‘Marie manages just fine while you’re at work, so you could easily have switched to working here instead. And her so-called disability doesn’t stop her from going to bingo, so I don’t see why you have to run round at her beck and call all the time. I’m sure she puts it on to keep you away from your family.’

‘Why do you always have to be such a bitch?’ Evan glared at her. ‘It’s all right for you, with your Pilates, and your yoga, and all that other hippie me-me-me shit you’re into. But you don’t see Marie when she’s struggling to breathe, and . . .’

Frank closed his eyes and rubbed his throbbing temples with his thumbs. His kids had got along OK when they were small, but they’d started fighting like cat and dog as soon as they hit their teens: Evan using crude humour to get a rise out of his sister; Jo lashing out with the razor-sharp tongue she’d inherited from their mother. But they were both nearing their thirties, so they really ought to have grown out of it by now.

Unable to bear any more of it when their voices rose in volume, Frank slapped his hand down on the arm of his chair.

‘Right, pack it in, the pair of you! If you must know, we didn’t want either of you helping out on the farm, because you were both useless at it.’

Jo guiltily dipped her gaze. She’d been ten and Evan twelve when their father had lost his engineering job and invested his redundancy money in this place. It was only thirty or so miles from their old terraced house in Manchester, but it may as well have been a different planet for how isolated they’d felt. Out of sheer boredom, Evan had half-heartedly helped their dad on the land, but Jo had defiantly resisted their mother’s attempts to teach her how to cook, grow vegetables, or tend to the stinking chickens. As soon as they had been old enough to leave home, they had both hot-footed it back to the land of the living, and only visited for special occasions now, like Christmas, and their parents’ birthdays.

The fire crackled loudly as the wind howled down the chimney, and the three lapsed into silence and drank their tea. On the verge of falling asleep by the time he’d finished, Evan leaned forward and slammed his empty cup down on the table.

‘Oi, spud face.’ He kicked Jo in the ankle. ‘Fancy a fight?’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ she warned. ‘I used to want to kill you when you roughed me up. And I mean kill,’ she added ominously. ‘If you’d known how many times I plotted to murder you and bury you under the cowshed, you’d have steered well clear of me.’