It was gone six when my patience snapped. I wasn’t going to sit and wait for a knock at the door any longer. Wasn’t going to stare at the telephone. I wanted answers. People should want to ask me questions. I had things to say.

The pub the locals called Samson’s stood just beyond the railway bridge on the Northumberland side of the village. The geography of the place still makes my head spin. Gilsland is split in two by a boundary line that deposits half in Cumbria and half in Northumberland. The two sides have different councils. Different rules. Different attitudes, if you can believe such a thing. The Northumberland half thinks of Haltwhistle, Hexham and Newcastle as the nearest big towns and cities. On the Cumbrian side it’s Brampton and Carlisle. Families divided from their neighbours only by an adjoining wall can pay different taxes and receive different services. And cutting across that invisible boundary line is the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall – a risen scar, a lesson in the brutal efficiency of conquerors who reached Gilsland and decided they had probably gone as far north as anybody really needed to. It was a place on the edge of things – fragmented, disjointed. More past than present.

I had been in Samson’s once before. A friend from university came to stay when I was seven months’ pregnant. She wore a lemon-yellow raincoat and a tartan beret and in the sweat and cigarette fug of the bar we had felt like something from the circus as we sipped our pints and bathed in the silent glares of men who had no desire to see two young lassies in their pub and who resented having to hold in their farts for the sake of two silly girls. We’d found it funny at first. Drunk an extra pint just for bad. But the fun of it didn’t last long and we were both pleased to leave, closing the door on the roar of angry words that followed our departure.

I was shivering by the time I reached the front door. The rain was still coming down in waves and my umbrella blew itself inside out as a military vehicle on its way from the RAF base tore past me and sent a puddle up my legs as far as my waist. I looked bedraggled and pitiful as I pushed open the door and walked into the main bar with as much bravado as I could muster.