The room above the kitchen is warm. The Aga is on below. He finds he sleeps a lot in the heat.
The bed is old and comfortable. The doctor says he should stay in bed a few more days, at least.
Sometimes Hibou comes in with tea she has made from rosehips and honey. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She is being treated by the same doctor as Breen is, Tozer says.
Helen Tozer’s mother brings more conventional cups of tea, refusing to believe that Breen doesn’t like them. ‘Drink it and you’ll feel better,’ she says.
He would love a real coffee but thinks it probably doesn’t exist this far west of London.
The doctor says his arm will be OK. The bullet smashed his collarbone, shattering it, sending fragments of bone down into his shoulder. But they’ve put metal in there instead, joining two bits of broken bone.
Tozer knocks on his door sometimes to ask if he is all right. He screams often in his sleep, they tell him. He dreams about Cox on the tarmac beside him. In some dreams he lies there. In others he stands up again.
It is Tozer’s sister’s room. Her dead sister. Nightmares are to be expected.
Tozer often looks tired. She has lost weight, if that’s possible. The farm is a lot of work. Her father has given up on everything. He’s never recovered. It’s all down to her now to keep it going. A young woman running a whole dairy farm, keeping the family going.
Breen was driven down here in the back of an ambulance after a few days in hospital in London. Tozer had insisted on it. There was no one else to look after him, she said. And no one to object to her insisting, either.
They say his left arm will not move that well for a while.
Today he gets up in his pyjamas and goes slowly downstairs. Mrs Tozer is cooking lunch. Beef stew and dumplings.
‘Oh,’ she says, surprised to see him up. She runs round, moving chairs, fetching a blanket for him. ‘Joining us for lunch, are you?’
It’s a first. Breen apologises for causing so much trouble.
She laughs. ‘No trouble.’
‘Extra mouths to feed,’ he says.
‘No trouble at all,’ she says, and looks out of the small square window into the farmyard.
‘It’s good to have the girl here,’ she says.
She means Hibou. The same age as Tozer’s sister was. Like someone falling out of the sky unexpectedly. Breen wonders whether it’s Tozer who’s bringing the farm back to life with her energy and work, or Hibou, by filling the space left behind by a dead girl. Even Tozer’s father talks to her, sometimes. He taught her how to change a spark plug in the tractor the other day.
Hibou is doing well, apparently. She doesn’t talk much, but she’s over the worst. There is some colour in her skin now, at least. Tozer asked her if she wanted them to call her anything different. Her real name, perhaps? But she prefers to be known as Hibou. Tozer tells her she’s a dab hand with the milking machine. A real help.
At night you can hear real owls round here, too.
The food smells rich. Almost too rich. Breen doesn’t want to disappoint her by not eating, but he’s not sure he can face it.
‘It’s good of you, Mrs Tozer, to put up with me.’
‘You miss your father, I expect,’ she says.
She ladles the stew into a bowl. Before he can stop himself, he says, ‘I wasn’t there, the day he died. I feel bad about that.’
Mrs Tozer drops gravy onto the top of the cooker. It bubbles and steams in the heat.
‘You can’t always be there,’ she says. ‘That’s the sad thing.’
To change the subject, Breen asks if he can use the phone after lunch. He wants to call London to see if there is any news of Shirley Prosser.
He doubts there will be. She used him. Not as badly as she’d used Harry Cox though.
‘She’s lucky,’ Helen Tozer said yesterday as they walked by the estuary. ‘And smart. She got her revenge on the people who killed the one she loved. I admire her.’
Breen does not want to think about her too much. She got away.
He will be off work for weeks, though he’s not sure how long he can stay down here. It’s not that he’s not welcome. But he is not a country person. He misses the city his father raised him in. He’s bored already. This is not where he is from. Hibou fits in here, but he doesn’t. He peers out of the window at the browns of winter. The leafless trees full of rooks.
The quiet complacency of everyday life. He knows it is not really like this. In this house they all secretly know it too. He can’t live here. He’s not sure Tozer can either, but she has to try.
She will be coming in soon, talking too loudly, smelling of sour milk and dung.