In the Market Square itself was Ferris’s, a butcher’s that was also a licensed game seller. Normally, a few brace of pheasant dangled their tails in front of the window, their necks stretched and tied with string. Often there would be a pair of pigeons or a mountain hare. Tourists had been known to take exception to this – to burst into the shop with allegations of animal cruelty and obscenity.

Ben Cooper had seized the chance of his leave day to take Helen Milner for lunch. Helen had been quiet during the meal. She was concerned about the progress his mother was making, and she always asked about Matt and Kate and the girls. But he couldn’t help being aware that she was interested in almost everything except him. She didn’t ask what he was doing at work at the moment. She didn’t want to know. Not today.

Cooper sat through lunch hardly eating. He watched Helen’s hair as she talked, remembering when he had been enchanted by the coppery sheen of it in the summer sun and had begun to hope that its glow symbolized a bit of light entering his life. It had been just when he needed it, too, when everything else had seemed to be going wrong – when his mother’s descent into schizophrenia had seemed unstoppable, and when Diane Fry had appeared on the scene to complicate his life like a tangle of briars that he couldn’t shake off. Helen had seemed to be the answer to all that.

But now August seemed a long way off. The leaves of the trees in the Eden Forest had taken on the colours of copper and gold, and the yellow of sunlight, too. And then they had died.

After lunch, they walked towards the river. In the side streets, the houses huddled together, like little groups of people gossiping. They stared into each other’s windows, and knew each other’s business. On the paved steps that ran down to the River Eden the rain had brought out all the colours in the Yorkshire stone, the browns and reds and greens. The steps were uneven, and some of them were slippery with wet leaves. At the bottom, leaves had collected in a drain, and dirty water had flooded the path.