I felt her push past me. Saw her run to the mangled collection of rock and leaves and earth. Saw her reach out and jerk back as if electrocuted.

She turned to me with her mouth like a bullet hole. I had no answer for the question she asked with her eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and meant it. I had no idea where the body had gone.

I think I left her there without saying another word. Walked back up the hill in case Fairfax had popped home for his car or a change of clothes.

John was waiting for me on the front step. Solid and straight, like a rock in a stream. I’d have run and kissed him if he held with that sort of thing. But something in his face stopped me. Something told me that my heart was about to get a fright.

‘It’s Fairfax,’ he said, and he couldn’t keep his eyes on mine. ‘Went off the Spadeadam road. That daft car folded up like a penknife. Nivver stood a chance.’

CORDELIA

I called it my nest. Cushions from the sofa, laid out in a circle in the parlour. The scratchy woollen blankets from the guest bedrooms. The sheets from my own bed and the soft, velvet curtains I had found in a hamper beneath the windowsill in the attic. I dragged them all into the sitting room a couple of weeks after Stefan died. I arranged them like a wren positioning twigs. Made a circle of linens and drapes. Wove myself a comfortable, padded little sanctum on the bare wooden floor. I lit the space with a single oil lamp, feeling oddly proud at knowing how to fill and light the old contraption. Sat there, exhausted and manic, panting in my small, dark room, lit with the kind of glow beloved by painters and poets.

I kept the curtains closed but there was always enough light to read by. The only picture on the wall was a pencil sketch of a stately home and the shadows cast by the light sometimes conspired to make it seem as if the grand old place was lived in; as if a splendid family were holding riotous gatherings within its great walls. I liked to make up stories for that house. Imagined myself and Stefan and whichever man I saw fit to allow, gliding down polished stairs, my white-gloved hand unsullied by dust as it stroked the varnished wood of the bannister. I saw myself as Jane Eyre. As Cathy. Saw myself as every heroine who had inspired me in happier times. Sometimes I felt as though the world within that picture was more real than the one I inhabited. Every so often I imagined waking up behind the glass; a collection of pencil strokes and smudges.