‘I hope not,’ I said, and I felt a shudder ripple through me as I imagined sharp teeth crunching through brittle bones. ‘Maybe it’s flown away.’

‘Yes,’ said Cordelia, deciding to believe me. ‘They’re tough, birds. And it’s bigger than that other one that came through …’

I held my hand up and shook my head, hunching down into myself. I didn’t want to think about it. The pain in my hip was reminder enough of what had scared me so badly I had to run from the house and into the path of the wagon.

She turned from the rhubarb plants and looked at me with those blue eyes that always seemed to be staring into the very centre of me. You know those lights you get at the optician, when they’re looking into the centre of your head and you can see your own veins floating in your vision like a plant without flowers? It made me feel like that.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked, softly.

I looked at my watch. It was mid-afternoon. We had a couple of hours until the boys came home. There was nothing to stop us. No interruptions.

‘If you’re sure …’ I said, and it was just something to say, really. Just noise.

Cordelia nodded and stood up. We trudged back into the house. For once, we weren’t soaking wet. The shower on the way back from the garage had barely lasted a moment and we had been able to stroll in relative comfort beneath a cold, pinkish-blue sky. We’d talked the whole way. Talked about the inscription on the recorder. I still don’t really know what I believed. It seemed too extraordinary – too removed from the world I knew. I had grown up in wartime but my war had been very different to the one experienced by millions upon millions of poor souls. Few of the people I knew went away to fight and of those who did, most came home. My childhood wasn’t full of air-raids and falling bombs and houses blown to bits in front of me. Food was a little more scarce and there was always a sensation that the world was wrong, somehow, but the battles and massacres and brutality barely touched us. Even when the prisoners of war arrived it was hard to associate the polite young men who worked in the fields with the stories we heard of the evil done by Hitler far away. I couldn’t make sense of the idea that a man who had seen such evil in a tiny place in France – a place not that different to Gilsland – could meet his end a stone’s throw from my front door.