He used to come with his father and shoot, just here. Not when it was green like now, with the leaves and the nettles, but in winter when it was all brown, the ground and the trees. Shhh, Richard, his father would say, and he would stand beside him, still as the dog knew to be still, not right under the oak where Kumiko had pointed but at the edge of its cover where there was a view out onto open fields and sky and the pigeons coming in to roost. He had stood in this spot beside his father until he had grown cold, and his mind drifted so that the pigeons always surprised him when they came. But not his father. His father raised the gun and fired, one, two barrels. When a bird fell the pleasure of it warmed them.

One barrel only, it must have been. Here. Somewhere about here. The pigeons flying up, and the small birds out of the bushes, and the rooks from their colony high in the trees. Had the birds flown up in astonishment, at a man who shot at himself?

He could not understand why he had not thought it before. (Or no, he might have thought it but dismissed the thought. Who wants to dismiss a truth they have believed since the age of ten? Or a lie, rather.) The story as she told it fitted together. It was so much more likely, when you thought about it, than any accident. Here, it had happened; planned, executed, not any accidental incompetent cocked-gun tripping over some fence. A man out in the early morning, come for the purpose, dying here.

He shouted then. It was neither a word nor a scream but only a twisted cry. Damn. Damn that girl, damn them all. Was she too far off to hear it? The sound stretched and melded with that of the hundred rooks that he had set rising and cawing over the trees.

He looked up where the black birds whirled under the sky. Light up there. Sunlight, seeping down. The nettles a bright green where the light struck through them. He stumbled out where the girl had gone, not following, only going out into the light, away from this place.