‘The boy who survived, Robbie Logan – that’s Annag’s brother – thought his friend saw something in the ruined house. They’d hidden on the beach at first, but Robbie said when he got there, he lost his nerve and refused to go in. He stayed down by the rocks. Iain Finlay, the other boy, went alone.’ He paused to sip his tea, snatching glances at her from the tail of his eye. ‘Robbie says he heard Iain scream, and saw him running away, up on to the cliffs, but he couldn’t be sure because it was dark and he was terrified, so he hunkered down out of sight.’
Zoe let out a soft whistle. ‘Did he fall, then – Iain?’
‘So they reckon. If he ran up on to the headland, away from the house, he could have missed his footing in the dark and gone over the cliff. It’s a sixty-foot drop there and the water covers the rocks at the foot when the tide’s high. By the time the police were called, it had already been in and out. They concluded the body must have been washed away without a trace.’
‘And the other boy, Robbie – he really saw nothing?’
Edward shook his head. ‘Apparently not. Although …’ he hesitated, rubbing his thumb along his chin, ‘there was a lot of talk about that, too. How much Robbie knew.’
‘Shit. I’ll bet.’
‘The police had trouble getting anything out of him. There was a social worker assigned to the family – she told me all this when I started at the school. Robbie didn’t go home till the next morning – he’d been wandering all night, out on the moorland, he said. He hardly spoke, except to give them that version. The social worker seemed to think he’d been traumatised, but …’ He held out his hands, empty.
‘Not everyone believed it, huh?’
‘He was only ten at the time, but he’s a big lad and he had a reputation as a bully. The younger kids are scared of him, though he mostly keeps to himself now. I think people didn’t buy the idea of him cowering down on the beach. Iain was always the weaker character, they said – he did what Robbie told him.’
‘Why didn’t the parents raise the alarm?’ Zoe sat upright, indignant. ‘How did they not notice their kids were out all night?’
‘The boys snuck out after everyone was in bed, apparently. Though in Robbie’s case, I’m not surprised no one noticed. His mother’s dead and his dad’s a lorry driver, he was away working on the mainland. Robbie was at home with his sister. She says she had no idea he’d left the house until the next morning.’
‘So people secretly think he pushed his friend over the cliff?’
‘Not so secretly, in a lot of cases. It seemed the police did too, for a while, but there was no evidence. Iain’s family moved away soon after, though, and a couple of other families moved their children out of the village school. Reading between the lines, I think that’s what did for the old teacher – the one I replaced. She couldn’t cope with the thought that one of her pupils might be a murderer and no one would ever be certain.’ He leaned forward and poked the fire; a flurry of sparks erupted and vanished. ‘But I think there’s just as many in the village really believe it was the curse of the McBride house. Another vanished boy, on the site of a famous child murder. It got a lot of attention in the Scottish papers and of course they dug up the old story – exactly what the islanders didn’t want.’
‘God. No wonder Mick’s so touchy.’ She fell silent, wrapped in her own thoughts.
‘He was so pleased you hadn’t heard about it. He wanted to keep it that way. I’m sorry – it’s a horrible story,’ Edward said. Zoe kept her eyes fixed on the floor. She knew he had seen her flinch. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Even if you don’t believe in all that, it’s still …’ He tailed off, uncertain.
‘All what?’
‘Well. Ghosts. Curses.’
She laughed, to show her disdain, but it sounded too loud in the small room. ‘I don’t mind a ghost story. It’s the living you have to be afraid of.’ She stopped, seeing his expression, hoping she didn’t sound paranoid. ‘I mean – when you look at the news, right? The stuff that goes on.’
He nodded. ‘True. There’s enough evil in the world without inventing it. I hope it won’t frighten you away, though,’ he added, glancing up shyly, a half-question in his eyes.
She looked at him, disconcerted; once more her awareness of the age gap that separated them was scrambling the signals. She felt herself flush with confusion. How mortifying it would be to respond as if she were flattered, only to find his concern was whether he would upset Mick; the embarrassment that would persist between them for the rest of her stay would be unbearable. In a place this size she could not risk having to avoid someone. Nor would it be smart to make herself a bigger target for village gossip: the American cougar. Even if he were flirting, what could come of it? She was still technically married, though she doubted that was weighing on Dan’s conscience much, back home. And really, who could blame him, the way she had been this past year?
‘It would take something genuinely terrifying to drive me away,’ she said firmly. ‘Like blocked drains.’
He laughed, but she could not help noticing the way he dropped his gaze back to his mug, as if unsure whether he had been rebuffed. They sat in silence, listening to the whispering of the fire. The conversation seemed to have petered out now they had exhausted the subject of the McBride house. She wanted to ask him more about himself, this curious life he had chosen, but was afraid it would look like she was prying; beyond that, she thought, what did they have in common, she and this boy, besides the fact that they were outsiders here, both running away – the very thing neither wished to talk about?
The rain had eased its assault on the window and through the narrow pane to her left she made out streaks of brightness struggling to break through the heaving clouds, though dusk was approaching. She shifted in her seat as a prelude to leaving, when her eye fell on the violin case in the corner.
‘That song you played last night,’ she said. ‘The haunting one – what was it called?’
‘They’re all haunting,’ he said, twisting to look at her with a smile, seeming grateful that the silence had been broken. ‘It’s the local speciality. Any more clues?’
‘It was right before you took your break. Before we went out for a smoke.’
‘Oh, you mean “Ailein Duinn”?’ He hummed a few bars and she nodded, hard. ‘Yes, that one always gets to people. Especially the way Kaye sings it. It’s a lament for a sea captain who was drowned, supposedly composed by his fiancée. She went mad with grief and drowned herself too, a few months later. So the legend goes. The lyrics are a bit grisly, though.’ He hesitated, as if he wanted to protect her from any more unpleasantness.
‘Tell me.’
‘She sings of how she wants to go to him in the sea. It ends by saying she wants to drink his heart’s blood after he’s drowned.’
Zoe tried to recall how it was to feel that kind of desperate passion for someone, the kind that draws you willingly to your destruction after them. She had been wildly in love with Dan at the beginning, or thought she had, which perhaps amounted to the same thing, but when she tried to remember the sensation it was as if she were remembering a movie she had seen long ago, or a second-hand anecdote. Now there was only Caleb. ‘Eat you up, I love you so,’ she used to whisper into his neck when he was smaller, clean and powdery after his bath, his hair damp; she would nuzzle closer, pretending to chomp his soft, soft skin, until he squealed with delight and wriggled away. Sometimes she felt the breath crushed out of her by that desire to enfold him, take him back into the protection of her body where she could keep him safe. But he had grown too big for that game; he had learned to push her away.
‘The older folk get very emotional about that song,’ Edward continued. ‘We have to play it every time. I suppose it’s not so long since every family