Dad was ashen. ‘A goat this big? This amount of damage? No way. And look – the tear down the middle is clean.’

The edges of its slitted pelt were straight, knife-cut. The lungs had been pulled free of the ribs, along with a spill of its other organs.

‘Not the girl herself?’

‘No! No!’ he said, and I bristled at his swift shielding of her from blame. How did he know what she was capable of?

‘Well, she was pretty defensive from the moment we pulled up,’ I suggested.

‘No,’ he said again, certain.

‘Why would she say all of that stuff then, just out of nowhere, if she wasn’t guilty of something?’

‘It wasn’t out of nowhere.’

‘What do you mean?’

He dipped his head and sighed. ‘She isn’t a bother, really,’ he said, no straight answer at all. ‘It’s just she’s on her own and she can be … She just needs …’

‘Needs what?’

Fear rose within me – had something terrible happened between them?

‘She needs someone looking after her,’ he said, avoiding my eye. ‘You saw the state of the mother. She’s poorly, no matter how Bishy puts it.’

I laughed sharply, anything to avoid my real emotion. I knew absolutely how Paul had felt now – his envy, the injustice.

‘But she’s a coycrock,’ I spat. The bigotry I’d been brought up with swelled easily to the surface. ‘And you know she’s been seen up at the stones with the Eldest Girls too, getting mixed up in their nonsense. The kids in my class have been talking about it.’

My father stared at me levelly. I felt ugly under this scrutiny, exposed.

‘Same might be said for your coycrock teacher,’ he replied, returning fire. ‘Hasn’t he been getting mixed up with those girls ’n’ all?’

I was breathless. He already knew, understood that I had taken his advice and discarded it. I wanted to say sorry, to beg his forgiveness, and at the same time I wanted to defend Ben – He teaches them science, only science! – but we were stood either side of a bloody carcass, the grassy stench of it rising up, so I said nothing. The situation felt messy enough.

‘Let’s get some tarp from the back,’ said my dad, ‘get this thing into the truck.’

We worked quietly, carefully testing that the animal’s limbs could take its own weight before we grabbed a pair of hooves each and lifted.

‘Can you see its missing horns?’ asked my dad. ‘Or any of his insides? I don’t want any remains being found.’ We poked around at the edges of a nearby copse but there was no trail of sinew, nothing to suggest an animal had dragged part of the goat away to chew on later. We gave up, Dad latching the end of the vehicle’s load bed.