However it was, he lived there alone, with a slinking, shadowy, thin collie bitch that had never been heard to bark (a poacher’s dog if ever there was one, Glass thought). In spite of his elusiveness, and the fact that he was known to do a bit of poaching, he was looked on as a respectable man, a good son to his mother and a man of his word, kind to the children who stole apples from his three prolific old trees and – had they not all heard him say so a hundred times? – never in his life the worse for drink. Which was why when Flo, seeing no light at his window, first tapped at his door, then pushed it and looked into a dark room which smelt quite strongly of, for one thing, tobacco, but more than that something that seemed to her pretty well indistinguishable from the smell which came from the big holes on the hillside above the track which led through Badger’s Wood, she knew it would be no good looking for him where she might have looked for any other man who was not at home at that time of day, which was to say in the pub; his oft-repeated views on the evils of alcohol were too well known for that. She could think of nowhere else where he might be found after dark, but there was a faint glow from the fireplace in his kitchen which seemed to indicate that he was at any rate in residence, so being a conscientious girl she waited. It was not a cold night and in view of the badger smell she thought she would prefer to wait outside. She put her lantern down on the doorstep and sat beside it, pulling her cloak round her with the hood right over her head so that all she saw when she looked out was the steady flame of the candle and the corner of Tom Harker’s rainwater butt.

★

Tom had watched the shooting party going home, as the afternoon ended and a faint mist began to rise from the ground. He had climbed over the park wall into the beech wood, his collie scrambling over behind him, and had waited beside one of the trees, looking over the park towards the copse where the guns traditionally took their last stand on the second day of a three-day shoot. Three of them were well within his view, the others beyond the trees of the copse. He remained unobtrusive because such was his habit; but had he been seen it was not likely that anyone would have objected – a big shoot in which well-known sportsmen were taking part often attracted spectators, and he was in a position where there could have been no fear of his interfering with the sport.