Dyson Kane started up the motor. The helicopter warmed up for a while, and then tipped up into the air. They flew at low level across the ocean of stained wheat, until they circled at last around the small tree-bordered house where Willard lived. Dyson put the helicopter down beside Willard’s Ford pick-up and switched off. They climbed out into the darkness, and ducked under the whistling rotors.

Willard was a widower. His wife Nanette had worked in the kitchens at South Burlington Farm when Ed was a boy; but at the age of forty-five she had contracted cancer of the face, and died. Willard had kept his house pretty much the same through the years that followed, and if anyone had walked into it without realising Nanette had been gone since 1961, they would have thought that she was about to come singing down the stairs at any minute. Willard wasn’t morbid about her, just very gentle with her memory. Beside the oak sofa, on a small table, her knitting still lay where she had left it the day she died. It wasn’t sacrosanct. Willard didn’t mind if anybody picked it up and looked at it. But it was something she had been doing on the day he left her, and that’s why he kept it there.

Ed and Dyson sat down in the living-room while Willard went into the kitchen to find the beer. Dyson called out to Willard, ‘Mind if I switch on the television? Maybe we’ll catch the news.’

‘Sure,’ said Willard, from the kitchen, popping the tops on cans of Coors. Dyson leaned forward in his armchair and pressed the switch on the big old walnut-veneer set. The picture flickered sideways for a while, and then they saw Magilla Gorilla grinning out of his pet-store window.

‘News is after this,’ said Willard, coming back in with the beer. ‘Does anybody like pretzels?’

‘I’m only the world’s greatest pretzel-addict,’ said Dyson. ‘I took three cures at St Joseph’s Hospital before they finally gave up and let me eat as many as I wanted.’ Ed glanced around the room. It was four or five months since he’d been in here, but it hadn’t changed. The cheap ornaments still stood on the mantelpiece over the fire, and on the walls hung the framed portrait of Nanette, and the painting of Mount Sunflower, the highest peak in Kansas, at sunrise. There was also an aerial photograph of South Burlington Farm, in colour, with the ballpen inscription, ‘To Willard. With thanks for everything you’ve ever done here. Ursula Hardesty.’