‘He said, Janice, that God had greatly disappointed him. He said that he had begged Him for His pity and His mercy and had been refused. He said there was nothing now I had to tell him that he wanted to listen to and if I ever came trespassing on his land again and tried to talk to him about God’s love, he would come out into his yard and stick his shotgun in my crap-filled mouth and shoot me.’

Creed stayed away from the church after that, and if he ever came face to face with her father down in the valley he turned around and walked the other way. He began to avoid anyone who attended the Sunday service, which in those days had been nearly everyone. At some point he moved out of the farmhouse he’d shared with his wife and into the bothy further up the fell. Eventually he stopped coming down into the valley for anything. It was as if, not being able to look God in the eye and spit in His face, or inform Him personally that he was sending Him to Coventry forever, Creed had settled on the next best thing. Or perhaps he’d decided that there was no face to spit in and he was living in a world of fools; that from now on, he was on his own.

He mended his walls and birthed his ewes and when autumn came he drove the new season’s lambs up along the high straight track that had once been the Romans’ way north to the border, sold them to be slaughtered, picked up his supplies and walked back the way he’d come. Anywhere he had to go, he took the old Roman way, never the path down into the valley, the track along the river that took him past their house and the church.

What would he look like?

Like the other men she remembered in their fifties and sixties who used to live here? Bull-necked men with brick-red faces and bow legs and giant hands?

When he was young his hair had been brown, chestnut-coloured, she remembered that.

Not as dark as his wife’s but still brown. His beard had been brown also.

And hadn’t he had one brown eye and one grey? She thought so. She thought she remembered her sister Pam remarking on it once when they were girls.

Her sister Pam and her brother Frank always asked after him when they came. ‘And what about Michael Creed?’ they said. ‘Do you ever see him, Ruth? Is he still up there?’

‘Yes,’ she told them. ‘He’s still up there.’

But what if he wasn’t?

What if since the last time she’d glimpsed his bulky shape in the distance, he’d died or given up at last and gone away, like everyone else?