‘I don’t know, love. And I’ve been here long enough to know that people are happy to say nowt. Sometimes you’ll see a pike take a perch in the tarn. You’ll see teeth and fury and blood and scales. And a moment later there’s not a ripple on the water. That’s here, love. People are happy to wait for the ripples to drift away. But I need to know if there were scales in the water. I need to know if a pike took a perch.’

I heard myself breathing. Heard the tick of the clock change its rhythm and realized I could hear my own heart. Nixon looked at me for a moment longer than I was comfortable with. Then he gave a nod and rose from the chair.

‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said, quietly. He looked as though he was about to reach out and shake my hand. Then he stopped himself, as if the action would be wrong.

‘His notebooks,’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘They might make for interesting reading.’

He stopped in the doorway, smiling a strange little smile. ‘If you knew where he kept them, love, you’d know every dirty little secret in the village.’

‘He never showed you what he wrote?’

‘Not a word,’ said Nixon. ‘But I swear to God, there are those would kill to get their hands on a few pages. And then there are those who would put a match to every page.’

I was still standing there when I heard the door close. Still standing there when the next streak of sunlight pierced the cloud. Still standing when it winked out, and pitched me into darkness.

FELICITY

Transcript 0004, recorded October 29, 2010

Don’t hunch your shoulders. That’s what me mam always said. We’re prone to a hump, the lasses in our family. Mam’s started when she were not much past fifty. Looked like a question mark by the time she died. I always try to hold myself straight, though you don’t want people thinking you’re looking down your nose. Takes an effort, remembering. Some people never manage it. They grow old staring at their shoes. Spend their dotage walking along looking like they’ve dropped a tenner.