There was only one photograph of Grandfather, sitting in bright sunlight on a kitchen chair outside what I guessed was Luskentyre, turning his head away and putting his arm up to his face in an action the camera had captured as a blur.  It was the only representation I had ever seen of him, apart from a couple of even more blurred newspaper photographs.  He was barely recognisable, but looked very thin and young.

'Ah.  Here now…' Zhobelia lifted a small brown book - about the size of a pocket diary, but much thinner - from the shoe-box.  She looked inside the little book, taking off her glasses to read.  A piece of white paper fell out.  She picked it up and handed it to me.

I put the photograph of my Grandfather down on the knee of my leather trousers. 'Ah-ha,' she said matter-of-factly.

I unfolded the piece of paper.  It felt crinkly and old, but also thick and fibrous.  It was a bank-note.  A ten-pound note, from the Royal Scottish Linen Bank.  It was dated July 1948.1 inspected it, turned it over, smelled it.  Musty.

Zhobelia tapped my knee again.  Having attracted my attention, she gave me a stagy wink as she handed me the small brown book.

I put the bank-note on my knee along with the photograph of Grandfather.

The little brown book looked faded and worn and very old.  It was warped, too, as though it had once been saturated with water.  There was a British Royal Crown on the front cover.  It was really just two bits of card, one thinner piece placed inside the other thicker cover, and not secured.  The inner card carried a list of dates and amounts of money, expressed in pounds, shillings and pence.  The last date was in August 1948.  That piece of card was marked AB 64 part two.  I put it down on the bed cover.  The other piece of card was marked AB 64 part one.  It seemed to be some sort of pass book.  It belonged, or had belonged, to somebody called Black, Moray, rank: private.  Serial number 954024.  He was five feet ten inches tall, weighed eleven stone five pounds and had dark brown hair.  No distinguishing marks.  Born 29.2.20.

The rest was a description of injections he had received and what sounded like army punishments: fines, detentions and losses of leave.  Perhaps it was just tiredness that meant I didn't haul up short at the date of birth, for I found myself thinking that I had no idea what any of this had to do with anything, until I looked from the book to the photograph of my Grandfather as a young man, still on my knee.

The world tipped again, my head swam.  I felt faint, dizzy and sick.  A terrible shiver ran through me as my palms pricked with sweat and my mouth went dry.  My God.  Could it be?  Height, weight; hair colour.  Of course the scar wouldn't be there… And the birth-date, to settle it.

I looked up into the eyes of my great-aunt.  I had to attempt to swallow several times before I had enough saliva in my mouth to make it possible to speak.  My hands started shaking.  I rested them on my thighs as I asked Zhobelia, 'Is this him?' I held up the small brown book. 'Is this my Grandfather?'

'I don't know, my dear.  We found that in his jacket.  The money was on the beach.  Aasni found it.'

'The money?' I croaked.

'The money,' Zhobelia said. 'In the canvas bag.  We counted it, you know.'

'You counted it.'

'Oh yes; there were twenty-nine hundred pounds.' She gave a sigh. 'But it's all gone now, of course.' She looked at the ten-pound note sitting on my knee. 'We burned all the rest, in the canvas bag.' She nodded at the white ten-pound note resting on my leg. 'That's the last one left.'

CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE

I sat with my great-aunt, gradually piecing together the story, going over it from what seemed like slightly different angles in her memory.  The story of my Grandfather being found on the sandy ground outside the mobile shop at Luskentyre on the night of the storm was all true, but what we had never been told was that the sisters had found an army pay-book inside the jacket he had been wearing.

They had also kept quiet the fact that the next day, after the storm, Aasni had walked along the beach at Luskentyre and found a zippered canvas hold-all, washed up on the sands.  It contained a pair of brown leather shoes, sodden with sea water, and a money sack containing two hundred and ninety ten-pound notes, all from the Royal Scottish Linen Bank.

They wondered if perhaps there had been a shipwreck during the storm, and Grandfather and the money had been washed ashore from the foundering ship, but when they asked Mr McIlone and some other locals, then and later, nobody had heard of a ship going down that night off Harris.

My Grandfather had been in no fit state to appreciate all this, lying with his zhlonjiz poultice over his head wound, hallucinating.  When he eventually woke up days later and claimed to be called Salvador Whit, the sisters thought the better of disabusing him of this notion while he was in such an obviously fragile and fevered state.  They had already agreed to hide the money in their special chest, worried that the small fortune they had found washed up represented the proceeds of some nefarious exploit; when Grandfather started pleading with them to look for just such a canvas bag, they became even more worried.

By the time my Grandfather was well enough to start looking for the canvas bag himself, both Aasni and Zhobelia had rather fallen for him, and jointly arrived at the conclusion that if he was given the money - whether it was rightfully his or not - he would probably disappear out of their lives.  The two sisters agreed that they would share the white man, assuming that that was what he wanted, and they would keep the money safe, only revealing its existence if there should arise some emergency which could be dealt with in no other way except financially.

They also agreed that, one day, they would reveal the truth to their joint husband, if it seemed like a good idea, and they were certain that he wouldn't beat them or leave them or cast them out.  Somehow, that day never did arrive.

Eventually, one afternoon at High Easter Offerance in 1979, they decided to dispose of the money altogether, after something that Zhobelia saw (she had so far been very vague as to exactly what it was that had had this effect).  They originally intended to burn it in the tandoor oven in the farm kitchen, but even in the middle of the night people sometimes came down to the kitchen, so that might be risky.  They decided they would incinerate the notes in the stove in the mansion-house kitchen, where the sisters usually carried out their experiments with Scottish-Asiatic cuisine.

Zhobelia didn't actually know what had happened in the kitchen on the night of the fire, but had managed to convince herself that the money - evil influence to the last - had somehow caused the pressure-cooker explosion and subsequent conflagration, and that it was therefore all her fault.  She had seen Aasni's ghost in her dreams, and once, a week after the fire, she had woken up in her bed in the darkness, and been quite fully awake but unable to move or breathe properly, and knew that Aasni's ghost was there in the room with her, sitting on her chest, turning her lungs into a pressure cooker for her guilt.  She knew that Aasni would never forgive her or leave her alone so she decided that night that she would leave the Community and seek out her old family to ask their forgiveness.

The Asis family had moved too, setting up home in the Thornliebank district of Glasgow, from where they ran a chain of food shops and Indian restaurants.  There were still Asis family members in the Hebrides but they were a younger generation; the people Aasni and Zhobelia had known had all decanted to Glasgow, and apparently there had been great debate amongst them regarding whether they wanted Zhobelia back at all.  Zhobelia had gone to stay with Uncle Mo instead - swearing her son to secrecy in the process - while the Asis family were making up their collective mind.