A voice cuts through the night, ‘This is for me to do, Mum.’ Nevis is standing between them, breathing hard, the rifle clasped to her chest. She is looking at the prostrate figure on the ground. Addressing herself to Mulholland, she says, ‘If anyone is going to kill you, it’ll be me.’

Mulholland’s voice, flat, almost as if the man has already departed his body. ‘Do you want to throw away your life?’

‘You don’t understand. I am reclaiming it.’

Honor says, ‘Darling, please, he is right. This is our business. Let us finish it.’

Nevis holds up a hand. ‘I’m not doing this for you, or for me. This is for Natasha and Jessica and Satnam.’

For a moment Honor is stunned into silence. She opens her mouth to speak and in that instant realises that Nevis is right. This is not her business. It never was. Her spite, her rage, everything she has felt about Mulholland over the past decades, all this has taken up precious space in her heart where it had no business being. A piece of herself closed off and unavailable. She has never been completely and wholly present. An absence in her own life. And in her daughter’s. A small dense ball of shame rises up and in its place a rush of release.

She hears Mulholland bleating, ‘I loved your mother.’

Nevis. ‘You raped her.’

‘I was young. It wasn’t like that.’

‘I choose to believe Honor, my other mother.’

Folding his good leg under himself, and pushing off the ground with his hands, growling in pain, Mulholland rises to a stand. ‘One last time, I beg of you to think again.’

Nevis braces herself. ‘I’m done thinking.’

A ragged silence falls.

From somewhere nearby the owl hoots again. Mulholland says, ‘Please forgive me,’ and in a flash he has wheeled about and is rushing towards the lip of the cliff, roaring in pain as his broken femur bears his weight. From the corner of her eye she sees Nevis raise the rifle’s sight to her eye. Honor hears herself cry out.

The roar becomes a scream as Mulholland goes over.

The whump of the helicopter rotors grows louder. Nobody hears Mulholland’s last moments in this world.

She watches Nevis gasp and, head in hands, crumple to the ground. The rifle drops and clatters as it lands. Rushing over and falling to her knees, Honor clasps her arms around her daughter. The wind from the rotors sweeps their bodies and lifts the hair from their scalps but they remain, each holding the other. A voice from a loudhailer instructs them to stay in place.

Landing a kiss on her daughter’s head and, feeling her body as it softens into her, Honor says, ‘It’s OK now.’ Nevis swings an arm around her mother’s shoulders and reaches for her hand. And so they huddle together, fingers loosely entwined, and wait for the police.