But Pat was quick-tempered in her youth, never one to stuff an opinion with feathers. Her fallouts were large, and often cataclysmic. When she lost a daughter to cancer and a partner to suicide, she – being an orphan – did not have a family to look to for support, and the friends she turned to instead let her down. The aggregate result of this, several years on, was her decision that the people she could truly rely on were crows. Crows, who never vanished during hard times, or stopped speaking to you when you gave them some unfiltered advice about their career. Crows, who would land on her arms and shoulders in the pub garden, always her arms and shoulders, never anyone else’s. Crows, who ate every last bit of her sausages and never complained. They gathered around her waiting for worms as she turned the soil in her garden, which wasn’t officially her garden, just a thirty square foot patch of ground between her back door and the dry stone wall where the moor in its harshest form began and which hadn’t been claimed by anyone else and which some bastard could now prise from her cold dead hands if they wanted to take it away from her. People looked at her and thought, ‘That’s the kind of person who never cries.’ But it wasn’t true. Back in September of 2008, when she’d seen a crow nailed to a fence post outside the Cavendish farm, she bawled, sporadically, for most of the following day.