CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Calderhill was closing in on me like a storm. I had to get away. Chris was in Amalfi, his ancestral home. I’d had a postcard from him, saying that Joanna had gone home and he’d be back soon too. Briefly, I considered joining him in Italy for a day or two. But I wasn’t Chris. If I’d learnt one thing in my young life it was that. And I wasn’t really in the holiday mood. And so I decided to flee to my ancestral home: the Isle of Harris.
The house in Geocrab had been sold when my grandma died, but there was still a shieling out on the west coast. I used to go there as a boy with my granda, chugging up the sea loch in his friend Norman’s boat. We’d spend days at the hut, fishing and fixing the place up in companionable silence – peaceful times away from the womenfolk. What
