Finally, unable to settle, she snatched up the keys to Dad’s pickup and left the trailer. She got in the pickup and drove.

As Shauna pulled up outside the Cleaver place, she thought not for the first time that the untidy bastards ought to do something to make the place look a bit better. Granted, they were only pig farmers, but the betting and other things meant they always had cash on the hip, so why didn’t they tart the place up a bit? It was damned near derelict, the gates hanging from their hinges, the porch leaning at a sharp angle. The farmhouse itself was dark, its roof mossy and missing some tiles, and the wooden cladding on the eaves was crumbling from years of neglect. The house was set close to the northern edge of a pine forest, and even on a day like today, which was bright and sunny, very little light penetrated the gloom around it.

There were several scruffy dirt-caked old trucks parked at the front, and she could hear a big dog barking monotonously inside the house. Looking out over the fields to the front of the place, she could see the pigs churning the ground to mud and hear them grunting – about a hundred in all. This was how the Cleavers made their living: breeding hogs and growing them on before sending them to market. She could smell them, too. Yeah, maybe that bitch Claire was right. The Cleavers were low lifes. But they were useful ones.

Jumping down from the pickup, she paused, looking at the statue of two grinning, rutting pigs perched above the sloping porch of the house. She felt a shudder of distaste go through her. Fucking oiks, these Cleavers. But she was going to do this, whatever it cost. She knew what she wanted, and here was where she’d get it.

‘Hiya, gal,’ said a voice behind her.

Shauna turned. It was Jeb, the youngest Cleaver boy, bull-necked and slope-shouldered. An axe hung casually from his right hand, and he was clutching a bundle of firewood against his chest with his left. He was better-looking than his two elder brothers Ciaran and Rowan, his hair blacker, his eyes nearly black too, with an intensity of expression in them that said Don’t ever mess with me. But she did, all the time.

‘Hi,’ she said, and smiled.

‘Come for some fun?’ he asked, and she nodded.

Fun first, she thought. Then she’d get down to business.

‘So where are they all today?’ asked Shauna as she and Jeb lay naked in bed an hour later. The radio on the dusty bedside table was playing ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies.

‘Dad’s at market with Rowan. Ciaran’s out the top field,’ said Jeb, rolling over and clasping her tit in a crushing grip. ‘Damn, you’re hotter than hell, girl. You really are.’