‘What was in the raven’s beak?’

I recall how I pressed myself tight into my father, wary eyes bolted on to the bird, my body flooding with building horror.

‘A chick,’ I say softly. My hands grip the steering wheel. Knuckles white. ‘The entrails of a dead chick.’

Flashes of that small pink body batter me. Flecked with newly emerging feathers. Sodden and bloodied. Its stomach ripped open. Entrails, tiny and thin, spewing from the ragged hole. Its baby head twisted unnaturally, spindly legs broken, wings spread-eagled. One eye bulging beneath a translucent membrane. The other pecked out.

‘A kittiwake. A day or two old, Dad said.’

Then without warning the raven had taken flight. Startled me so I squeezed my father tighter. The bird beat the air with powerful wings, dark feathers outstretched, body rising like a phoenix into the bruising sky.

I take a breath and shift my weight as I change gear. I glance out of the window to my right. The sea is silver today. Touched white in places where the wind annoys it. Foreboding wraps around me like a cloak. I pull in to a lay-by. A caravan passes, its driver red-faced, stressed as he negotiates the narrow Cornish lanes and unforgiving locals who speed around corners primed and ready to shake their fists at the tourists.

‘You saw a raven the day I left, didn’t you?’

I look across at her. She is staring straight ahead. My breathing grows tight as if my lungs are silting up. A gull cries and the shadow of a cloud passes over us.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I saw a raven that day too.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tamsyn

July 1986

I knocked on Granfer’s door as I pushed it open and walked in. My whole body was buzzing from my morning. The raven on the roof was forgotten, blanked out so I was free to relish every moment I’d spent at the house.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I made you a sandwich.’

Granfer hadn’t moved and was still sitting in the worn leather chair he’d had forever. I never understood how he could spend so long staring at the same muddle of jigsaw pieces. It would have driven me mad. But Granfer could sit at the table for hours on end, happy in his own world, poring over the spread of shapes on the table Mum got for him a few years earlier. She’d found the table in the Salvation Army shop in Penzance and brought it back on the bus as proud as could be. It looked like junk to me, with its sun-bleached flimsy laminate top and legs riddled with woodworm, and sure enough, as she set it down in the kitchen, she’d beamed and announced it only cost a pound.

It took her three evenings, a yard of green felt from the haberdashers in Hayle, and a staple gun she borrowed from school to transform it into what she grandly called a card table, perfect, she’d said with a wide smile, for holding a jigsaw.