She put her arms around him and he let himself be held like a baby. The release of it felt good

Finn prodded at the bulbous skin of his hand. He flicked at his pinkie and was surprised that it didn’t hurt. The curtain was swept back and Dr Flett came in. She was wearing boot-cut jeans with Nike trainers, a tight purple T-shirt under her open doctor’s coat. She was someone’s mum, probably, someone’s daughter. She fitted into life here on the island and was just doing her job. Finn wondered if she knew any of the dead passengers and crew. Did she realise the extent of what had happened? When word got out his life would be unbearable.

He thought about Maddie. “OK,” Flett said, gripping his hand. “You might want to look away.”

Her head was bowed as she concentrated on his fingers. Finn stared at the swirl of her hair, the pattern of follicles, the individual strands. He wondered how much morphine she’d injected into him. He felt the bones in his knuckle crunch and grind against each other, unnatural, like the devil messing with his body.

He felt the fingers being twisted into line with the rest of his hand, heard a pop as a bone went back into the joint, then more grinding as Flett jiggled the bones into place, gripping and twisting, bending and massaging. The colour drained from his face. He put out his other hand to steady himself, then his body slumped back on the treatment table, plastic headrest against his scalp, the reassurance of it, something where it was supposed to be.

Support

“You OK?” Flett said. Finn managed a small nod with his eyes closed. “I just need to splint it,” Flett said. Something cold touched the outside of his hand. He opened his eyes and saw her strapping a metal splint to his smallest finger, along the outside of the palm. Then she taped his two injured fingers together with the middle one.

“This provides support to the two broken ones,” Flett said. “We call it buddy strapping, attaching the broken fingers to a healthy one.”

Finn thought about that. Flett moved the hand around, examining her work.

“That’ll do.” She nodded at the X-ray display, which had a second image, the left side of Finn’s ribcage. A hairline crack in the bone below the nipple. “Shame we can’t do the same for your rib.”

“So what can you do?” Finn said. Flett shoved a hand into the pocket of her coat, pulled out a box of pills and placed them in Finn’s lap.

“Take two whenever you need, no more than eight in 24 hours. They’re morphine, pretty strong, so they might make you tired or sick. Don’t drive or operate machinery, all the usual.”

“OK.”

Flett stood up and put on a smile. “You’re very lucky, I hope you appreciate that.”

“I do.”

She pulled the X-rays from the light box, switched it off and the room went gloomy. “We’ll keep you in overnight for the head knock. Just to watch for complications from concussion.”

“I can go home in the morning?”

Flett looked at him. “That depends on the police.” She had a hand on the curtain, pulling it back. “Good luck, I think you’re going to need it.”

Regretted

The door of Finn’s hospital room opened and Ingrid walked in. “My boy.” She put her hands to her face then stretched them towards him as she came to the bed. “Ingrid.”

He’d stopped calling her Gran. It seemed babyish as a teenager and he wanted to annihilate all that back then. He regretted it when Sally died, wanted to have the family link again, so now he allowed himself to switch between the two.

She hugged him and stroked his head and he felt pressure on his rib. He tensed his muscles, which made it worse. She noticed him flinching and pulled back. She went to take his hand and spotted the strapped fingers.

“For goodness sake,” she said, “what have you done to yourself?”

“I was in a plane crash, maybe you heard.”

“Oh, Thorfinn.”

He didn’t like her using his full name, it felt too formal, but he said nothing. Ingrid ran a finger along the splint. “Are you OK?”

“I was lucky,” he said.

“Just awful. Folk have died, is that right?”

Finn nodded, head down. She stroked his hair, her fingers at his temples, behind his ear. He leaned away as she found a cut at the back of his scalp.

“They’re keeping me in tonight,” he said. “Concussion. They don”t want me having an aneurysm like Mum.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I got off lightly. A fractured rib and a broken knuckle.”

“How did it happen?”

Finn looked at her. Cropped white hair pushed forward, blue-grey eyes full of mischief. Fair Isle jumper with a Nordic runes design, red jeans, smart boots. She was 67 but looked closer to 50y, amazing considering she’d spent all her life battered by the elements up here.

She’d worked the farm for 30 years, with her husband for the first 25 then on her own, before selling off the fields to a neighbour when she began to feel the aches and pains too much.

The job at the Tomb of the Eagles seemed to have injected new life into her, though.

Finn thought about her question. “I’m not sure. There was a lot of fog and turbulence, we were getting thrown around.”

She touched his cheek, which made tears come to his eyes. He breathed in and felt his ribs expand and contract. He was aware of his body struggling to hold itself together. He imagined the morphine seeping through his veins. “You’re probably still in shock,” Ingrid said.

Release

She put her arms around him and he let himself be held like a baby. The release of it felt good, someone else taking control. “I feel so guilty.”

Ingrid pulled back to make eye contact. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“You don”t know what it was like.”

“I know that you’re my grandson and a good boy, and whatever happens I’m here for you.”

He looked away. She rubbed his arm. Finn remembered her doing the same thing as they sat in his living-room in Dundee, the day after he found Sally. He was brutally hungover, had spent the rest of the previous day drinking and wandering from room to room, picking up things and putting them back down, lying down on her bed and smelling the pillow, staring at a photo of the two of them on holiday in Greece together, stupid smiles on their faces.

But this was the next day, the truth starting to sink in. He was never going to see her again.

More tomorrow.