One

'But I do. One day I will make you a roast dinner. I absolutely promise you.' He was about to say that it would be good meat, with a trustworthy provenance. No tattoos. But he kept his teeth clenched on that. He thought there and then that he might have gone a little mad. And why not? Who could go forward, given what had happened, without insanity shadowing them? He doubted everything he had seen, even as his hands moved through the thick furring of ash on a gatepost, or he hopscotched a way through the broken pieces of the dead. He wondered if the ghosts that pursued him were of his own imagining, and if the awful deaths of Chris and Nance were illusions too. That, or done by his own hand during a fugue that he'd believed was the result of a crack on the head.

For the first time he thought of abandoning Becky and Aidan. Perhaps they would be safer without him. He didn't know himself well enough to trust his actions any more. He doubted how the future might play out. Every possibility was edged with black, with blood.

They moved through a garden that sloped up to the farmhouse, their feet scratching through the thin bristle. Black remnants of haycocks dotted the fields around them. A rusted disc harrow embedded in lifeless, impacted soil, twisted and cracked augers, their spiral inner teeth spilling free, the tines of a shakaerator broken and bent as if set to work on earth turned to stone. The roof of the barn was punched in; a wall bending out from one corner, as if holding on for grim life. All of the machinery bore fresh pockmarks, as if it had been peppered with pellets. He turned back to the house. All the windows on the upper floor nude, framing black. It would have to've been a powerful air rifle if it had been fired from that distance.

'Let's have a look in the kitchen,' Jane said. A door flapped in the rising wind, providing a beat that their feet marched to. Jane held up a hand and they hung back a little once they were near. Jane waited, checking the broken windows for movement. The kitchen was magazine rustic. Wheatsheaves burnt to fingers of charcoal on a cupboard made from recycled scaffold planks. Crisped cushions in an inglenook. An Aga. Welsh-slate floor. Shaker-style cabinets. Copper pots. A Belfast sink filled with bloody water. Jane hesitated over that, feeling the warning signs begin: the skin gathering at his nape, the hairs rising on his arms.

They checked the drawers and cupboards. There was basmati rice in an old coffee tin. Dozens of cans of plum tomatoes. Spices stored in tins that had once contained Assam tea. In the cellar Jane found a freezer with its own generator. He opened it and recoiled at the stink of rotted chickens sloshing about in a defrosted broth. Another fridge containing bottles of wine, cans of bitter. No longer cold, but who cared?

Becky and Aidan got a fire going in the porch, where they were shielded from the brunt of the wind. Aidan was given a pestle and mortar and shown how to grind the spices to powder. He worked at their names as he did so, struggling at first, but reciting them like a mantra to the rhythm of the pestle. Cor-i-an-der. Cu-min. Car-da-mom. Fen-u-greek. While Becky drained tins of chickpeas and new potatoes, Jane made his way into the hall. A rush-seated stool stood in an alcove beneath a coat rack crammed with coats of varying sizes. A restored Bakelite phone on a stand. A shoe rack with muddy wellington boots. There was a living room off to the left. Inside it Jane found bodies lying under torn-down blinds and a plastic shower curtain. A man, two boys in pyjamas, one maybe five, the other seven. And a baby girl. All had been shot in the head. The eldest boy had a gunshot through the palm of his left hand. Where was the wife, the mother?

He closed the door, wishing there were a bolt he could shoot or a key he could turn.

He went back to the kitchen, considering what to say, but Becky and Aidan were engrossed in their cooking. Instead, Jane made his way upstairs. He stood for a moment on the landing, looking out at the field below. A good view of the dual carriageway from here; they could have been tracked easily as they approached the house. Someone with a gun would have made themselves known by now, surely? Warning shots? Hands up. Turn around. Leave.

Dead, then. Or long gone.