He murmured into her hair, his hand stroked the line of her hip and across to her rounded little stomach. His legs were sticky and his upper body exposed and cold. He wished he had a blanket to cover the two of them, but with her lithe, warm body still against his, for the moment, he couldn’t move, didn’t want to.

‘I always liked you, Arthur,’ she said, into his chest.

*

There was silence at the kitchen table. Father had taken his breakfast early and was out already. The vet was due to make a visit to see about the disposal of the carcasses of the dead livestock. They’d buried all the drowned chickens but there were cattle they hadn’t yet found. Verity watched Peter drinking his tea. His face was drawn and she saw the shadow of her father in his features. Her toast lay picked at on her plate. Every time she tried to eat she saw Jack’s greenish-grey head, hanging down from the tree, and the purple bruise on his temple, and she felt sick. They said he knocked his head on the boat.

An image of the window in the cabin swam into her vision. She would never have seen his body if she hadn’t been at the cabin. She had picked up the binoculars that Jack had brought from the base, and put them to her eyes. At first she could see only the marsh. Then she raised them too high and it was only sky. Adjusting down, she came to the pine trees and turned the knob to focus. There was a policeman, quite clearly, framed in the circles. His face was animated, pink as if scrubbed raw. He was saying something. She swung the binoculars to the left and there, impossibly, was Arthur. He was kneeling on the ground and above him was a sack hanging from the tree. No. It was a dead fox. And in the same moment she thought it was a fox, the binoculars fell from her hands, her arms dropping as if someone had taken away all the life in her body, and she knew.

Death was a constant on a farm – a cow haemorrhaging after a breech birth; their old dog, Baxter, slowly dying of liver cancer; their mother’s horse, mercifully shot when she broke her leg. And her own mother. She thought about what Arthur had said about her mother being found in her nightdress. Goosebumps rippled over her skin. That’s why she’d insisted on looking at Jack’s body. This time she wouldn’t be denied the truth.

But she could never have foreseen the horror of it, the grotesque dangling of his beautiful body hung like a stuck pig. Her fingers tapped incessantly on the table.

Peter coughed, clattered his teacup on the saucer. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how he ended up there, if he was helping people in the town.’