Ann-Marie shifts in her seat. ‘So.’

Niall turns the radio dial and a chat show fills the pickup, along with the smell of anti-freeze blowing out from the dashboard. The wipers start squeaking. There is a comedian who sounds serious, talking about how Christmas is getting earlier each year. Niall starts off into the empty road, swerving a little and then righting himself.

‘You sure you’re OK?’ asks Ann-Marie.

‘Aye-I’m-fine-why.’ One word melts into the other.

‘You … don’t seem your usual self.’

‘I’m fine! Never better. Never. Better. Women, y’know.’

Ann-Marie smirks. ‘OK.’ The black road merges into the black landscape either side of them, with tiny dots of light in the distance and catseyes glowing up from the tarmac, one after the other.

‘It gets so dark now. It feels so much later than it actually is,’ she says.

Niall stays silent. A lorry charges in the other direction, almost clipping the wing mirror.

‘Niall.’

‘Aye.’

They drive on in silence. Niall changes the radio station to the one he prefers at this time of day. They are playing a run-down of the best folk of the seventies. He can feel Ann-Marie relax a little beside him.

They pass a snowy field outside the village. Christine once took him up to the standing stones there, for a solstice picnic in the sun, by the ancient burial ground. She was always doing these things.

Before she moved to Strath Horne, Christine had found paganism in the city, becoming one of the performers at the Beltane fire festival. He had never been to the spring event itself, but he knew it was about body paint and nudity and sex. He had heard that there were orgies. She had danced naked with fire. He would ask her for her stories before he went to sleep some nights. He nicknamed her friends from that time, the New Age students, ‘the hobbits’. Fucking Beltane. It had meant nothing to him, before he met her, except running up a hill like a madman and shoving your face in the April dew. And bonfires. He must admit he has a soft spot for them now. She used to call them ‘need-fires’ and make bannocks. She celebrated the sun. She was a child of seventeen when she moved to Edinburgh, but lied about her age. No one could tell her anything. She painted her nails vermilion and made posies from rowan branches. He would tease her later, hearing these stories, and tell her she needed to keep away from the rowans, that the branches would burn her, that someone would dunk her in a river.

Once a farmer complained that he had found ivy garlands around his cattle in the field some way from their house. No one ever admitted to this. Christine looked as though she had no idea about the incident, yet Niall remains convinced to this day it was her doing.