I couldn’t speak for the whole journey back. Fraser put some music on and turned it off again. I thumbed the soft teeth of the feather in my pocket and rested my head against the window.

He parked up outside the drive. ‘Want me to come in?’

I shook my head. ‘Best not.’

When I told Lottie, her face lost its softness.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, looking past me up the driveway.

I tried to explain, leaving out the trespassing and the tonguing, but I could see straight away that she blamed me, utterly.

‘You went to a quarry. Illegally. And let him off the lead.’ Her fingers dug into her upper arm.

‘No. I tied him up.’

‘And went … ?’

‘Just went exploring a bit, just having a—’

‘Right, Polly.’ She leant forward, inhaling, and gave me a look of disgust and crushing disappointment wrapped up together. ‘You’ve been drinking all day.’

I let her have that one. ‘We’re going back tomorrow. First thing. As soon as it’s light.’

She lowered her forehead into a palm as if she was doing a yoga move, before bringing her face up again. ‘Maybe I should be calling the police.’

‘I don’t think they come out for lost dogs.’ My voice was trying to burrow underground.

Her fingers were digging into her other forearm. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ She turned.

Fraser wasn’t at the bar yet. The landlord gave me a wink with my change and went back to the football. I propped my cheekbone on my hand and peeled the corner off a beermat.

‘Never mind, eh, lass?’ A man over in the corner was addressing me. He had a birthmark over one side of his face that made it look like someone had chucked red wine at him.

‘What?’

‘Never mind, eh?’ He nodded to my glass. ‘You’ve a drink, a coat, and the sun’s given you freckles. Can’t be that bad.’

I smiled a non-smile.

‘There you go.’ He sat back and turned the page of his Daily Record.

Dead. Not dead. Tyger was wandering around the quarry with his mopiest face on. Tyger was nothing more than a floor mop at the bottom of a shaft. Distant deeps. Or suspended mid-air, his lead a noose. Its deadly terrors. I’d killed him. In the forest of the night. I was getting good at killing.

‘Not once was nerve lost.’

The birthmarked man was holding a half-length pen between his fingers and had newspaper ink on his forearm. He was looking at me expectantly.

‘Sorry?’ My beer mat had shed both sides of its print. ‘Oh. I don’t know. I’m no good at those.’

He gave a grand, gracious shrug. ‘Me neither.’ Felt hat, a long plaid coat, and a finely striped scarf the colour of old-fashioned sweets. He looked like he was off to a West End play.

The look Benji would have when we picked him up and he saw that Tyger wasn’t in the car with us – a plastic doll face, someone slowly pressing their thumbs in. Water’d heaven with their tears. Fuck.