Anton sips his pint, uncomfortable with Mark’s tone.

‘There’s something else I remember. Something about you,’ Mark tells him.

Anton puts his glass down, brings his eyes up to meet Mark’s, sees the hard, searching look his son gives him. Inwardly, he feels himself shying away from it, afraid.

‘I remember a party in the house. I remember going outside when I wasn’t supposed to. I saw something. I think I saw you.’

Anton’s heart is clamouring in his chest. He knows. The boy knows.

‘That was the night Mum died, wasn’t it?’

‘Mark, there were so many parties in our house. You were just a child –’

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

Mark’s eyes furiously search his father’s face. Finding nothing there, he lets them fall, then picks up his pint and sinks it. ‘I miss her,’ he admits. ‘Even now, I still do. I wish she hadn’t died, okay?’ he adds, and the hostility in his voice, with the accusatory look he shoots at Anton, changes things between them. For in that one moment, a realization comes to Anton, the truth he has always dreaded: his son thinks he did it.

Anton walks home alone. Despair has opened inside him. All these years he has pushed back hard against it. But now the last bulwark against it has collapsed: his own son is convinced he’s a killer.

All he wants now is to be left in peace. He doesn’t look at Hilary’s house as he walks up Wyndham Park. Instead he keeps his eyes on the pavement, offering up a silent prayer that he won’t meet anyone he knows. He couldn’t handle it right now.

He closes the gate behind him, and begins to climb the steps. Up ahead, in front of the door, Anton sees that an old coat or soiled blanket has been kicked in there. But as he gets closer, he notices the snout, the blackened tips of the ears, and the weeping cavity where an eye had been eaten out by insects or birds. He halts his progress, recoiling in horror.

On more than one occasion in the past a vixen had made her home at the back of his garden, parading her progeny across his lawn in the hour before dusk. Anton has no idea where foxes go to die – urban creatures, mangy with disease, seeking out a quiet spot close to human habitation in which to expire. But Anton knows that this dead creature had been placed there on his doorstep. It’s a message. Over the past few weeks there have been several. Birds, bags of dog shit, and now a fox.

He glances back at the quiet street. The evening sunlight shines strongly through the trees. From hidden gardens come sounds of unseen kids screaming, dogs barking. All that noisy living, it makes him uncomfortable, as if he’s trespassing.