If you met this man, you might think perhaps he was a monk, or a philosopher, or at the very worst a harmless eccentric whose house you could call into when the world was too much to bear and you just needed to be somewhere clean and quiet for a while. (Although naturally, you’d take off your shoes at the entrance.) But in fact, people rarely came to visit. The reason was simple. They were afraid of the man’s dog.

The dog was glossy black, and its coat was so thick and lustrous you could plunge your hands in halfway up to your elbows. It was eight feet long from the tip of its nose to the feathery fringe of its tail, and its paws were the size of dinner-plates and its ears were lined with fur. When it groaned and yawned in its sleep, its huge teeth were sharp and white, and its tongue was like red velvet. It slept in a corner where the sun never shone, and no-one knew what colour its eyes were, because no-one had ever seen the dog awake. It simply slumbered on and on in the darkness, breathing slowly and deeply, while the man whitewashed the walls and polished his marble table and stuffed his flour-sack bed with clean straw.

Once, a woman came to the door selling ribbons and laces. She looked at the dog as it twitched and sighed and dreamed, and it looked so soft and glossy that she reached out towards it to stroke its fur. But the man leapt across the room and took her by the hand and begged her not to wake the dog up.

The man was perfectly gentle. But the look in his eyes frightened the woman so much that she ran away and married a fisherman who lived aboard his boat all the days of the year, and never set foot on land again.

After that, the man had considerably fewer visitors.

And then one day a brother and his sister stood in the doorway and looked at the man inside his house, and a terrible and curious thing happened. All by itself, the dog woke up. It yawned and stretched and licked its lips, and raised its muzzle high in the air, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing. Flecks of drool fell from its rosy tongue as its claws tac-tac-tacced across the stone floor towards them.

The man begged, No, no, go back to sleep, go back to sleep! But the dog took no notice. Its wild gold eyes were fixed on the brother and sister, its ears pricked and alert. And even when it was close enough for them to smell each other, it was impossible to say if the dog meant to lick their hands, or tear their throats out.

Chapter Seven: Now

Don’t be arsey, Donald told himself as he pulled into the car park. You need them on your side.

He glimpsed his reflection in the plate-glass doors, and sighed. It was no good. No matter how he dressed or how much he tried to alter his body language, he just naturally looked intimidating. Not aggressive, thank God – he’d known a few scrappy, rat-faced men who could start a fight simply by walking into a room – more a looming physical presence that made everyone else a bit quieter, a bit more well-behaved. He shouldn’t complain. On balance it had worked well for him. It was an asset in his current job, an asset as a father. It had been an asset in his former life.