It was a tougher climb than Michael remembered. Thighs burning, chest expanding like bellows, he reached the farmyard gate, a simple galvanized lattice of steel poles, newer than the stout concrete posts which held it. Both were smattered in muck, sprayed from tractor tyres, but now baked into hard melanoma by the summer sun.

  Before opening the gate, he looked back down towards the beach house and the dunes behind it. In an irregular quilt of yellows, greens, and browns, the land swept out below. He frowned quizzically. The browns were dirty, cancerous taints to the usual order of things. Or was that him misremembering again? After all, he could hardly call himself a country boy, not anymore. Still, his anxiety flared.

  The dunes. His father’s bedtime stories, replete with a tatty sock-puppet, one button-eye hanging loose by a long thread, the other gone and all the more terrifying in its searching blindness as it reared up before the Lorimer heir and dove down to tickle his tummy. He remembered screaming and giggling and losing his breath, loving playing the role, until his father turned out the light and closed his bedroom door, leaving him alone with the dark and the sounds the sea hissing like a giant serpent tasting the air in search of another Lorimer. Silly bedtime stories, told by a silly man.

  He lifted his gaze to the strip of sand and the sea beyond, which blended with the sky as if there was no seam between heaven and earth. To the right, Hernshore Wood abutted the dunes, following the line of the coast southward and encroaching inland on the hills, until trees encircled the Roost. That was the local name for the old Lorimer castle. Today it was nothing more than a ragged ruin, and it had been that way since it was struck by lightning in the early 1970s and razed by fire. This caused Michael’s father, ever the maverick and breaker of tradition, except with his sock-puppet stories, to build the beach house. He didn’t know much about it, and he was surprised he remembered even these details. It was before he was born, and the house looked the way it did as an homage to the beach houses in Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons of the East Coast of America, because daddy dear adored Jaws and Spielberg. Hell, he’d been a script supervisor on Duel, which proved to be Spielberg’s and Jonathan Lorimer’s big break. Everyone knew about the former. Not so much the latter. Although Tara was one of them. He wondered if Sam was a movie nerd like his mother... and Jonathan.

  With a shrug, Michael put his back to the woods and those thoughts. The farm gate squealed on open and close. A good country boy always shuts a gate behind him, he thought. That’s not exactly me though, is it? Stop reminiscing. There was Sam to get back to. The shock of Sam’s encroachment on Michael’s life was a palpable weight, an ever-present load that he must consider, and even when, out of a bachelor’s habit, he forgot him, it off-centred him every time he remembered the boy. More than once, he felt as though he was about to trip. That was the story of his life right now. Fuck-up after fuck-up. Was that what Sam was? Of a sort. He ignored the implications of that thought and started towards the farmhouse.

  The yard was uneven with broken slabs of concrete, pitted with a constellation of bone-dry potholes. Chickens scattered in Michael’s wake, clucking like busybodies at the May Day fair. He was about to knock at the flaking red front door, when the past crowded back in like the now curious chickens behind him.

  The laughter of children, cut grass on the breeze, and a knowledge that there was no need to knock... Just come on in, little Micky Lorimer. Huddled in a knitted cosy, there’d be a pot of tea smoking thoughtful on the kitchen table. It would be surrounded by a ragtag family of chipped mugs and freshly baked scones, or white cob rolls, or flapjacks sweet with honey from Ma’s own hives.

  Involuntarily, he smiled, remembering the time Toby and he poked a hive to see what would happen. The world flipped from adventurous playground to stomach-lurching terror when the bees attacked. The two of them ran, the long grass tugging at their trainers as they flailed wildly, and the bees taught them a lesson with at least dozen stings apiece. Christ, it had hurt so much, and Toby’s face swelled up on one side making him look like Quasimodo. Ma picked out the stings and smothered them both with pink calamine lotion while she simultaneous scolded them, dried their tears, and hugged them like they were the most precious things in the entire world.

  Michael knocked anyway. There was no answer. He tried again louder. When there was no answer the second time, he called out and opened the door a crack.

  ‘Ma? Ma Tunstall! It’s Micky’ He listened a beat, treading water in the sea of silence. ‘It’s Michael Lorimer.’

  As no reply came, he pushed the door wide. It was close to how he remembered it, maybe a little smaller, but there was no smoking tea pot or freshly baked bread. The stove was black and lifeless. A clock ticked over the hearth with a heavy oak mantel, made of a single knotted piece of timber. Curled up in a threadbare wing backed seat, lay a large tabby cat. It raised its head, regarded Michael as if he were inconsequential, and went back to sleep. A pair of muddy wellington boots stood sentry by the umbrellas at the door. They were too big to be Ma’s, which meant they could be Toby’s or Seth’s, Toby’s father.

  “Ma, are you about?”

  “Toby?”

  The clock tick-tocked as if to shake its head.

  The chicken’s cocked their heads expectantly. He almost asked them where to find Ma. As he barged through them, they scattered, ruffling and clucking, before falling back in to follow him across the threshold of the farmhouse. A dry-stone wall marked the boundary with the field opposite. He could almost feel the roughness of those rocks, his once scabby knees and hands... All these thoughts carried a warmth that was unsettling.

  He rounded the corner and stopped. The chickens stopped too, jerking their heads up to him before pecking at the heels of his shoes. Ma Tunstall was digging a hole next to the stone wall. She stabbed the spade back into the earth and paused, listening like one of her chickens.

  She was older, but still as full of hip and bosom as Michael remembered her. Her hair was the same bird’s nest of wiry curls, only now they were much greyer. She wore green wellies on her feet and a dress patterned with small flowers of white and purple. A cream cotton apron was tied around her waist and bore smudges of mud from her labour. She was too old to be digging a big hole. Not that that was something anyone would ever dare to tell Ma Tunstall. With a hand to shield her eyes form the sun, she turned to see who was watching her.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, Micky Lorimer. Your parents didn’t bring you up to watch old women dig holes.’

  His feet were on the move before she’d even finished the sentence. He wanted to be angry about Toby and his car. He wanted to hurry things along and use the phone in the farmhouse. Michael could want all he liked because Ma Tunstall was holding out the spade for him, and that meant he had to take it.

  ‘I’m not really dressed for this,’ he said, already rolling up his sleeves.

  Ma didn’t answer, she just handed him the spade and patted him warmly on the back. ‘Good to see you, Micky.’ That welcome was so genuine and everyday that it felt like a plate full of butter melting over white toast.

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  He adjusted the weight of the spade in his hands. ‘What are we digging?’

  ‘A grave.’

  Michael paused on the back swing. ‘A what?’

  ‘A grave. Fin’s dead.’

  ‘Fin?’

  ‘You got slow breathing in all that London smog?’ Ma’s words were flinty.

  Hackled, he was about to snap a retort, but meeting Ma’s eyes, Michael saw they were glassy with tears, and he remembered what a good dog Fin had been. A wriggling black and white puppy so excited it peed on his trainers. A sprightly sheep dog who’d round them up out of the fields and lead them home towards Ma’s calls. A wise friend who’d bark when they were about to do something dangerous, and they would, of course, ignore him and end up in a stream, or twisting an ankle, or running through the long grass chased by a swarm of bees.

  That’s right! Fin had been stung as well that day. How had Michael forgotten that? Ma had threatened to see to Fin first, who harrumphed down on his bed next to the hearth with reproachful-eyes and licked his stings and raked teeth through his fur.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ma. He was a good dog.’

  Ma softened; the corners of her mouth quivered at the truth of it. ‘Aye, that he was.’

  It was then Michael saw Fin lying in the long grass, legs out straight, head not sitting quite right, one pale blue eye starring up at nothing, and a thick ribbon of blood running from his ear, drying in the hair on his neck.

  Michael swung the spade into the dirt. ‘How’d he pass?’

  Without missing a beat, Ma replied, ‘Far too bloody old, among other things.’

  Michael didn’t question this. He merely nodded and shovelled dirt out of the hole. Country ways could seem blunt and rough. At the Tunstall farm, he’d seen chicken’s necks severed from their bodies by the head of an axe, and rabbit’s necks wrung until the vertebrae snapped with a crack like an old man’s knees. More memories. More things he’d not thought of in several decades. Fin must have been ancient in dog years. Over twenty in human years, easily.

  Ma had already made good progress on the hole, despite the dirt being dry, and she’d reached the damper earth a foot or so below that. The rhythm of digging and the burn in his muscles to dig a grave for an old friend made him forget himself and his wandering thoughts until he caught a whiff of something unpleasant. It reeked. Not manure or even pig shit. It was even ranker. Unhealthy. Festering. Myriad white worms gyred around his feet. It was the country, it was supposed to be like this, but those brown patches on the fields he’d seen from the gate and his uncanny sense they weren’t right returned to him. Sleave to nose, he stopped and hopped out of the hole.

  ‘Is that deep enough?’ Michael hoped it was. He hoped they could cover the hole and seal in the smell quickly.

  ‘Aye, that will do.’ Ma inclined her head at the grave. ‘Don’t want to put Fin too deep in when it’s like that.’ She shook her head, staring at the hole and up to Michael and back to the hole. One thick, almost bushy eyebrow raised.

  ‘What brings little Mikey Lorimer back to Hernshore?’

  The way she seemed to be looking through him, pondering, Michael wasn’t sure if she was asking him or thinking out loud. Still, it was a question with Michael as its focus. Ma waddled over to Fin as he began to answer.

  ‘Funny you should ask. I came up to see if I could borrow your landline. The one at the beach house is terrible and I need to call the agents to see where their rep is. I’m worried she’s got lost trying to find us.’

  Ma had hefted Fin and brought him to the grave. It would be a nice spot by the wall and not far from the house at the start of the fruit orchard. Ma laid the old dog in the earth. ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’ She murmured something over Fin that Michael didn’t catch.

  ‘Right, thought it was obvious. I told Toby earlier when he totalled my car, which is another reason...’

  Ma interrupted him, her grey eyes peering up, sucking her teeth. ‘Not obvious and I’ve not seen Toby.’ She waited expectantly.

  ‘I need to sell the house, well, the house and the land.’ He wafted his hand, indicating that all the land was technically his, but trying to seem causal about it.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of hearing that. Toby said the same thing. It’s my land...’

  ‘Your land?’

  ‘Yes, my land. And I can sell it if I want.’ Why did he sound like a petulant child?

  Ma laughed. ‘I don’t dispute that, Mickey. Did you ever stop to think about whether the land would let you sell it?’

  It was Michael’s turn to laugh, but then he saw Ma was being serious. Something irked him about the dirty brown patches in the fields and the rank smell from the bottom of Fin’s grave. Something not quite right. Something he was missing or perhaps forgetting. Whatever it was he didn’t have time for it.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to argue. I really need to make that call, and I’ve left Sam at the beach house. And—’

  ‘Who’s Sam?’ Ma interrupted.

  ‘Well, he’s my son, actually. It’s a long story but—’

  ‘You’ve a son?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Ma’s face blanched. ‘How old?’ Her eyes seemed to already know the answer.

  ‘He’s sixteen, but I don’t see why that’s relevant.’

  Ma grabbed me at the wrist, panic tightening her voice. ‘You left him alone at the beach house?’

  ‘Yes, of course, I...’ An icy gust ran up from the base of Michael’s spine. It swept over him like a draft through an abandoned house, banging doors, unsettling dust in a place long forgotten and best left undisturbed. Just don’t go into the dunes. That’s what he was going to say to Sam but didn’t, because it was a reflex, like looking for change in the telephone box, like the key under the stone on the porch. It was one of those things your parents said to you, perhaps with a sock puppet diving to tickle your flank. One of those things you swore you’d never say to your kids. Which if, like Michael Lorimer, you’d sworn never to have kids at all, it hit doubly hard.

  This thing was a folktale about Alaric Lorimer’s deal with the devil. Well, not the devil exactly, and not exactly a deal to slay the wyrm of Hernshore dunes. And it wasn’t exactly a matter of ‘slaying’ the wyrm either. Every Lorimer son had to cross the dunes in the summer of their sixteenth year accompanied by their father. That was the folktale. And it was one Michael’s father had humoured when he was Lord of the manor. Although that tradition ended as a bad joke. A terrible punchline, funny to no one, least of all Michael, because he had been there. He was the one who found him drowned at the shoreline.

  The memory came unbidden, cold as the first autumn frost, so cold it made him numb. Sea water foaming as the waves crashed on the shore. Knees sinking into wet sand. Hands pulling at the body, hauling his father onto the dry sand. Shaking. Shivering. Numbing him ever since. He swore he’d never come back. And yet here I am, he thought.

  Ma Tunstall was storming off, leaving Fin half-buried. Michael was confused and started after her. ‘Ma, wait up. He’s fine. I told him to look around the house.’

  ‘Can’t leave the boy all alone,’ Ma threw back over her shoulder.

  ‘He’s sixteen. We were left alone much younger than that.’

  ‘Aye and look at the trouble you used to get into,’ she said, rounding the side of the farmhouse and disappearing.

  Michael broke into a jog, and as he reached the front door, Ma came rushing out with a set of keys in her hand, scattering chickens. She headed, stiff-kneed, for the beat-up army-green Land Rover Defender, opened the driver’s side door and lumbered inside. Before slamming the door, she leaned out in frustration.

  ‘Well, Mikey, what are you waiting for?’

  Michael looked forlornly between the farmhouse and the Land Rover. All he wanted was to use the phone, but the red door to the house stood firmly closed. This was supposed to be a quick visit, show the beach house and land to Nush and be back in civilisation that same day. Then the London property deal would be back on track, and he’d have the headspace to work out what he was going to do about Sam. Why was everything proving so unnecessarily complicated here? It was as though Michael couldn’t shake his bad luck and it had stalked him here all the way from the capital.

  The Defender’s engine coughed into life, and Ma banged the outside of the driver’s door with her palm. ‘Mikey, pull your head out of the cow’s arse.’

  With a sigh, he did as he was told and ran to the four-by-four. He could remonstrate with Ma on the way. There wasn’t anything worth worrying about with Sam. He’d be perfectly fine at the beach house by himself, superstitions or not. Not for the first time, Michael internally rolled his eyes at country ways. Some things weren’t worth resisting.