Looking down and behind at his own ruined body he explained how he’d got his blackened chest (a jug of boiling water from the copper), the three dark triangles on his back (her smoothing iron), the big round brand beneath them (the frying pan), the divots (the red-hot poker), and then with his voice dropping very low he told Susan Boyce that there was something else too, below his canvas belt, but he would not show her that. No. If she wanted to guess the worst thing a bad-tempered wife might do with a pair of sharp-bladed dress-making shears, then she would have it.

Susan Boyce said nothing, only looked.

‘She is under the beets,’ said Fowler quietly – one night when she was sleeping he’d stabbed her through the heart with the sharp stubby blade of a paring knife and carried her outside and buried her with all her things: her skirts and her clogs and the pins from her hair, her frying pan and the jug from the old copper, her iron and the poker and the cutting-out shears and everything else she’d ever owned or touched that reminded him of her and might make him think she was coming for him again – anything that might make him think he could hear the clatter of her furious clogs charging towards him across the hard clay floor.

In town, he said, he’d put it about that she’d run off and left him.

Susan Boyce looked at him.

Her face was still, without expression, and Henry Fowler thought to himself, I have made a mistake. I am wrong about it all.

He had been so sure before but now that he was standing in front her with his waistcoat over the back of the chair and his neck-cloth lying on the seat and his shirt-sleeves hanging down like a skipping rope between his knees Henry Fowler said to himself: I have watched her here in this house, moving about in her shawl and her plain high-necked gown, passing behind his chair and pouring his tea, and I have caught the scent of something that isn’t here, and when he returns tonight she will tell him what I have told her and he will fetch a few of the men from town and they will come with their shovels and dig under the beets and they will look at the marks on me and I will tell them how I got them and they will look at each other and remind themselves that Henry Fowler is nothing but a seedy old convict with a bit of land to his name and they will shake their heads and call me a liar and then they will hang me.