Chapter Twenty-Five

Callum thought about the photograph — his father’s photograph, the one taken on a disposable camera bought with cash in Inverdrum, developed alone in a car park before its owner could lose his nerve — and understood, with a fresh urgency that pushed through even the accumulated exhaustion of the last five weeks, that he needed to find it. It hadn’t been in the tin box under the wheelhouse bench, not among the eleven notebooks he’d already gone through cover to cover three separate times. Somewhere — in the cottage, in the boat, in some third hiding place his father had chosen with the same careful, patient logic that had kept eleven notebooks safe for thirty-seven years — there was a physical photograph of Huw Brannigan, young, in uniform, standing where his father’s memory placed him on a night in October 1987.