Pally started walking. Josh felt half-inclined not to follow. He wanted to get home, fall into bed. But there was something about Pally’s manner that had him hooked. He followed.

Pally drove them in his battered old Jeep. Neither of them spoke. It was very dark out in the country at night, no street lights, but Pally knew his way and Josh looked ahead as the headlights cut through the blackness. He realized that he knew this route. He knew where Pally was taking him.

‘Pally . . .’ he started, dry-mouthed, wanting to insist that he turn this bloody thing around.

‘Nearly there,’ said Pally, and pulled off the lane and down a dirt track.

Josh knew this place so well. It was in his blood. He’d grown up here, on this site, with Claire and her parents Eva and Pally just over the clearing, and Cloudy Grey and Shauna’s lot, and his old drunk of a mother, God rest her.

Before Pally reached the clearing into the campsite itself, he pulled the Jeep off to the left. They bumped along over open meadow, the lights tilting crazily up ahead in the gloom, until they saw a small gathering of people standing beside a barrel-top wagon. Pally clamped on the handbrake but left the engine running and the lights on to highlight the scene.

‘You should see this,’ said Pally, and climbed shakily out of the Jeep. ‘Come on.’

The small group of people beside the wagon were turning, looking back in the glare of the headlights. Josh thought he saw Trace, Claire’s sister. And that looked like Claire’s old Aunt Lil, her mother’s sister. Pally’s brother too, he thought he recognized. No one else. At least, no one that he could see.

He climbed out of the Jeep and approached the group. They watched him in silence as Pally grabbed a tilley lamp, opened the door of the wagon and ascended the steps. Josh followed. He had to bend nearly double inside, he was too tall for these old things. Pally hung the lamp on a hook and suddenly Josh could see what was in here.

It was a corpse.

‘She passed three days ago,’ said Pally.

Oh shit, thought Josh. Now he knew what was eating Pally up; it was grief.

He found himself staring down at a little old woman on the narrow bed. It was Eva Milo, Claire’s mother. She could almost be asleep, but she wasn’t. Her face was serene and white as parchment. Her thin wrinkled arms were folded on her chest, and she was dressed in a plum-coloured crushed-velvet dress with a pearl necklace at her throat. There were gold hoops in her ears. Her white hair was carefully coiffed, and someone had dabbed a little rouge on her lips.