Leach spread his shoulders, drew back a meaty hand and punched Mark in the mouth, knocking him down. The farmer laughed, thrilled at the chance to hit somebody. Mark got back up, flushed and furious, but his blows were uncontrolled and fell harmlessly against Leach’s chest and shoulders. The farmer knocked him to the floor twice more with blows to the face, until the Ranger was bloodied and crying.

Mark wiped the blood from his mouth and touched a loose tooth. He knew he was helpless. But the only thing he could think of was that he wanted to tell Leach that he wasn’t crying because of the pain.

Then Leach noticed his sons watching, wide-eyed, from the corner of the shippon. He looked at Mark on the floor and saw that he was only a boy, too, beaten and humiliated.

‘Go on, clear off,’ he said.

As soon as the Ranger had gone, Warren Leach felt a black depression descend on him. The boys had vanished somewhere. They didn’t even have the excuse of the calf needing attention now. The animal had brought in a bit of money at market. Not much, but enough to pay a fraction of the bills. They had food on the table for a day or two, and a cupboard full of bottles of whisky, which was one of the necessities these days, Leach was discovering.

The boys had gone somewhere they didn’t think he would find them. They didn’t want to be near their father any more, he realized that. Why should his own sons avoid him? He was sure it was because of their mother. After all these years, she seemed to have become his enemy. He was convinced she was in touch with the boys somehow, turning them against him. He didn’t know how she was doing it, but she was poisoning their brains. They had always been such good lads before.

Leach was aware he hadn’t always been a perfect father. And he shouldn’t have let Will and Dougie see him hitting the young Ranger. At first, he had thought they would admire him, see him as the strong father he used to be, a man who was afraid of no one. But the feeling didn’t last long. It became mingled with a sense of shame. The boy he had beaten could just as easily have been one of his own sons, in a few years’ time.

When Leach tried to think about what had happened in his life over the last couple of months, his mind shied and balked at the enormity of it. It was a problem so huge that he couldn’t contemplate it, couldn’t even begin to consider how to cope with it. He could only follow helplessly the little trickles of thought that ran this way and that in his brain, seeking a way out of the nightmare.