‘Swear secrecy or help?’ he asked, wanting to be clear before he committed.

‘The former to start with but the latter would be great,’ she answered frankly. Her hood blew up behind her head and she pushed it back.

He nodded. ‘OK.’ He couldn’t somehow imagine Clancy putting him in the position unless she was pretty sure he was safe to commit.

‘Well.’ Clancy clasped her hands between her knees. ‘Apparently Jordy isn’t very understanding with anybody whose sexual orientation is other than his own.’

‘Ah.’ Aaron felt a clunk of misgiving in his midriff. He could only think of one way this conversation was going to go now and it would explain a lot. The exclusive friendship. The way they dropped off the radar. Their sometimes silent communication. Harry’s attitude to going to uni. ‘Harry and Rory?’ he asked slowly.

Relief flashed across Clancy’s face. ‘You’d guessed?’

‘Not until you mentioned sexual orientation. Jordy being a bit of a dinosaur in that direction and the way Harry and Rory are always together suddenly made a new kind of sense. Wow.’ He sat silently, trying to assimilate the information and project its likely consequences.

Clancy gave him the gist of a conversation she’d had with the boys and Aaron listened intently. ‘If Jordy’s pressuring Harry to go away to uni and live in such a way that he can’t share accommodation, then I’d imagine he has suspicions,’ he said at the end. ‘He’s trying to separate them. He probably thinks it’s a phase Harry will grow out of if he suddenly has a feast of girls around him.’

Clancy looked doubtful. ‘If that’s how he thinks then I can see why Harry’s reluctant to tell him.’

‘Yeah.’ Aaron reflected for a bit longer, then sighed. ‘Thanks. I’ll have a think about it and talk to Harry. See if we can work anything out. Poor kid. Jordy can be overbearing and rigid and nobody’s ever “come out” to the village, so far as I know.’

‘It would be a solution if they both got jobs and moved away together,’ Clancy mused. ‘But Rory’s fixed on Harry going to uni and not wasting his potential. Isn’t life hard?’ Clancy reached out and ran her fingers over the neck of the guitar, following the curve that would spend a lot of time resting in the soft part of its eventual owner’s left hand.

Aaron watched her fingertip trace its contours and an entirely inappropriate image filtered into his mind. If he wasn’t careful, life wasn’t going to be the only thing that was hard. He made his mind switch tracks. ‘I’ll talk to Harry and Rory. See if I can come up with anything to help.’

Clancy removed her hand from the guitar and became brisk. ‘Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is the videos from Keelmarsh House.’ She foraged in the bag she’d left at her feet and brought out a thin Mac laptop. ‘I’ve made them into several clips. I thought that I could hook up to your Wi-Fi and share them with you.’