He heard Danny Craven before he saw him. There was the sound of hammering and the low, tuneless whistling that a child makes when he’s concentrating. It had been a cold spring and most of the trees were bare and the ground was thick with last winter’s leaves.

Vic had known the wood since he was a child. It was one of the features of his landscape. There had been a fox covert, encouraged by the old squire, Olivia Grenville’s grandfather, who had been more interested in hunting than shooting.

One summer holiday Vic had come to the wood each night at dusk to watch the cubs. It had been an obsession. While other boys watched television and played cowboys and Indians he came to the wood to see the foxes. Even now, when he should consider them as vermin, they held a fascination for him. If he had problems with a fox taking pheasants from the release pen he preferred to wait for it, in the special look-out he had built in a tall tree, and shoot it with a deer rifle, than put down poison which would kill them all.

At the edge of the wood Vic paused and looked back over Crow Water, preparing himself for the meeting with Craven. Vic found even the most routine exchange a strain. He had never had friends. There had only been one other boy of his own age in the village and they had never got on. When he had moved on to the secondary modern at Appleworth he had been even lonelier, out of his depth. He never knew what to say to the other boys, who all seemed quicker, more sophisticated. He had left at fifteen to work on the estate and had never shared the interests of other teenagers. He cared for Marie. And Cassie, of course. But there was no one else he felt the need to bother with. He went occasionally for a pint in the Crowford Hotel, and all the regulars knew him – he had been at school with most of them – but they never had any real contact beyond a nod and a chat about the weather. He got on surprisingly well with Jeremy Grenville, but he was hardly more than a boy and as shy and awkward as Vic himself. Otherwise he preferred to be alone, and though there was really too much work for one man he was happy that he had no assistant.