“The funny thing is,” he said, as though there had been no pause in their conversation, “Malcolm never said anything about it. He was in the bar yesterday and he didn’t say a word about Tommy coming.”

“Maybe he wasn’t expecting him,” Fiona said, further alarmed at this idea.

There was a long silence, broken only by Gavin slurping his tea. Fiona tried to focus on the crackling of the fire and not the wet sounds coming from her husband. It was a technique she’d taught herself years before. And she reminded herself that he was a good man, that he was kind, that he’d always been patient with Stuart. That patience wasn’t the same as weakness.

“Tommy Baird,” Gavin said eventually, in a meditative way. “I never felt right about him.”

“What do you mean?” Fiona said, the hot and cold feeling back.

“I felt like—we should have known, somehow. Don’t you think? We should have known. Done something, maybe.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Fiona said, more angrily than she’d intended. “What could we have done?” Firmly, with the air of someone closing the discussion, she said, “It doesn’t help to dwell on a terrible thing like that.”

She had seen that family almost every day, almost every day for ten years, and she had missed it all. She could never have predicted—but nobody could.

And she remembered Tommy afterwards, too. She saw him at ten or eleven, his face contorted in rage, hurling something at her—a vase, had it been? Something of Heather’s, something that had smashed just beside her head. He was a demon by then.

“Shall we have some of the coffee cake?” she said to Gavin, trying to soften the way she’d spoken before, trying to quieten the memory of Tommy. “It’ll be stale before we’re halfway through it.”

“Aye,” he said. “That’d be nice.”

There could have been no predicting what happened, Fiona told herself again as she went into the kitchen and got the tin down from the larder, cut Gavin a large slice and herself a small one. And in any case, as she always reassured herself (it wasn’t very reassuring), nobody ever knew what went on behind closed doors.

2

No, Malcolm wasn’t expecting him. When he opened the door in the late afternoon, the darkness already thickening, and saw Tommy standing there, he was so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.