All the same she decided to let the girl go. Cassie was becoming bored and frustrated at home and as she grew bigger and stronger Marie found her temper tantrums increasingly hard to control. And she realised that, although he tried not to show it, Vic was upset by the girl. When she was a baby he had been almost affectionate, holding her anxiously, buying her presents, taking her for walks up the valley in her pram. But now, as she approached adolescence, Marie could see that her uncoordinated movements and her slurred speech disturbed him. Sometimes Cassie would throw her arms around him, pulling him down so that his head rested against her cheek, damp from the saliva dribbling from her slack mouth. He would pull away without a word and go outside to stand in the garden, staring up at the hill. He would have liked a son, Marie thought suddenly, with a stab of guilt. A fit and healthy young man like Jeremy Grenville. Someone to take up on to the hill and teach everything he knows.

Vic Liddle spent the afternoon on the hill. He did not spend enough time there, especially at this time of the year. He thought it was too much work for one man – rearing the pheasants and keeping 2000 acres of heather moorland in a fit state to provide a decent day’s shooting five or six times a season. The moor always had to take second place. Perhaps now he had someone to help him things would be different, but he did not trust Danny Craven further than he could throw him and he thought there would still never be enough hours of daylight to get it all done.

All the same he looked up to Crowford Crag with some satisfaction. The heather was just as he liked to see it. They had almost finished burning and the blackened strips showed up dramatically against the brown hill. Soon it would be replaced by the new shoots of heather that the grouse liked to eat. He burnt each year in strict rotation, following the plan left to him by the old keeper. He kept it on the wall in the cottage, though he knew it by heart and did not need the guidance of the crayon-coloured map. Marie complained about it good-naturedly and said it made the place look untidy but he would not let her take it down. Some keepers went in for November burning but he preferred to do it in the spring to leave some heather long to feed the birds in case there was snow. Now he wanted to check that there weren’t any areas that needed reseeding.