticed the blood on the rush mat and squatted down onto her knees to look at it. It must have been a tramp; that’s who it was. Maybe he’d fallen and hurt himself and, desperate, had called into the house for cover. He’d probably just stayed the night and moved on.