Sylvie worked beside Ruth and Lenny for what felt like ten hours but was actually about an hour and a half. They were thin, strong, forgetful people in their seventies, and it was true, they did tend to cut corners. They groaned a lot, and Sylvie liked them, Ruth in particular, whose high, rounded eyebrows matched the deep furrows beneath her eyes and gave her an owlish look.

Ruth had taught English Literature at a university about a million years ago, she told Sylvie. Lenny had worked for the Department of Education before he was made redundant. They talked about soil quality, crop rotations, drought-resistant grains. They laughed that they’d been sent off to a Marxist re-education camp.

In the garden there was celery, spinach, carrots. There was kale and garlic. Further off there was an old pear tree. All of it looked dry and ragged on closer inspection. Maybe this had all been workable once, Sylvie thought, but now the battle was being lost. The sun seemed intent on killing everything.

Drowsy in the heat, her mind spat up disjointed memories. All the times she’d come out here were mixed together now. There had been an irrigation channel where she and her dad had swum, and an old red tinny that had swarmed with ants when they’d flipped it over on the bank. They used to lie on their backs and point up at things they saw in the clouds: rabbits, dinosaurs, bulbous faces. She was six. Or she was fifteen. Or she was twelve. Then, at some point, she’d stopped coming. The ants got into the sandwiches. And once, she had tried to hide some kind of treasure up in the pear tree. She tried to remember what it had been and couldn’t.

But the question nagged at her, and when Ruth and Lenny finally stood up, groaning, and limped off to lunch, Sylvie went over to the pear tree and hauled herself up. It wasn’t high. The bark was sharp. The blossom smelt softly foul. She had been maybe fifteen the last time she did this.

And then, in a little hole where two branches forked, she found it.

An old, rusty locket.

She unwedged it.

It had been hers. But before that it had belonged to her grandmother, Cath. Joe’s mum.

She tried to open it, but she couldn’t. It was rusted shut.

The rifle was lying on the bed when she got back to the cabin. Checking to see if it was loaded — it wasn’t — she lay down next to it and watched the slowly moving brown curtain, which was golden now in places, where the hot afternoon sun was pressing through it.

Finally, she called Harlow.

‘I took your mum’s car,’ she told him. ‘You can tell her what you want. I need some space. I’m staying with my dad.’