‘And I looked at his filthy greedy face, and I believed for a second that she could have loved me. That I could at least have had a mother if he hadn’t wrecked her and killed her like he killed Eden. Like he killed everything. And my hate was so intense I could feel it inside me like a hard nugget. I clenched my fists and said the words that completed the calling, watching him while he repeated them through his yellow teeth.’

Calvin nodded as though there had been a question. ‘She did love you. She was weak.’

Sam’s eyes were clouding. He stopped speaking, looking up at Calvin with a face that said there was no more to tell. Calvin prompted him. ‘What then?’

Sam looked back at him with glistening eyes. ‘You know what then, Calvin. You were there. I killed him.’

‘How so? When did you kill him? What with?’

The scratching claws were very close now. Calvin figured the animal was only feet away in the blackness. A bold creature indeed, if creature it still was. But both men suspected different. Sam’s tears fell, running over his bloodied cheeks in thin snaking rivulets, falling to rest in smudges on his filthy jacket.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I only know I passed out and then he was there … like that … the way you saw him when I came round.’ He buried his head in his knees again and gave voice to his tears, sobbing deeply. ‘Dear God. That I could have done that to any human being.’

Calvin leaned forward and picked a smouldering twig from the fire and with an astonishingly nimble movement swung round and threw the burning wood at something behind him. Sam snapped his head up at the action, and as the twig spun into the dark its flames momentarily lit up the marten that was crouching against the rough wall of the tunnel, before striking it squarely on the back.

The animal growled with a noise too deep for its size and bared its teeth and both Sam and Calvin had time to see the dark whorls of the obscenity shine behind its eyes, before the flaming wood extinguished and plunged the tunnel into darkness again.

Calvin turned back to Sam who was looking into the blackness with horror. ‘Did you think he would let us be?’

Sam sniffed and wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘It let me be last night. I hoped it was over.’

Calvin gave a wry half-smile. ‘It had other duties last night.’

The light dancing on the old man’s deeply-lined face showed just how sick and broken he was. Sam felt cold fingers of horror on his spine at the thought of what those duties had been, and how Calvin might have dealt with them. He looked for the first time at this figure from the past with something approaching sympathy.