Fit Billy next door is standing on his front path, holding a massive dumbbell in each hand and performing arm curls, shirtless even though the sun has gone down. He grunts as he lifts the weights and says, ‘Hi, lads! How’s yer mam?’ He always wants to chat.

Mam reckons he’s lonely since his mam died and his girlfriend moved out, so I feel bad hurrying past and saying a quick, ‘Hi, Billy.’

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he says to me. He puts his weights down and takes my phone out of his trackie bottoms pocket. ‘Friend of yours came past a few minutes ago. Said she found it at the top of the beach steps, and knew it was yours because of the case. You wanna be careful with it, son. Canny phone, that is!’

‘Oh aye … thanks, Billy,’ I stammer.

At least that is one less thing I have to worry about.

Some hope. I look at the screen and there’s a long, fine crack across the glass. My phone! (It was a present from Dad, so we could FaceTime, he said, although we hardly have.)

I don’t hear the rest of what Billy says. Something about a new World War Two film he’s got off Amazon. He’s obsessed with the war, is Billy.

I get the package in the house and upstairs without Mam seeing. It isn’t hard – she’s asleep on the settee because she had an early shift this morning. I’ve zipped up my hoodie to hide my bloody T-shirt from Seb and now the carrier bag sits on the floor between our beds.

‘Open it then,’ says Seb.

‘Okay, okay.’

I told him that the bag was by some bins – and that was sort of a bit true-ish. Even as I pick up the bag, I work on my conscience.

If it was by, well, okay near the bins in that yard, then it must be rubbish. Nobody wanted it. It belonged to nobody. Probably.

Therefore it is definitely not stealing. You cannot steal something that has no owner.

Seb and I sit opposite each other while I run my thumbnail through the tape on the top of the cardboard box and tip the contents on to my duvet: two slim packages about the size of a small pizza box, each bearing an identical coloured label.

Chapter 10

KENNETH ‘the Mystic o’ the Highlands’

McKINLEY

presents

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There’s a picture of a grinning middle-aged man with a luxuriant swept-up hairstyle, the goldish colour of a pound coin; he has dazzling teeth of a whiteness I’ve never seen for real. His eyes peer out from the picture over the top of round, coloured glasses. The design of the label looks pretty old-fashioned. Definitely from way before I was born.