Pearly lay on his back in the large bed, Helen asleep close by, her face turned into the pillow, her disordered hair like a pale feather duster in the faint, greenish light of the bedside clock. Even had she been awake, Pearly wouldn’t have shared his thoughts. There were alternatives, Pearly told himself, a variety of actions that would almost certainly have the same result politically, but would involve differing impacts on those involved. The affair could be exposed publicly but anonymously, Philip alone could be told, Deidre could be blackmailed. The last option sounded the most reprehensible, but surely, Pearly thought, it was the kindest and fairest way. She would have the responsibility of solving the problem she’d created and a range of options to achieve that. Even her husband need never know the truth.

There was that dog barking not far away, and Pearly allowed his thoughts to wander for a while. The barking of a dog at night is a lonely, isolating sound, like a faraway train whistle or waves breaking in the distance. The Prendergasts’ dog had bitten him, but his ankle hadn’t been badly hurt. He’d been bitten once, long before, by a larger, seriously aggressive pig dog when he was hunting in the Lee Valley behind Nelson. His shooting mate had said it was his own fault because he’d got into the melee when the dogs had bailed up a tusker in the creek. Better a random dog bite than a swipe from the cornered boar. He’d taken a turn to carry the carcass out, despite the wound on his leg, and remembered the lice, or whatever, crawling from the dead pig onto his own body. Pearly wondered how Rob Prendergast was, whether his dog had bitten other people. I must ring Rob, Pearly thought. The neighbour’s dog continued to bark. The feral pig had been lean, hairy and infested with vermin. Pearly was drifting towards sleep, thoughts and images becoming a jumble in which there was no distinction between the trivial and the significant, the comforting and the disconcerting, the true and the imagined.

With an effort he focused on Deidre again. He didn’t have to make up his mind immediately, but probably, he told himself, it would be just making her aware someone else knew and leaving her to take the action best for everybody. He didn’t begrudge Deidre the physical pleasure with her lover — Pearly had experienced that buffeting ecstasy often enough — but everything had a price. And if the whole thing was just in Sanderson’s lascivious imagination then she would come to no harm.