He was wearing a suit.

It linked to a STV news site. The headline, in artless, bland type: Murderer released after fifteen years in prison.

I was sick onto the carpet.

I opened the laptop again, not wanting to look at it. Having to look. Hoping my powers of reading would fail me, that the words would just be strange shapes, untranslatable. I didn’t read the whole thing through, just swept over the short paragraphs.

He’d murdered his girlfriend. He’d murdered a girl called Molly Bawn and been sentenced to life in prison. The article was dated five years ago.

James Randall. His name was James Randall. Not just Jim, a name that seemed as simple as the life he led, as short as his sentences.

My stomach felt like it had been hole punched. His fluid, my fluid, the bitter-copper river, the dirty white waterfall, the storm rain, the blood from the hare, the blood from the deer, the ribwort mulch, pouring out of me, viscous.

I made it to the toilet, just.

Lottie found me with my head against the base of the sink. ‘Polly, it smells of—’

I retched again. My tongue was coated in tree-resin.

Hands sweeping my hair away. ‘Come on. Bed.’

She stopped short in the doorway, seeing the floor. ‘God, Polly, what on earth have you been eating? Or drinking?’ A despairing glance. ‘I’ll get the mop.’

The night sky was a split fig.

My skull was empty but sleep was very far away, as distant as somewhere with traffic lights and late-night chippies and evangelical churches. Lottie had cleaned up my vomit while I’d lain there, facing the ceiling. She’d drawn the curtains and I had listened to the little firework-bursts of the adverts from the TV for hours. When they finally stopped and the hallway lights clicked off, I’d put on my hoodie and gone outside.

I hadn’t needed a torch. The moon was alight, clouds like three giant, interlocked snowflakes behind it, and bright enough for me to stumble down by the stream and out onto the stones, to stare at the loch and the wide, starred sky.

The loch slopped, the flesh of someone very heavy walking.

Mångata. Moon street. That’s the word Adam had said ages ago, the Swedish one.

It couldn’t be. Jim. How could someone so gentle have done that? I thought of him pulling me apart, bone by bone, my chest broken open, head tipped back.

I felt fragmented, my limbs leaden and not quite attached. Like someone above me was in control, tiny hooks worked into my shoulder blades. I waited for them to lift the strings, pull me off the stone and into the black-blue air, along the moon street, my toes dragging the loch into fine lines, like two pluming wings.

A rushing sound by my ear.

I ducked. Something swung over my head like a bell. Weight and heat, the slight prickling of something skimming the top of my ear as it passed. Straightening, I saw a large, dark shadow, wings, moving over the loch to the hills opposite.