I stayed for two more drinks. Bought a round for the other drinkers. My coat was almost dry by the time I slipped back into it.

‘I can walk you home,’ said the dark-haired drinker, who had admitted to the name of Ray. ‘I doubt Chivers will be in now. Probably found himself somewhere dry or followed the smell of chips and got a feed. We’ll send him up to you. I’ll walk you back.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Lot of people passing through,’ he said, seriously. ‘You must hear the roar of the rocket.’

‘From the base? Sometimes.’ I had a flash of memory and smiled at it. ‘I used to tell Stefan it was a dragon.’

‘Aye, maybe. They don’t drink in here so I can’t say what sort of lads they are. But I don’t like the thought of you going back out in that rain. Not on your own.’

‘I’ve been here two years. You’ve never worried before.’

They looked at me like I was mad. ‘You’ve never been in here before, love. Never been ours to worry about.’

‘And now?’

He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. But I didn’t let him walk me home. I didn’t feel the rain as I smiled in the darkness and trudged through the downpour up the hill. My head was full of mysteries and questions.

The air base.

Pike.

A writer’s father, dead on the Spadeadam road.

I slept soundly that night. I didn’t wake. Didn’t hear anybody lift the latch on the back door and move through my house. Didn’t feel the eyes of an intruder, staring upon me with the intensity of sunlight through glass.

That knowledge came later, when I looked at the muddy footprints I had left on my route through the house and saw them overlaid with boot prints that dwarfed my own.

FELICITY

Transcript 0003, recorded October 29, 2010

… My friend Janet came with me to sort out Fairfax’s things. John had offered but he would have been more hindrance than help. It’s not a job for a man, that sort of thing. They get sentimental. Start telling you that this and that has got to stay and before you know it you haven’t so much got rid of the rubbish as rearranged it. And Fairfax had plenty rubbish to rearrange.

‘Bloody pigsty,’ muttered Janet, looking around the living room and pulling that face she used to use when the farmers were spreading slurry on the fields.

‘It’s clean,’ I said, sticking up for him. ‘Just cluttered.’

‘Aye,’ she goes. ‘Cluttered with muck.’