She had always got on well enough with Vic Liddle and thought he would know better. Perhaps it was some sort of pagan superstition. This was a pole, stuck into the ground where two dry-stone walls met at right angles. All the corpses were fresh, most were crows. Then she saw the buzzard. It had been tied by its neck, so the wings and the great claws hung down. It was still beautiful. She shone her torch over it, stretching the wings, looking for signs that it had been shot. There was nothing.

She was so furious that for a moment she could not move, then she took a penknife from her pocket and cut the buzzard loose.

‘Poison,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘That bastard’s been using poison. I thought Vic had put a stop to that years ago.’

It was bad enough that the buzzard had been killed. Many gamekeepers hated them, suspected them of taking young grouse, and though it was illegal to kill them they were often shot. But poison was indiscriminate. The poisoned bait laid on the hill to be taken by the larger birds of prey was also taken by other birds, by farm animals, even by domestic pets.

Then her anger turned to fear and she knew that if Lottie and Belle had strayed on to the hill and eaten the poison, or one of the birds killed by poison, then they would be killed too. She turned the right angle of the dry-stone wall and walked on up the hill, past the keeper’s gibbet. Tears streamed down her face, and she shouted and swore into the still night, promising them vengeance, imagining bloody Grenville strung up by his neck on a pole.

She found the cats curled up together in a nest of grass. They were cold and lifeless, surprisingly small. She lifted them gently into the large poacher’s pocket inside her coat, her anger blown out, still crying. She walked back to the farm, carrying the buzzard over her shoulder, sliding over the frosty grass.

At the house she went into the kitchen without taking off her coat or her boots. She found one of the plastic carrier bags that had contained her supermarket purchases and put the buzzard inside. Even with the neck bent the claws stuck ridiculously out of the end. She tied the carrier bag at the top with a piece of string, fastening it around the horny legs, then put it carefully into the large chest freezer in the scullery. This was evidence. She was quite calm but determined that Marcus Grenville would pay.