The trip to the station and back took an hour at least. She spent the morning waiting for one or other of her sons to come home. She made soup for lunch and laid the table for the three of them. When Jonny came in he saw the table and asked if Richard was back. No, she said, but I thought I heard him coming into the yard. I laid for the two of you.

He slammed the door of the Land Rover, went in the back door, down the little corridor to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table having lunch like on any ordinary day, the two of them sipping soup and a place at the end of the table laid for the girl perhaps – or perhaps it was laid for him, as if he had just been out on the farm and was coming in a little bit late. There would be a bowl warm on the Aga, soup kept warm for whichever one of them it was. Such an everyday scene, except for the fact that one place was missing, and you did not know which of them it was who was meant to have been there. The two of them looking at him, spoons raised. Sunlight coming in the window over the sink, where a flypaper ugly with trapped flies dangled and shuddered in the draught.

His mother started to get up to bring him some soup. No, don’t do that, I’m not eating. He walked out and on to the office. He took the key from the central drawer of his desk and opened the metal gun case in a cubbyhole to the side of the room. He took out a shotgun and a couple of cartridges and went out again, by the front door this time so that he did not have to pass them.

I’ll go after him, Jonny said, running to the front door.

No. She pictured horror. No. Not you. You can’t. She caught him back. If anyone goes, it has to be me.

They tussled on the step there for a moment and then he saw that she was right, and let her go, and she ran out down the drive, hectic, apron flapping. She was still wearing the blue apron she had been wearing to cook, that she had been too distracted to take off before lunch. But already Richard had disappeared from view, down the drive, past the hedges. He might have turned in any direction after that. The hedges hid everything beyond.