Perhaps they weren’t pretending any more. There used to be a house here, he said, taking her hand just so lightly and leading her in between the trees. He knew a way in that wasn’t too overgrown with nettles. He held back branches so that she could pass. Not skylarks over them now but rooks, rising, circling, cawing. There was an old chap who used to work for us, Billy, who remembered when the house was here, when he was a boy, and there was a woman still living in it. We used to think she must have been a witch. Look, this is where it was, you can just about see the foundations.

She did not say that she knew the place already. They had met him there before, on the track, but he must have forgotten that. They had been in the little wood, and when they came out Richard was driving by in the Land Rover, so handsome and casual with his elbow on the open window, and stopped and picked them up, and Richard had said that he still went shooting there, and Jonathan thought that he didn’t care. As if it was just a little wood where they shot pigeons and there once used to be a house. An innocent-enough place.