‘Aye,’ he says, smiling. ‘Just saw the truck and then saw you, running like you’d got dogs after ye.’

‘I’d had a fright,’ I said, and I felt sick at remembering the bird.

‘At Fairfax’s?’ he asked, and I could see his brain working things out.

I nodded. He was looking at me with eyes like conkers and it went through me. I had to look over his shoulder or I’d have given in to a shiver. Harper were right – they’d tidied up sharpish. The slabs of the old mausoleum were laid out on the long damp grass around a large patch of dirty earth. The churchyard looked a little bare without the old tree. What remained of the broken trunk stood where it always had; a finger that had pointed skywards for centuries now cut down to the first knuckle.

‘Bird came in,’ I said, quietly. ‘Gave me a turn.’

He nodded, understanding. ‘Doesn’t seem right, does it? He were OK was Fairfax.’

I nodded. There didn’t seem much else to say about it. Fairfax had known the boys their entire lives. I should probably have talked to them both about his passing but it just wasn’t what you did. People lived and people died and you got on with it because tomorrow it might be you that did the dying. That’s changed now, of course. Folk can’t lose a pet without acting like they’ve had their whole family burned to ash. Maybe it was the war that made us hard or maybe we just knew that death was as much a part of the circle as life was. You get that in farming towns. You see the changing of the seasons; crops rising and leaves falling; berries bursting into life then being crushed in the beaks of the birds who need them for their own squawking, desperate young. I suppose you don’t weep much for the death of one tree when you’re standing in an orchard.

‘You really think it weren’t an accident?’ asked Brian. ‘You and Lady Muck?’

I was going to say something that would answer his question without really giving anything away. But I was no good at that. My face let me down. And if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have known the difference between my truth and my lies at that moment. So I shrugged and said I didn’t know.

‘I heard what she was saying,’ he said, scratching his chest. I noticed how filthy his fingernails were. ‘Last night. About the camp and the tapes and stuff. Sounds like she’s mad.’

I understood, then. That’s why he’d come home early. He’d heard us talking and wanted to snoop. He wanted to know what we found. He’d sneaked away from school to come and spy on his mam and her new friend.

‘We found nowt,’ I said. ‘There was nowt to find.’