The smell of freshly made coffee met her as she padded through to the kitchen, the flagstones chill even through two pairs of socks, and she sniffed appreciatively. It reminded her of her favourite Italian delicatessen, where she met her friends for coffee…or used to meet, she remembered bleakly. There were no friendly little places to drop in for coffee around Kincaillie, and no friends to meet.

If anything, the kitchen was more depressing in daylight than it had been the night before. It was dank and dirty and dilapidated, and the pile of boxes they had unpacked from the car the night before only added to the chaos of the scene. Mallory sighed.

The kitchen door stood open, and she went over to shut it before realising that it was just as cold inside as out, so it wasn’t as if a lot of heat was being lost. Registering for the first time that the rain had stopped, Mallory stood in the doorway, hugging her arms together, and looked at her new home for the first time.

The door opened onto a walled kitchen garden, as tangled and unkempt as everything else at Kincaillie. Beyond the far wall she could see what looked like a small wood, huddled into the hollow of a forbidding hillside that reared up above them, its flanks covered with scree and heather and its top ridged with corries where snow still lay in cold white streaks. The wind had dropped to a brisk, gusty breeze that sent clouds scudding across the sky, and the air was fresh and cold and tangy with the smell of the sea.

Torr stood on a brick path, holding a mug of coffee and watching Charlie, who was snuffling joyously around the big, messy garden, so much more interesting to him than the immaculate courtyard garden he’d been restricted to in the city. Sensing her presence, though, he looked up and barked a welcome, before bounding over to her, his tail wagging furiously.

His delight was impossible to resist, and Mallory couldn’t help laughing as she bent to receive his rapturous greeting. He squirmed with delight at her attention, and, still smiling, she looked up to see that Torr had turned and was watching them both with an expression that made her heart stutter. The next instant, though, it was gone so completely that Mallory wondered if she had imagined it.

‘Good morning,’ she said, unaccountably shy as she straightened. It wasn’t even as if they had done anything to feel shy or embarrassed about, but the memory of lying close to him, feeling him breathing, seemed suddenly startling in the cool morning air.

‘Good morning.’ Torr came over to join them on the paved area by the door. ‘I see you managed to get some sleep, then?’

‘Yes. Thank you,’ said Mallory stiltedly. She had been so deeply asleep that she hadn’t even stirred when he’d disentangled himself from her, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. ‘Have you been up long?’

‘Not really.’ Torr seemed almost as awkward as she felt. ‘I made some coffee, and then Charlie was keen to come out.’

‘He seems to be having a good time, anyway,’ she said, as Charlie bustled off in search of more smells.

‘Yes.’

A ridiculously constrained silence fell.

‘The water should be hot enough for a bath if you want one,’ said Torr after a moment. ‘I put the immersion heater on.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’ Mallory was torn between longing for a bath and dread at the thought of all the cleaning she would have to do first. The memory of that bathroom made her shudder. ‘Er…will you keep an eye on Charlie if I go and do that now?’

‘If you want, but he hardly needs watching. There are no busy roads for him to escape onto here. You don’t need to worry about him now.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, reflecting that proximity to a busy road had also meant that they were close to central heating, immaculate plumbing, a functioning oven and all the other conveniences of modern living that had passed Kincaillie by. ‘I suppose not.’

In his dark blue sweater and jeans, Torr was apparently oblivious to the cold, and said that he would stay outside with his coffee while Mallory went in to tackle the bathroom. Helping herself to a fortifying mug of coffee, she found some rubber gloves and some bleach. Torr had suggested bringing some cleaning equipment, and now she could see why. If the bathroom had seemed disgusting last night, what was it going to look like in the cold light of day?

Bracing herself, she carried the coffee down to the bathroom, took a deep breath and opened the door. And stopped dead.

The floor had been roughly swept and the bath cleared of the debris she remembered from the night before. It was still stained, and cracked with age, but it had been cleaned and rinsed, and a cloth hung neatly over the taps. Torr must have dealt with it while she was sleeping.

Mallory looked down at it thoughtfully for some moments, and then turned to inspect the basin. Like the loo, it had had a cursory clean. Not enough to make it sparkling, for sure, but at least the bathroom was usable.

Turning on the hot tap, she held her hand under it until she was sure it was going to run hot, hardly daring to believe that she would get her much longed-for bath after all. She filled the tub almost to the top, and when she lowered herself into water as hot as she could bear, she let out a long sigh of relief. The walls might still be grimy, the view through the window unremittingly bleak, but at least she was warm again. For the next few minutes that was all that mattered.

By the time she eventually made it back to the kitchen, Mallory was feeling much more herself. She had washed her hair and dried it until it fell dark and smooth and shiny to her shoulders, and was wearing black trousers and her favourite pale blue cashmere jumper.

Torr was on his knees in front of the big range, his face screwed up with effort as he reached one arm deep inside, but he looked round when Mallory came in. Something flashed in his eyes, and was quickly shuttered. ‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Much.’ Mallory hesitated. ‘Thank you for cleaning the bathroom,’ she said. ‘I was expecting to have to do that myself.’

He hunched a shoulder, as if embarrassed. ‘I thought you might want a bath this morning,’ he said gruffly. ‘The conditions here are worse than I remembered.’

It wasn’t exactly an apology for the state of things, but Mallory sensed that he was offering an olive branch of sorts.

‘I thought I’d make some more coffee,’ she said, picking up the kettle. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Thanks.’ Torr got to his feet, brushing the dust from his hands, and showed her how to light the gas ring before resuming his awkward position practically lying half in and half out of the range.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked him as she retrieved the coffee from the provisions box.

‘Getting this range going,’ he said rather indistinctly. ‘It should provide a good heat, and we’ll be able to cook on it.’

He might be able to, but Mallory couldn’t begin to imagine how she would begin to even boil an egg on it. She had never yearned to make jams and chutney in a farmhouse kitchen; the latest technology, preferably black and gleaming or cool stainless steel, was much more her style.

She watched him, unwillingly impressed by his competence. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’

‘I grew up in the country,’ he told her, grunting with effort. ‘We had a range in the kitchen. It wasn’t as old as this, but I’m assuming the principle is the same. Ah, that’s it!’ he said with satisfaction, and withdrew his arm once more.

That was something else Mallory hadn’t known about him before. ‘I didn’t have you down as a country boy,’ she said. ‘Did you live in Scotland?’

‘No.’ Torr brushed ashes from his hands. ‘My father came to work in England as a young man and never moved back. But, like a lot of expatriate Scots, the longer he was away the more Scottish he became. He was always very insistent about my Scottish heritage.’ His mouth quirked at one corner. ‘He even named me after a loch, which I thought was taking things a bit far. You can imagine how much stick I got about being called Torridon McIver at my very English school!’

Mallory had a sudden vivid image of a boy with dark hair and dark blue eyes and a beaky, combative face. He would have squared up to his tormentors, that was for sure. It was a strange feeling to imagine him as a young boy, just as it was disconcerting to realise just how different he looked in his faded jeans and his bulky jumper. The man washing his hands at the sink was barely recognisable as the stony-faced businessman in an immaculate suit who had effectively blackmailed her into marriage.

‘I’ll show you round after this,’ he said, as they had some bread and jam with coffee for breakfast. ‘Kincaillie’s your home now, so you might as well get to know it.’

How could this be home? Mallory wondered as she followed Torr along interminable passageways. Charlie trotted interestedly behind them, his claws clicking on the bare floors. They went up and down an extraordinary variety of staircases-some narrow, some grand, some stone and spiralling, some broad and wooden-and in and out of endless rooms. Not all were as dramatic as the great hall, but they were equally cheerless.

The damage wrought by a leaking roof and years of neglect and abandon was depressingly obvious, and Mallory was baffled by the warmth in Torr’s voice as he ran a hand over a piece of stonework, or pointed out a view from one of the windows, almost as if he didn’t see the damp and the dirt and the dust and the debris. She might grimace at patches of mould or rusty streaks, but he seemed able to picture the rooms as they had once been, when Kincaillie was a living, working house rather than a crumbling ruin.

Some of the rooms still had occasional pieces of furniture, shrouded in dust sheets, and they came across the odd stag’s head, stuffed and rotting on the wall, but otherwise the place was eerily bare.