Kerr of Kerrsyde came back from Ayr on the fourteenth of November at about eleven in the morning, and there were four men in that yard who saw him get off his horse and every one of them has described it the same way.
He did not ask anybody anything.
He walked across the yard and into the chapel and shut the door.
He was in there for about a quarter of an hour.
His daughter was in the hall when he came out and she stood up, and he looked at her and said: "Who found him?"
"Tam. And the two women from the mill washed him."
"Where was the horse?"
She had four days of it ready and she gave it to him in the order she had set it out, which is the way she had done accounts for him since his eyes went.
The horse had come up on its own and was standing at the bawn gate at about six in the morning.
The bridle had a cheek strap broken on the near side, which is the side a man goes up on.
There was a mark on the back of his head and the priest had looked at it for a long time and had not mentioned it in the hall.
And he had been in the water eleven hours, which put him in it at about five o'clock in the evening, which is four hours before he would have left Craigend.
Kerr of Kerrsyde listened to the whole of it standing up.
"Four hours," he said.
"Aye."
"So he did not go to Craigend."
"He went to Craigend," said Ailsa Kerr. "He was seen at Craigend. He went at about four and he was in the water at about five, and whatever happened to him happened on the way there, Faither, and not on the way back, and every man in this house has spent four days saying it was coming home in the dark with drink in him.
"And it was not. It was daylight."
Her father sat down.
He was six and fifty. He had buried a wife in 1516 and he had a book with thirty-seven entries in it that was about to have thirty-eight, and his eyes had gone four years earlier and he had not told above three people.
"Say the rest," he said.
"There is no rest. That is the whole of what I have got."
"Ailsa."
"There is no rest," she said. "I have asked eleven people four questions each and there is nothing else. Nobody saw a horse on that road. Nobody heard anything at the mill. The Blackwoods were at the Rig all that day for a marking and there are about forty men who will swear it, and I have had that from two of our own who were on the hill and saw them."
Her father did not say anything for a long moment.
"Then we wait," he said.
"Wait?"
"We wait, and we find out, and then we do it properly."
She has gone over that morning about four hundred times in the forty years since and she has never once been able to decide what he meant by it.
Because he did find out.
He found out inside four days, and there is no reason on this earth that a woman who could get eleven hours out of a wet coat could not have found out too, if she had been let.
And on the fifteenth of November her father sent her to her mother's cousin at Maybole for a month, and she went, because she was five and twenty and he was her father and it was 1523.