“The thing is,” Davey said to Malcolm at the funeral—John’s, which they held separately to the others (it was well attended, out of respect for Malcolm, though he’d have preferred it if nobody had come)—“it wasn’t just some stranger, was it? It was John. He was born here. He was one of us.”

Malcolm saw these words for what they were: a clumsy attempt at kindness. Davey was claiming John for all of them in order to ease the burden on Malcolm a little.

What could have been going through John’s head? people wanted to know. Many of them had seized on the fact of his money troubles, as though this could somehow explain it all. He’d maxed out his overdraft and run up £10,000 of credit-card debt buying nice suits, that fancy car, staying in expensive hotels for his nights on the mainland, and—worse—he had fallen into arrears with the mortgage payments. Then, of course, he’d lost his job; the firm had laid several people off, not just John. It had been a mess by the time it all came out, once John wasn’t around to hide it any longer.

Too much pressure, people said. Must have sent him over the edge. But even the debt John was in—it appalled Malcolm, but even he could just about see it wasn’t a catastrophe. John would have paid it off in a few years if he’d got another job, sold the car, lived within his means.

Still, Malcolm sensed in some people a kind of relief at the knowledge of John’s debt, as though that might explain everything. He must have panicked, they said. Probably thought he was protecting his family. Temporary madness. Later, in any case, they ceased to discuss it around Malcolm, and he was grateful. He did not think they had ceased to discuss it, though it was possible that, for a time at least, they had run out of things to say.

He never had any answers to give people, or not the kind that would make any sense. A monster had been among them, and nobody had seen it. Of course they were affronted. Malcolm tasted again the shock like metal in his mouth as he received the phone call that terrible afternoon, followed soon after by the bitterness of bile. “It can’t be true,” Heather kept saying in the car. “I don’t believe it.” She would continue to say this in the days afterwards, then over and over in the weeks and months that followed, long after she’d realized the words offered no protection. Malcolm would nod in agreement, seeming to share her disbelief. And yet beneath the surface, although his shock was real, the greatest shock of all had been finding he had no trouble believing it.

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