In the darkness, Mr Dash purses his lips. Raises his eyeglasses. Twitches them sideways. Plays with the focus until he sights the bedroom window in the left-hand corner of the last house before the water. The light’s on. The light’s always on. The curtains are always open too. And one blessed evening, several months back, Dymphna had stepped out of the shower, squeaked a porthole into the condensation on the bedroom window, and managed to give Mr Dash far more than he had expected to see when he stepped out into the spring air and attempted to spot the rare Montagu’s harrier he had been given to believe was inhabiting the little wooded area near the water’s edge.

The image remains imprinted on Mr Dash’s mind: a memory so perfectly clear that he wonders whether he has had to forego other memories in order to make it. He can’t fully recall the faces of his nieces and nephews, or his best friend’s birthday, but he can see every glorious particle of that magical evening. Can visualize her perfect pink roundness; the damp glistening on scorched skin; the tattoo winding up her ankle to her fleshy buttock; the two metal bolts pinned through her big pink nipples. He had not thought her more or less attractive than Dinah. She had simply been different. And by God, how he longs for different.

He stares through the glasses. Stares, and hopes beyond hope that she will waddle, wetly, buxomly, onto the big yellow screen of the bedroom window. He has only sighted her on a handful of occasions, and never in anything more evocative than her swishy pale blue kimono. On the other occasions she was fully clothed, bustling about, laughing and chatting into a mobile phone, or carrying a laptop around in front of her, the screen filled with an unfamiliar face, as if bearing a head on a tray.

He’s had little to do with Dymphna in the flesh, much as the thought warms him on cold nights. She was already living in the little house when he and the wife upped sticks and set out for the very edge of civilization. They’d lived in a little market town twenty miles inland before Dinah got it into her head that sea air and bracing winds were what they needed to make their retirement go with a bang. Dymphna had popped by as soon as the removals men had driven away. Brought them a little basket of gifts. Dinah had dealt with her. Chatted for an age while he was on his hands and knees trying to work out which cable went where in the back of the TV. She’d brought odd gifts: multi-coloured candles; greasy soaps filled with real flowers; little voile bags packed with crystals and tied with red silk. She hadn’t turned his head, of course. Not then. Not at five foot nothing, with a big fleshy middle and a backside that wobbled like half set trifle. Mr Dash hadn’t known what to say, so he hadn’t said very much at all. Forgot her name and was too embarrassed to ask her to repeat it. Left it to the wife. Got chapter and verse once she’d gone, of course. Quite taken with her new pal, was Dinah. Fortune teller, or so she claimed. Medium and clairvoyant. Palmist. A whiz with the old Tarot cards and no stranger to journeying into the great beyond to ask lost souls if they had any messages for those left behind. Mr Dash had no time for any of that nonsense. Put a stop to that friendship before Dinah could be tempted to cross anybody’s palm with silver or ask for guidance about what lay in store.