She killed the sound on UK Memories. She went around the room and flicked all of the lamps off. She went again and sat by the vague burbling of the stream. She let full dark take over the glass – that it might banish what was out there. But each night sent its visitors. The open maw of a mouth she might see or the slash of a sudden, quick turn that could only be the angle of a nose, like a Frenchman’s cruel hard nose – the night put its faces to the glass. The murmuring of the stream came to work as the voices of those gathered outside.

She believed and at once did not believe.

‘Please?’ she whispered.

The word was enough to break the spell. She got up and went about the room and she flicked on all of the mismatched lamps – the kitsch 80s lamps, and the vintage 50s lamps, and her father’s treasure, a superb thin angular 70s Belgian classic that had the look of a spider, reaching, and cost about the same as a retro Saab. Three of them made like ever. In some humourless loft in Antwerp. She slid the glass doors and stepped boldly outside and into the chill of the fresh dark.

‘Nothin’ and nobody,’ she said.

‘Veh-hy … much … hah-lone,’ she said.

She convinced herself that it was so. It was chill outside but a sweet chill. The stars worked to hang a melody on the dark sky. The bogside was picked out along its expanse in an abstract confusion of shapes; the rocky outcrops and the reefed banks and the lone tree – a wind-twisted whitethorn – that was visible from the house.

‘It’s on holiday,’ her father said once. ‘Get away from all the other trees.’

The black breathing of the sea was beyond; the sea was a palpable beast, and as though it was waiting. She sniffed hard for its sexual note – brine, ozone, salt.

She turned back inside and slid the glass doors shut and every surface in the room gleamed in the lamplight with menace. The space was planed to a riot of sharp angles. The Sabatier block sat glowering on the brushed granite worktop. She shook her head rapidly from side to side, like a dog after rain. Her phone rang.

The ringtone was demented, so loud and fast, cacophonous, and she knew that it must be going on past seven o’clock – or eight o’clock, his time – in Granada. He’d have a couple of drinks down and some jamón and Manchego for nibbles. He’d be feeling languid and deep and thinking, okay, I’ll just check in, I’ll play it casual.

She had switched off voice message – it would not go to voice. So how long to let him suffer? Twenty rings? Or forty?

She answered somewhere in between.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’