Chapter 5: Before the Constable

"Say it again," I said.

"I saw how you die," said Niall.

"And it was you, and you tried to stop yourself from drinking me, so you're an idiot."

"What did you actually see, Niall?"

"Me."

"Over you."

"With my teeth in your throat and nothing left of you in my arms."

"That's not a death."

"It is the end of a life."

"It is a Tuesday," I said, "and I'd like to hear the rest of it."

He opened his mouth, and the bell at the gate began to ring.

It rang and rang, a hand pulling the rope without mercy.

Morag looked in from the yard with the gun under her arm.

"They've brought the glen," she said.

I went out onto the step in the last of the light.

Beyond the gate stood forty or fifty people, with lanterns.

Hamish Gow stood at the front with a heavy man in a constable's coat and a minister in a black hat.

The thin doctor from Inverness hovered behind them.

Angus Gow stood off to one side, his bandaged hand tucked into his coat and his eyes fixed on me.

I knew the faces in the crowd.

The neighbours I had grown up beside were there, and the widow I had lied to, with her shawl over her head.

They had come to see a girl dragged out of a haunted house.

"Mr. Kerr," called the constable.

"I am sorry to disturb your evening."

"I have a paper here from the factor and the doctor, concerning one Ailsa Munro, a ward of Mr. Gow."

"She is said to be unwell and in the wrong house."

Niall had come out of the kitchen behind me.

He stood a step above me in the lantern light, tall and thin and white-haired, and a murmur went down the crowd.

Half of them had never seen him.

"She is not unwell," said Niall.

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