He shrugged again – a different shrug this time. It meant that he was hurting, but wasn’t going to moan. He still had his pyjama trousers on but he’d changed out of his slippers and into his gardening boots. He had a donkey jacket on over the cardigan and a nice blue flat cap on his head. With his cigarette hanging from his lower lip and his eyes looking a bit misty from the painkillers, he did look a handsome chap. I had to tell him to stop whittering on or I might have gone and embarrassed myself by saying something nice.

‘Let’s mek it quick, eh?’ he grumbled, as he pushed open the driver’s door. ‘Grab what you need and we’ll be away.’

I stepped out of the car – my foot going right in a mucky black puddle. It went over the top of my shoe and soaked my sock before I could jerk back. I said a bad word and looked across the bonnet of the car to see John laughing at me, shaking his head in that way husbands do when they’re asking themselves just what they’ve gone and married.

I limped towards the back door, soaking wet and cross with myself, trying to pull my anorak around my middle. I had my vest tucked in my knickers so I know Mam would have been proud, but it was always that little bit colder up on that hill than anywhere else and I was shivering as I nipped up the steps, my hands in my coat pocket rummaging for the key.

‘Nip of fox in the air,’ said John, jerking his head in the direction of nothing in particular. ‘You smell it? Meat and vinegar smell – you never forget it.’

I made a show of sucking in a gulp of air through my nostrils. It serves to humour a partner, doesn’t it? I was more interested in finding the right key than I was in him and his silly outdoorsy nonsense. He’d be pointing out trees and birds and telling me the names of different farms if I let him ramble. So it was a shock to actually get a whiff of it. To get that little trace of something that didn’t seem right.

‘Fox?’ I asked, my hand on the iron doorknob, the key in the lock. ‘It’s earthier than that. It’s like chicken gone bad. Do you think somebody’s left her a gamebird and the maggots have …’