“Maybe you shouldn’t know too much about that place,” he said. “Not if you’re going to live in it.”

“I’d like to know. I heard you were close to Mary.”

He let out an exhalation as his expression softened. “As close as anybody could be, I suppose.”

“How did you get to know her?” Sara asked.

Mr Buchanan gave a sorrowful smile and lowered himself onto a stool behind the counter, his movements stiffened by age.

“It was this shop she walked into that morning,” he said. “After the killings out there at the farm. My father opened the door to her. Me and my mother were in the back having breakfast, and he called my mother out. We used to live above the shop in them days, with the kitchen just through the storeroom.” He pointed over his shoulder to the open door. “I followed after my mother, came out here, and here was this wee girl, not much younger than me, standing right where you are now. She was spattered in blood, wasn’t saying anything, no matter what my father asked her. Not even her name. She wouldn’t talk to my mother either. Just stood there, not even shaking. Completely still.

“I don’t know how long that went on. My mother knelt down in front of her, holding her hands, trying to get something out of her. My father was pacing up and down, asking what to do. Then I remember she looked at me. I was here, behind the counter. Mary looked me in the eye, just for a second, then she fell to the floor. My mother screamed like the wee girl had dropped dead, but she hadn’t. My father dragged me out from behind the counter and told me to run up the street and get Dr. James, wake him up if I had to. So, here’s me running up Morganstown Main Street in my pyjamas at the scrake of dawn. Dr. James—James Cardwell was his name—he was at his breakfast when I got to his house, up by the church there. He came huffing and puffing behind me, and the wee girl was still lying in a heap on the floor when we got back.

“Dr. James turned her over on her side, arranged her arms and legs, said it was to stop her from choking. He reckoned she was in shock and we had to get an ambulance out for her, and the police. They took her away to hospital, and the police took my father into the back to talk to them about it.