“This is great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. Andrews, and she smiled comfortably.

“Och, you’re welcome. I don’t suppose it’s a patch on Mr. and Mrs. Elincourt’s fancy machine up at Heatherbrae, but we do our best.”

“Not at all,” I said with a laugh, thinking of my relief at dealing with a real person for once. “Actually, their coffeemaker is a bit too fancy for me, I can’t get to grips with it.”

“From what Jean McKenzie says, the whole house is a bit like that, no? She says that you take your life in your hands trying to turn on the light.”

I smiled, exchanging a quick glance with Jack, but said nothing.

“Well, it wouldn’t be my taste, what they’ve done to it, but it’s nice that they took the place on at least,” Mrs. Andrews said at last. She wiped her hands on her apron. “There’s not many round here that would have, with that history.”

“What history?” I looked up, startled, and she made a shooing motion with her hand.

“Och, don’t listen to me. I’m just a gossipy auld woman. But there’s something about that house, you know. It’s claimed more than one child. The doctor’s little girl wasn’t the first, by all accounts.”

“What do you mean?” I took another gulp of coffee, trying to quell the unease rising inside me.

“Back when it was Struan House,” Mrs. Andrews said. She lowered her voice. “The Struans were a very old family and not quite”—she pursed her lips, primly—“well, not quite right in the head, by the end. One of them killed his wife and child, drowned them both in the bath, and another came back from the war and shot himself with his own rifle.”

Jesus. I had a sudden flash of the luxuriously appointed family bathroom at Heatherbrae, with the outsize tub and Moroccan tiles. It couldn’t be the same bathtub, but it might conceivably be the same room.

“I heard there was . . . a poisoning,” I said uncomfortably, and she nodded.

“Aye, that was the doctor, Dr. Grant. He came to the house in the fifties, after the last Struan sold up and moved over the border. He poisoned his little girl, or so they say. Some’ll tell you by accident, others—”

But she broke off. Another customer had come in, setting the bell above the door jangling, and Mrs. Andrews smoothed her apron and turned away with a smile.

“But listen to me rattling on. It’s just idle gossip and superstition. You shouldn’t pay any heed. Well, hello, Caroline. And what can I get for you this morning?”

As she moved away to serve her other customer, I watched her go, wondering what she had meant. But then I shook myself. She was right. It was just superstition. All houses above a certain age had experienced deaths and tragedies, and the fact that a child had died at Heatherbrae didn’t mean anything.

Still though, Ellie’s words rang in my head as I tied Petra’s bib more firmly under her chin and dug out the pot of rice cakes.

There was another little girl.

* * *

We took the long way round back to Heatherbrae House, driving slowly along past peat-dark burns and through sun-dappled pine forests. Petra snoozed in the back as Jack pointed out local landmarks—a ruined castle, an abandoned fort, a Victorian station decommissioned long ago. In the distance the mountains loomed, and I tried to keep track of the peaks that Jack named.

“Do you like hill walking?” he asked, as we waited at a junction with the main road for a lorry to pass, and I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question.

“I— Well, I’m not really sure. I’ve never done it. I like walking, I guess. Why?”

“Oh . . . well . . .” There was a sudden hesitation in his voice, and when I looked sideways at him, there was a flush of red across his cheekbones. “I just thought . . . you know . . . when Sandra and Bill are back and your weekends are your own again, perhaps we might . . . I could take you up one of the Munros. If you liked the idea.”

“I . . . do,” I said, and then it was my turn to blush. “I do like the idea. I mean, if you don’t mind me being slow . . . I suppose I’d have to get boots and stuff.”

“You’d need good shoes. And waterproofs. The weather can turn very fast up on the mountain. But—”

His phone gave a little chirrup, and he glanced down at it, and then frowned, and handed it across to me.

“Sorry, Rowan, that’s from Bill. D’you mind telling me what he says? I don’t want to read it while I’m driving, but he doesn’t normally text unless it’s urgent.”

I pressed the text on the home screen and a preview flashed up, all I could see without unlocking the phone, but it was enough.

“ ‘Jack, urgently need the hard copies of the Pemberton files by tonight. Please drop everything and bring them—’ And that’s where it cuts off.”

“Fuck,” Jack said, and then glanced guiltily in the rearview mirror to where Petra was sleeping. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, but that’s my afternoon and evening gone, and most of tomorrow too. I had plans.”

I didn’t ask what his plans were. I felt only a sudden swoop of . . . not quite loss . . . not quite fear either . . . but a sort of unease at the realization that he would be gone and I would be quite alone with the children for the best part of twenty-four hours, by the time Jack had driven down, rested, and then driven back.

It meant something else, too, I realized, as we came out of the dark tunnel of pine trees into the June sunlight: no possibility of trying the attic door until he got back.

* * *

Jack left almost as soon as we got back, and although I had gratefully accepted his offer to take the dogs with him, and relieve me of the responsibility to feed and walk them on top of everything else, the house had an unfamiliar, quiet feeling to it after they had all gone. I fed Petra and put her down for her nap, and then I sat for a while in the cavernous kitchen, drumming my fingers on the concrete tabletop and watching the changing sky out of the tall windows. It really was an incredible view, and in daylight like this, I could see why Sandra and Bill had hewn the house in half the way they had, sacrificing Victorian architecture for this all-encompassing expanse of hill and moor.

Still, though, it left an odd sensation of vulnerability—the way the foursquare front looked so neat and untouched, while at the back it had been ripped open, exposing all the house’s insides. Like a patient who looked well enough above their clothes, but lift their shirt and you would find their wounds had been left unstitched, bleeding out. There was a strange feeling of split identity too—as though the house was trying hard to be one thing, while Sandra and Bill pulled it relentlessly in the other direction, chopping off limbs, performing open-heart surgery on its dignified old bones, trying to make it into something against its own will—something it was never meant to be, modern and stylish and slick, where it wanted to be solid and self-effacing.

The ghosts wouldn’t like it . . . I heard it again in Maddie’s reedy little voice and shook my head. Ghosts. How absurd. Just folktales and rumors, and a sad old man, living here after the death of his child.

It was more for want of anything else to do that I opened up my phone and typed in “Heatherbrae House, child’s death, poison garden.”