It wasn’t right that they could come with their smiling faces and sharp hands and take his safety away. It wasn’t right that they could make him weak like that, when he was the strong one. They were soft, after all, he had seen it: the weakness of their flesh, seeping out of their clothes; had tasted their prey-scent in the flowery perfumes they doused themselves in. Women were dangerous, and difficult, just as the man had said they were. They would always be lethal to him, a thing to be feared.

When he returned to the house, the man was nowhere to be seen, but the living-room door was open and Michael could see one of the women still sitting on the sofa. It was the one in the white fur coat, and she looked bored, picking at a loose thread on a cushion. The other girl was gone. Michael went down to the kitchens and picked out one of the long meat knives; he had seen the man cooking with it sometimes, cutting up steak or carving a pork joint. When he returned, the girl was still there, and in the lengthening shadows of the evening Michael realized that she couldn’t see him just outside the room. He imagined himself as he was in the woods, silent and at home, a predatory force. He thought of all the little ghosts he had packed neatly away in the black earth, how they knew him from his silent footsteps as he passed over their graves.

The knife held loosely in one hand, he went into the living room and closed the door.

Later, much later, Michael became aware of the man standing in the doorway, watching him. He blinked rapidly. The room appeared to have changed; it was a different place, a room in a red landscape full of silence.

‘Michael.’ The man’s voice was very soft. ‘We can’t leave her here, lad.’

He shook his head. ‘We’ll take her to the woods.’

‘No.’ The man came a single step into the room, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Even that’s too close. We’ll have to take her far away, Michael, just to be sure.’

‘But that’s what I promised her, a place under the trees.’ Michael didn’t recall making the woman any such promises, but the last hour or so was already fusing into one strange fever dream, and it seemed right enough. She belonged in Fiddler’s Wood with the rest of them, so she would feel his silent footsteps walking over her.