Owen nodded. ‘It’s because I belong here. Those other people, on the internet, I meant nothing to them. I had no place there. And now look what I’ve done to my life in Cargreave. I’ve been on the parish council for fifteen years. But the chairman left a message on my answerphone last night and said the most appalling things. Mary Salt used to be one of Mum’s patients. Mum delivered both her children. I can never look Mary Salt in the eye again. I’ve just put my resignation through her letter box.’

Cooper began to feel as if he were standing at the front door of someone’s house, searching fruitlessly for the right words to break the bad news when a family had lost a loved one – a father killed in a car crash, a teenager dead of an ecstasy overdose, a young girl snatched and dumped dead by the roadside. After a while, you learned there were no right words. You just did it, got it over with, and tried to keep up the barriers against the emotions you were bombarded with.

People wanted you to play God. They wanted you to bring the husband or daughter back to life somehow. In training, you were told how relatives might react, but not how you were going to react yourself. You weren’t trained in dealing with your own feelings. And those emotions didn’t come from a bottomless well. Every time you drained the emotional reserves, it took a bit longer to refill. Cooper had started to worry that eventually it wouldn’t refill at all. One day that well might prove to be dry, and instead of normal feelings, all he would touch would be a dry, cracked surface, barren and stinking, like the sides of Ladybower Reservoir after a hot summer.

‘I don’t understand, Owen. Did you never have a girlfriend?’ said Cooper.

The Ranger shook his head. ‘It’s old fashioned, I suppose.’

Old fashioned? Cooper didn’t comment on the understatement. Most people these days would find it incomprehensible. Perversely, he knew, this would be another thing that Owen would find held against him.

‘I was always awkward and shy as a teenager,’ said Owen. ‘I never developed the knack of forming relationships.’

‘And when there was just you and your mother? Surely it wasn’t too late?’

For answer, Owen stared at the Ten Commandments. Cooper tried to follow the direction of his gaze. Which commandment riveted his attention, and what thoughts had his question provoked that made Owen look so amazed and appalled at the way his life had turned out?

Cooper looked down the list, until he arrived at the right line. Owen was right to be amazed, if that was what he was thinking. He was looking at number seven: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’