Breakfast is a silent affair. They have said terrible things. The dog is sniffing restlessly at the door. The dog needs walking, and the sea is only a mile away. Logan dons his jacket and finds Jules beside him, doing up her boots. Nothing is said. The wind buffets the glass in the front door.

She puts the dog on the lead. Logan locks up. They turn onto Ilex Way. The road is divided by a wide central reservation lined by two rows of holm oaks. They cross halfway and turn onto the path. Jules unclips the lead from Achilles and wraps it around her neck.

This used to be the driveway for Goring Hall, she says. You can just imagine the horse-drawn carriages, can’t you?

Logan doesn’t answer.

The trees stretch for a good half mile. It’s a bright morning, and they nod hello to other dog walkers coming in the opposite direction. Achilles scampers ahead, full of new smells, snuffling at the damp leaves. They pass the gates of Goring Hall – now a private hospital – and turn left onto farmland. The fields are already ploughed and planted with some kind of grass crop, perhaps early wheat. Sparse green blades poke through the soil at regular intervals, but have not yet taken; they have a fragility about them. The field runs all the way down to the sea, which is ahead of them now, a strip of blustery grey.

Alongside the field is a deep gully, for drainage or irrigation, he isn’t sure. Jules and he traipse down the edge of the field one after the other, as the path won’t allow them to walk side by side. As he forges ahead he senses she is falling behind, yet he doesn’t want to vary his pace: he needs the briskness to work off his anger at thoughts surfacing out of last night’s row. Achilles shuttles between them, darning the hole they have made, backwards and forwards like a needle through the stubby accidental plants seeded into the path. As though the dog is hoping to draw them tighter when in truth they are pulling apart.

When they reach a turn in the field, Achilles starts barking. She’s found a stone, a raw heft of flint imbued with some unimaginable appeal. Bark, bark, bark. The noise is an assault, an affront. Logan paces back to the dog and picks up the flint. Unsure of where to throw it – not the field, clearly; he doesn’t want to be accused of damaging the crop. So he throws it into the deep gully of the drainage ditch. A challenge, he thinks, for the dog to find it in the reeds.