There was a pub in between the town and the holiday park where Will and Angharad used to go on special occasions, a sprawling roadhouse pub that showed sport and was popular with families in the early evenings and serious drinkers later on. The food had always made up in quantity for what it lacked in sophistication. Will quickened his pace, anticipating the pleasure of drinking a cold beer as he waited for a meal to be served: something old-fashioned and greasy, gammon, pineapple and chips perhaps. Saoirse was vegan and he hadn’t had a meat meal for ages. The thought of it made his stomach grumble with guilty anticipation. From a distance he could tell there were no lights on inside the pub and as he came nearer, he saw that it too, had closed, its windows hidden behind protective metal covers, the lawns in the beer garden turned to weed and litter.

That was a blow. There was nowhere else in Severn Sands to buy a meal that Will knew of. He’d have to make do with a snack from the service station. He stood for a while, looking about him. The road he was on led to the holiday park, and then doubled back behind it, like a lasso, enclosing Channel View and the Big House. He was so close now, Will reasoned, that even though the thought filled him with dread, he might as well continue to the holiday park. To re-familiarise himself and to pay his respects. To get the most difficult part of his return over and done with.

The night was dark, flimsy clouds veiling the moon. The blades on three distant wind turbines sliced through the night. A frost was settling on the grass. Will inhaled and felt the cold in his lungs.

It was a long time since Will had felt cold like this. Country cold. Bone cold.

He had forgotten how the low, flat land held onto the rawness here, how the darkness was darker, somehow, how the chill of the water spilled over onto the plain, wrapping itself around you. ‘Proper countryside’ was how he’d described it to Saoirse; a wild, forgotten place cut off from the world by the Levels to one side and the sea to the other. A place where nobody without a reason to be there would ever go.

‘You’ll have to take me there one day,’ Saoirse had said, but this wasn’t the place for her. She liked her countryside sweet and verdant: the rolling hills of Devon; the hollyhocked cottages and country pubs of the Cotswolds. She wouldn’t see beauty here, especially not at this time of year, when there were no leaves on the trees, no flowers, no birdsong, nothing but flatness and water and mud.

The wind lifted Will’s hair; he felt its icy breath on his neck.