His mother didn’t mind. She had turned into the kind of woman who quietly wrings her hands whenever she speaks and hangs crosses on the walls, – not because she believed, but because that’s what her own mother used to do – accepting that her value had been reduced to zero with the death of her husband. She would have been a prime candidate for alcoholism too, but her stomach was too weak for it, so her steady depression was uninterrupted by the occasional highs of drinking.

Gábor would have liked to drink in a wine cellar, to give an aura of sophistication to the proceedings. But there were no wine cellars nearby, only the Outskirts Pub, with Christmas lights hanging in the windows, cheap national rock playing over the muted hockey broadcasts, men playing cards in knitted sweaters at the tables. The pub was waiting for Gábor to arrive; it would wait patiently forever, like a good lover.

That November night Gábor cut through the cold with resolve, the remains of his weekly salary in his pocket. He had bought a pack of the cheapest cigarettes. He had given a little cash to his mother for the rent and bills. The rest he had saved for booze.

The low chimneys coughed out smoke; it was cheaper to burn trash for warmth than to pay for gas. The icy, foggy air had a penetrating odor that Gábor had always associated with dawn, autumn, and failure. That’s why he had hated autumn, even as a kid.

He crossed the railway lines, passed the spotlights of the mill, then just marched along the wet asphalt, step after step. Gábor had long ceased to think about anything substantial. He told jokes to himself in his head or replayed conversations from long ago, reconstructing them in new ways, imagining what he should have said instead of what he actually had said. He could have listened to music on his phone, but the songs he liked reminded him of how low he had fallen. The music he listened to was considered by the locals to be intellectual and unmanly.

When he saw it he thought it was some kind of animal. First came the sound. A howling. Only animals howl that way, like a dog, for instance, when it’s in pain. Then he understood.

Gábor didn’t rush to help, but he didn’t run away either. He was in shock. He knew this was a defining moment in his life: would he be the one who runs or the one who acts? But he wasn’t either of these, he just stood there, in the middle of the road at night, completely frozen.

The murder was taking place a little beyond the roadside ditch. The victim, a man in his thirties, had escaped from his attacker’s clutches and was crawling towards the road.