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those who’d created a niche for themselves hung on to the farming and fishing traditions playing out their last songs, while their children fled in search of prosperity elsewhere.
    Prosperity, or a last kick of the heels before adulthood. That was all Alice had wanted. She’d been devoted to our cause, but she’d talked to me lovingly about her dad’s croft, never had serious plans for any life other than taking it on for her own.
    I leaned my brow against Eddie’s window. He hadn’t said a word to me in the last mile, and just as well.
    The tarmac developed a median line of weeds and ochre sand. Eddie negotiated one pothole then another, then drew to a halt on the verge. I glanced at his forbidding profile for news of a flat tyre or engine problems, but he was staring straight ahead.
    “Is something the matter, Ed?”
    He switched the engine off. “I can’t say as there isn’t.”
    Oh God, Celtic obscurity at this hour. Sunlight had begun to pierce the veils of rain, and the sky would stay bright until late up here on the world’s shoulder, but I was tired enough to die. “Could you say one way or the other? Just to help me out?”
    “My suspension’s no’ what it used to be. I am no’ sure I can risk taking you all the way to the village.”
    I was fairly sure he meant the Honda’s suspension, not his own. I glanced around at the car’s litter-strewn interior. Chip wrappers, crumpled tins and empty packets of Highlander crisps. Nothing had changed that I could see. The road wasn’t materially worse. “It’s three miles, Ed.”
    “Aye, which makes six for me and this old girl.” His brow rucked. “So I’d rather not, Mal. That’s all.”
    I got out of the car. Eddie didn’t restart the engine. He sat there frowning like a bulldog, so I went round to the driver’s side and gestured to him to crack down his window. “Eddie, have you heard what happened while I was away?”
    “I can’t say as I haven’t.”
    “For God’s… Okay. The truth of it’s bad enough. If anything worse has reached people here…can’t you tell me what I’m gonna be facing at the end of that track?”
    “Only the truth of it, if seeing’s believing.”
    “You saw something? Was it on the news?”
    He drummed his fingers on the wheel. He was a good guy, prone to robbing himself by giving old ladies free rides. He didn’t want to be judging me. Something incontrovertible had forced him to a verdict. “Aye, it was on the news. I take all that with a pinch of salt, but everyone saw the film.”
    The wind slapped my hood against the back of my head. One of the toggles caught me a stinging blow on the eyelid. “There was no film. That’s just it—Alice and Oskar were filming for us when their boat sank.”
    “Well, someone was recording it all. It must have been from your damned Sea Hawk .” He broke off, suddenly glaring at me. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Friend of the Earth and as big an old hippie as you like. But you were on this film, and the whaling ship, and our poor Alice and that other lad, and everybody here saw them drown.”
    * * * * *
    There are pretty north-coast villages—places where old men sit and mend their nets on the harbour wall, and white-painted cottages gleam in the sun—and then there’s Kerra. We have a few of those cottages, but they stand empty fifty weeks of the year until their wealthy London owners come up on holiday. Everyone else lives in the maze of pebble-dash terraces that sprang up to house the workers who came here during the brief fishing boom and never managed to escape when it was over. There’s a small industrial harbour—no wall for the old men—a scatter of flat-roofed factory shops, a Co-op whose opening hours you’d need a mariner’s almanac to predict, and that’s about it.
    Oh, and a pub called Mackie’s, which sets off the Co-op by never seeming to close at all. By the time I’d tramped the turf track over the outlying dunes and down into the