The dogs were subdued  on the way home. They weren’t sure what they’d caught. A hare more blue than  grey, unmarked  by death: though  empty, its eyes seemed to focus on him when he took it from them. ‘Get up,’ he said to the bitch to cheer her up. ‘Get on with you.’ But she stuck so close he felt her head touch his leg. It was cold in the bothy where he lived with the dogs, up there the far side of Ampney. When he got in he thought for a minute he saw a kind of grey mould on everything. Then, later that night, he woke up out of a dream of the woman he had talked to the afternoon  before. He didn’t remember  anything  about  her and now she was leaning over him in his bed, undressed, whispering something  he couldn’t catch. Her grey hair was hanging down, her tits thin  and  white, her eyes the blue of his dog’s eyes. He didn’t like the way she tried to catch his attention.  It woke him. He was as hard  as wood, and it wouldn’t go away. He yearned to fuck someone, anyone. ‘I’d fuck anything,’ he said to himself. By then, wraiths and dips of mist lay across the fields. He could see all the way to the Arbor barn at Winsthrow, up to its door in mist. Further away, it looked as if something tall had caught fire in that direction, but it was just something in the corner of his eye and when he turned his head it was gone. ‘She wanted to know all about you,’ he teased the dogs.

They pressed up close to him then, and all the next day followed him about, quiet and unresourceful. ‘Get on with you,’ he said to them. ‘Get on with the both of you.’

Anna Waterman, meanwhile, had passed the rest of the afternoon at the de Spencer Arms, arriving home about five o’ clock. By six she had twice rung Marnie, to leave confused messages. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she began, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. In a sense, she wasn’t sorry, she was only in a panic. ‘Well, anyway, give me a call.’ Poor Marnie! After that she went round with the vacuum cleaner, and opened all the windows to get rid of the smell of paint. Later, James the cat stalked up and down the arm of the sofa butting his head into her face while she sat in front of the television. ‘James,’ she told him, picking uninterestedly at tuna and baked potato, ‘you’re a nuisance.’ The cat responded  with a breathy grinding noise.