‘We can do this, you know. We got him back, and that’s all that matters.’

A few short months ago, Claire would have questioned that. Now, she thinks he’s right.

‘I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Love you,’ says Matt.

Jack’s taken advantage of Evan’s rare absence to pay a visit to Helen Trewitt, his bee-keeping neighbour. He takes the Freelander to the bottom of the Trewitts’ lane, but finding the gate closed, he parks up on the rough ground, and sets off to walk up to the house. The day is bright, biting cold, and Jack feels every breath of frigid air deep in his lungs. A third of the way up the track, he stops to rest, telling himself it’s to get a look at Andrew Trewitt’s Blackface ram. A few paces further on, he feels the need to stop again, fighting against a rising feeling of nausea. The track’s somehow grown in length since he was last here – how is that possible? – but only months ago he ran up here like a young man. By the time he reaches the farmyard, he’s feeling very unwell, fighting for breath and his heart-rate unsteady.

Pulling himself together as best he can, he knocks at the farmhouse door.

‘Jack! Come in!’ Helen’s always welcoming, but she takes one look at Jack and makes him sit down.

‘Are you all right?’ she asks. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’

‘A glass of water,’ says Jack, hunting in his pockets for his tablets and inhaler, but he’s left them in the glove-box of the Freelander.

‘Tea’s good for everything,’ says Helen, and she finds fruitcake to up Jack’s blood sugar. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t drive up. At our age, who wants to be slogging up that track? How are you anyway, Jack? How are you getting on?’

‘I miss her,’ he says, repressing the pricking tears, as he seems to do constantly these days. ‘It isn’t easy, not easy at all. But I’m soldiering on, for Evan’s sake.’

‘He’s a worthwhile project, that boy.’ Helen pours tea and cuts the fruitcake. A cat lying on the windowsill above the Aga gets up from its blanket, turns round and settles back to sleep. ‘He’s a credit to you, Jack, he really is.’

Jack tells her about the police intervention and how he fears a backward step.

‘I wouldn’t be too worried,’ says Helen. ‘It had to come sometime. They were always going to need some kind of statement, and it might do him good to actually talk about it. It’s not good to keep things bottled up.’

Jack doesn’t agree, though he doesn’t say so. He has no wish to know what Evan went through.