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Chapter One

Vera Stanhope climbed out of Hector’s ancient Land Rover and felt the inevitable strain on her knees. Hector’s Land Rover. Her father had been dead for years, but still she thought of the vehicle as his. She stopped for a moment to look down the valley at the view. Another thing her father had gifted her: this house. Sod all else, she thought, maybe she should forgive him because of this. It was October and the light was going. A smell of wood-smoke and ice. Most of the trees were already bare and the whooper swans had come back to the lough.

She’d stopped at the supermarket outside Kimmerston on her way home from work and there were carrier bags piled on the passenger seat. She took a guilty look round to make sure the coast was clear. Her eco-warrior neighbours despised the use of plastic bags, and after a day in the office she couldn’t face a right-on lecture about saving the planet. But there was no one in the yard next door. A couple of hens poked around a weed patch. No sound, and if Jack was working in the barn there’d be loud rock music. Or howling blues. She lifted the bags out of the Land Rover, then set them down on her doorstep to search for her keys.

But the door was already open. She felt a shiver of tension, but also of excitement. No way would she have gone to work without locking it. She’d never believed all the romantic crap about it being safe for country folk to leave their doors open. The rural communities experienced crime too. She’d read the reports and knew there was as much drug use in the pleasant middle-class high schools in Northumberland as in the ones in town. It was just that teachers were better at keeping it quiet. She pushed the door open, using her elbow, thinking that really the last thing she needed was a burglary.

Despite her considerable weight she moved quietly. A skill she’d learned in childhood. She stopped in the hall and listened. Nobody was moving in the house. Unless they were as quiet as she was. But there was sound, a cracking of twigs, of sparks. A fire had been lit. The smell of wood-smoke was coming from her home, not from the cottages in the valley as she’d first thought. But it surely wasn’t a fire out of control. There were no fumes seeping into the rest of the house. No roaring flames. No heat where she was standing.

She opened the door into the small living room and saw Jack, her neighbour, sitting in the most comfortable chair. The chair where Hector had always sat. He’d put a match to the fire she’d already laid in the grate and was staring at the flames. Shock, and relief of the tension she’d felt on coming into the house, made Vera angry. Bloody hippies! She’d given them a key for emergencies, not so that they could wander into her house whenever they felt like it. They had no respect for personal boundaries.