‘I hit him,’ Frannie screams to both of them. ‘I hit him with the car.’ Cathy’s torch beam wavers as she runs towards them, leaving tracks in the night air like a sparkler. ‘It’s the man from the market.’

‘What?’ Joe says. He can’t stop looking at the man lying in front of her. His skin is both bloodied and waxy, smears of red against the grey.

Joe cautiously approaches Frannie, even though he doesn’t want to. Tears have left clear tracks in the blood on her face. A smear of snot sits underneath her nose. He wants to turn away from it, run back to his villa, and to Lydia. Away from this – this grotesque chaos.

It feels like he’s walking through water that won’t part in front of him. He tries to step forward, but he can’t. He forces himself to look at the person lying on the ground. Tall, slim – his hip bones are visible. Frannie’s lifted up his shirt. His torso is bleeding. His glasses are cracked.

He’s very obviously dead.

Most of the Plant family are vets, including Joe and Cathy, and death is obvious to vets.

There’s so much blood. Pints and pints of it. He begins to panic. He’s usually fine with blood, but not like this. He tries to slow his breathing. It’s a panic attack, he tells himself. Not uncommon for him, but not quite like ones he’s had before either.

He gets out his phone as Cathy has and shines his torch across the road. The blood shimmers back like petrol. There’s so much of it. Joe tries not to gag. It smells fetid, both metallic and rotten, like just-turning food.

He turns to look at his sister, in a begging position in the road. ‘What the fuck’s gone on?’ he says.

‘Please help,’ she says. ‘Don’t be –’

‘Don’t be what?’

‘Just help me,’ she says, through tears. Frannie hardly ever cries. She’s sunny and messy and imaginative and loves buying too many clothes on eBay. She isn’t a crier.

Something deep and familial rises up suddenly through him. He felt it when Frannie fell off a swing on to her back when she was three, and was winded for ten whole seconds, the longest of Joe’s life. When she choked on a sweet and Joe thumped her hard between her shoulder blades and she coughed it right up. The first time Frannie went out as a teenager and Joe waited up for her, although even their mother had gone to bed. He still remembers it now: the ticking of the grandfather clock in their hallway, the hum of the fridge. And the relief as Frannie’s key turned in the lock.

And, of course, it reminds him of Rosie.

‘I hit him – I hit him.’

‘I can’t – how?’ he says.

Joe kneels down next to the body. Cathy joins him, but she’s just looking, silently. He wishes he had her cool head. He and Cathy recently operated together on a greyhound and she spent at least a minute, after they’d opened him up, just looking. Not rushing. Just gathering information, in that way that Cathy does.