The school’s website contained nothing about its teachers. No images. No names. He tried to imagine her in front of a class of rowdy teenagers. She’d be serene, in control, managing to keep things in order as she slowly explained some mathematical conundrum. Would she be patient? he asked himself. Yes, he thought, up to a point.

General web searches for Christine Saunders also proved ineffective: there were way too many people with the same name. Finally, he tracked her down on Facebook. In her portrait photo she was every bit as attractive as she’d been tonight, her smile bright and confident, but steely; not quite guarded, but almost. He scrolled through her timeline. The posts were mainly about activities at school, chess club, humorous references to the glories of algebra and trigonometry. There were no posts about family, and the account itself was only seven years old.

Then there were maps. Lots of them. She clearly enjoyed long walks in the West Yorkshire countryside, each one plotted on a small, in-set map courtesy of an exercise app. That explained why she’d chosen to live in a village like Tong. The simple pleasures of the outdoors. He’d been missing it all. The magnificence of the valleys, the splendour, the greenness! He’d been missing every bit of it, for his entire life. Perhaps he’d found someone to share it with.

With a pang of shame, he began exploring her list of friends, clicking here and there, hardly knowing what he was doing. He hadn’t been on Facebook much since he got back from France, and there were several hundred messages and friend requests on his account. He’d forgotten how to delete them. Plus, he was pissed. The icons were tiny, and they danced about in duplicate, however much he screwed up his eyes to focus on the screen. His head was beginning to feel heavy on his shoulders, and staring at the computer was not helping.

Friend request sent.

Shit. He’d clicked it by mistake. He pulled the laptop closer to his face, tried to work out what he’d done, how to delete the request. He couldn’t find anything. His finger dithered on the touchpad, hardly daring to click anything now. She’d know he’d been snooping.

‘Shit!’

He needed to sober up. But getting off the sofa proved to be harder than he’d imagined. His body was a dead weight, and the best he could do was to lower himself down onto the floor, then hoist his upper body onto the coffee table. From there, with one monumental push of his arms and legs, he was able to struggle upright.