Mary turned up the day after the funeral. Hammering on the door of the cottage in Wintersprint until Kit’s father let her in. When Kit got down to the kitchen he found Mary stood with her back to the sink, clutching a barely touched cup of Brooke Bond and kicking her heel against the cupboard.

Kit’s father walked out as Kit came in.

“We need to talk…”

“Sure,” said Kit, nodding towards the stairs.

“No,” said Mary. “Not here.”

“Where then?” he asked.

“The church,” she said. “But I want to put flowers on Josh’s grave first.” There was no vase for the wild flowers Mary had picked along the way, so she just put them at the top of the mound, below the mock-marble headstone. Then she turned and looked round the silent graveyard, nodding slowly to herself.

“What?” asked Kit.

“Just remembering.”

He followed her down to the church in silence.

“It looks so empty,” she said, her voice echoing from bare walls and a hammer beam ceiling. Someone had tidied away yesterday’s kneelers and removed the wreaths and fresh flowers, although the table at the back where the book of condolences rested was still there.

Mary’s offering had been simple.

A single word.

Sorry.

“You want some time to yourself?”

Mary shook her head, almost crossly. “I told you,” she said. “We need to talk. Somewhere private.”

The door to the tower was open and a spiral of stone steps led to the belfry, with a simple wooden ladder leading to a flat roof above. Kit went first, both up the spiral of steps and the ladder. Either the medieval tower was higher than he’d imagined or the hills were lower, because Middle Morton looked smaller than expected.

Slumping down, he put his back to a stone parapet and watched Mary try to work out where to sit. Okay, he thought, if she sits next to me, that means…if she stays standing… She sat exactly opposite, and Kit tried to tell himself that meant nothing at all.

“You want to talk about Josh?”

“No,” said Mary. “I want to talk about us.” She shifted restlessly and for a moment Kit thought she was about to stand up again, but all she did was twist her head and run one hand across her face. “We may have a problem.”

“Josh’s death?”

Mary sighed. “Just listen,” she said. “I’m late…”

Late for what? Kit almost asked. And then he realised.

“Shit…”

“Yeah,” she said. “Shit and fuck and anything else you want to say. But it’s still true.”

“But we used condoms,” said Kit, sounding like someone else. “You can’t be pregnant.”

“Not that first time,” said Mary. “When my parents were away. You remember?” She said this as if daring him to contradict her.

“But I…” He could recall the stickiness on his fingers and her stomach, where he’d withdrawn before it was too late. “I pulled out, remember?”

“Listen,” said Mary, “I’m late. End of story.”

“How late?”

“Late enough…”

“Oh fuck,” said Kit. “Are you sure it’s me?”

Mary stared at him. She raised her head, opened her eyes against the sunlight reflecting from the lead roof on which they both sat, and glared at Kit, harder than he’d have thought it possible for anyone to glare.

“I’m just asking,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s you.”

“You and Josh…?”

“Me and Josh nothing,” said Mary, crossly. “Forget Josh. We need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Who have you told?”

“Christ,” said Mary. “I’ve told no one. Who do you think I’ve told?”

Kit took a deep breath. “I’ve got £450 in my savings.” He thought about it. “That should be enough.”

“For what?”

“You know,” said Kit.

“No,” Mary said. “I don’t know. Tell me. Enough for what?”

“To sort things out.”

Mary repeated his words back to herself. She knew exactly what he meant, Kit was sure of that. All the same, she kept repeating his words, until they sounded like an echo of an echo, soiling the air around them.

“I’ve got to go,” Mary said, climbing to her feet.

“No, wait…” Kit caught her arm, harder than he intended. All the same, the speed with which she turned to wrench herself free shocked both of them.

“Stay here,” she said, from the top of the ladder. “Give me five minutes. I mean, we wouldn’t want to start rumours.”

Her text message arrived next morning. She thanked him for coming to put flowers on Josh’s grave, apologised if she’d been bad company, and told him not to worry about the other thing. It had been a false alarm. He should have known from its politeness that she lied.

“Look,” said Kit. He wanted to say he was sorry, wanted to say half a dozen things but the words stuck in his throat, so he shuffled his heels on the path and bowed his head to the dead flowers at his feet.

A yew tree had been planted near the gate, a sop to tradition for those still angry that the original site next to St. Peter’s was no longer used for burials. In fifty years the tree would look as if it belonged. For now it looked what it was, a stripling planted ten years earlier to counter complaints from everyone in the village who thought such things mattered.

None of the graves on the hillside dated much before the mid-1980s. Even then, Josh’s parents had to fight to get a plot near the gate and have a plaque commemorating his brief life added to the wall of the Treece family chapel inside the church.

It was late, the wind warm and smelling of summer. Kit had the graveyard to himself, an arbitrary patch of hillside consecrated above St. Peter’s. Wreaths from three days earlier hid recently turned earth and a temporary headstone, rag-rolled with grey paint on cheap wood had been painted over with Joshua’s full name and brief dates. A tiny bunch of wild flowers rotted just below the headstone.

Having tried and failed to apologise, Kit headed home. He took the foot path that skirted the edge of Wicker Copse and came out on Blackboy Lane, turning back to see the whole of the village laid out below him. A breeze blew warm and gentle along Morton valley, barely troubling the leaves, the river curved gently in a twisted ribbon of greenish blue. It was an evening destined for memory, almost too still and too perfect in itself.

Kit knew why he’d stopped. He wanted to cry for Josh, for Mary, for himself, and the whole shitty mess they’d made of their friendship; but his eyes remained dry and the simple apology he wanted to make choked his throat. So Kit took off his jacket, and set out for Wintersprint and the cluster of knocked-through cottages he occasionally still called home.

“Kit Newton?”

Nouveau, he almost said.

And then Kit took a look at the man asking and those standing behind him. They’d been waiting at a blind corner screened by brambles on one side and a roofless barn on the other. A spread of elder could be seen through the barn door. Someone had hacked it back to the roots but it stubbornly insisted on resprouting.

The man at the front had gelled hair, a grin, and a photograph, which he compared one final time to the boy standing in the middle of the road in front of him.

“Yeah,” said someone behind. “That’s the little fuck.”

There were five of them, perhaps three or four years older than Kit. Hired muscle mostly, track-suit bottoms, branded tee-shirts, and gold chains. They’d have hated Kit anyway, even if they weren’t being paid for the pleasure.

Pulling a spring-loaded cosh from his pocket, gelled hair flicked it to its full length and tapped the end against his own palm. “One arm and one leg,” he said. “And I’m to tell you, that’s getting off lightly. Feel free to argue, because we can make this as hard or easy as you like.”

“Who sent you?” asked Kit.

The man grinned, and grinned even more when Kit bent to retrieve a broken stick from the roadside. “Oh well,” he said. “It’s your choice.”