And John had disliked the croft. Had he always, or had this come later? Malcolm thought John had wanted different things even as a child. He had a memory of his brother and the satchel, a leather school satchel John had been desperate for and had finally received one Christmas. Malcolm wasn’t sure how old his brother had been then—perhaps seven or eight? He remembered the satchel because he had found it so incomprehensible at the time, how passionately John had his heart set on it, when neither of them had any use for a smart leather book-bag like that; they had very little to carry to school, and their old rucksacks did the job fine. Malcolm couldn’t get his head around craving something that had no real use. Maybe he had teased John about it. He felt certain his father had, saying something like, “You’ll be carrying the feed in that, will you?”

But Malcolm recalled John’s excitement when he’d opened the satchel that Christmas, how John had leapt up to hug his mother and she had laughed and hugged him back, and Malcolm had felt pleased to see this, and surprised. John had carried the satchel about with him everywhere for a time, Malcolm recalled, and it had looked funny with his old thick jersey with holes in the elbows and his muddy boots.

Then later, another memory: he and John coming into the kitchen when their mother had a friend round (he could not remember who it had been), and the woman saying, “That’s a smart satchel, John. What have you got in there?”

Then, before John could answer, their mother saying, “Oh, it’s empty. He has nothing in there at all. He just carries it around for show.”

She’d said it lightly, with a laugh in her voice, and Malcolm was sure she hadn’t meant to be cruel. But he had felt his brother’s humiliation. He didn’t know if he was misremembering, but he thought John had stopped carrying the satchel around after that.

Malcolm could see it was silly to dwell on something like this. In any case, he knew as well as anyone what a strange darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.

“We could move, you know,” Heather had said to him in the months after it happened. “Take Tommy away and take ourselves away too. Go somewhere where nobody knows us.”

This was in the days when Malcolm was most painfully aware of the questions people were asking themselves. Did violence run in families? Did whatever rage had been in John live on in his son, and maybe even in Malcolm?