P.A. WEST

The guest cancelled at ten to six, which was about right for a man from Surrey who had paid for three days on the hill and been told on the phone, twice, that it would rain.

Calum Munro read the text standing in the larder doorway with the strip light buzzing over his head and the rain coming down past the gutter in a single grey rope. So sorry, flight issues, will rebook in spring. There were no flights that came anywhere near Corrach that the man could have been on. Calum put the phone back in his chest pocket and stood a while longer, looking at the hooks.

The guinea fowl started at ten to five.

They always started at ten to five. Dad had bought them in the spring, on the grounds that guinea fowl were better than any watchdog and would shout the place down if a fox or a stranger came within a hundred yards of the cottage. This turned out to be perfectly true. What nobody had mentioned was that they would also shout the place down at the moon, at the wind, at a leaf, at each other, and at nothing whatsoever, in a voice like a rusty gate being dragged across a tin roof.

You hear it first in your knees.

Not your ears. Your ears are full of the panzer and the shearer and the hiss of the sprays and the hundred small complaints of steel, and they gave up telling you anything useful forty years ago. But your knees are on the floor of the seam, and the floor is the bottom of everything, and when the bottom of everything moves, your knees know.

The old police station at Lochmaddy had been sold in principle and not yet in fact, and so it sat at the top of the brae in a kind of probation, neither theirs nor anyone else's. The heating was off. The cells had been emptied of their blue mattresses in November. In the front office, where the counter had not opened to the public in years, there was a rectangle of paler paint where the map of the Uists had hung, and a drawing pin still holding the corner of it, torn.

Ishbel MacAskill had been sent up with the van and the keys and PC Lewis Dunbar, to finish what the move in October had not.

The fire on the picket line was the only warm thing left in the valley.

The lad had come out of the cabin with the crew's tea and been caught on the way back, and told to stop and get warm. He stood as close to it as they'd let him, which wasn't very close, because he was sixteen and an apprentice and it wasn't his strike, not the way it was theirs.

The shop is never so nice as when it's shut.

With the lights off out front and the shutter down, the noise of Middle Street goes. No buses changing down for the hill, no lads outside the bookies, no Kayleigh's music, which is always on, and always the same three songs, and always about a boy who did something wrong. There is only the hum of the fridge with the milk in it and the tick of the clock above the back-office door, a cheap clock with a picture of a steam train on it that somebody won on a tombola years ago and nobody has had the heart to throw out. Ten to ten. Plenty of time.

The night is never so kind as when it's nearly over.

By three the corridor at Ashgrove has gone quiet the way only a nursing home goes quiet: never silent, but settled. The radiators tick. Somebody's oxygen machine sighs at the far end of the east wing, in and out, in and out, like the sea. The buzzer board in the office has a light on for room eleven, which is always on, because Mr Kirtley presses it in his sleep and nobody can ever find out what he wants.

The fires came first. They always did.

Roy was down the stairs at a quarter past five on the last Monday in August, in his socks, with his jersey pulled on over his pyjama top, and the Keeper's Cottage was doing what it always did at that hour: creaking quietly to itself, like an old man turning over in bed. Summer or not, the walls held the night's cold. They were two feet thick in places, they had been holding cold for over five hundred years, and they saw no reason to give it up just because it was August.

The ditches ran the wrong way.

That was the first thing Calum saw when the light came up properly, and he saw it the way he would have seen a hind standing wrong on a face, before he knew what he was looking at. A ditch is cut to take water off the ground, and water goes downhill, and so a ditch follows the fall of the land, near enough, whatever the man with the spade had in his head. These did not. They were ruled.