JUST BEFORE TEN o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 20, Clem stashed his bike inside Franklins’ unruly hedge, then froze. The sound was harsh, grating. And loud; it had come from close by. Then another, the coarse roar of some sort of machine. And above him, rooks in tumultuous outrage. The wind was light but bitter. His imitation-suede jacket was little defense against it. He stood, indecisive, shivering, then moved cautiously through the undergrowth toward the ruins of the house. When he got to the stump of its gable wall, he stopped. He stopped totally — breathing, heartbeat, brain function all at a standstill. He heard laughter, and because nothing made sense, he thought it might be his own.

It had all gone. All of it. The barn, the pines, the bramble and bracken. The low table of land that they had occupied was a smear of raw brown soil and torn roots. Beyond it, fifty feet into the vast field, a bonfire plumed smoke into the wind. As he watched, half a flight of stairs collapsed in it, like a blackened accordion. Then a huge caterpillar-tracked bulldozer reversed into his line of sight. The man perched at its controls, looking backwards, with a cigarette in his mouth, was his father. Clem dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot.

They’d found out. Him and Mortimer, they’d found out. And this was what they’d done about it. Smashed them. Erased them.

He sat with his back against the wall, numb at first, then slowly filling with fierce grief. The sound of the dozer settled into a heavy chug, then died. Voices. A second engine fired up, somewhere off to his left. Clem got to his knees and peered over the wall. His father was sitting atop the machine, speaking to someone hidden from view by the remaining walls of the house and a surviving clump of hawthorn and gorse. Clem crawled to the corner of the ruin and out behind a low, overrun bank, perhaps once the edge of a kitchen garden. He raised his head again.

Three other men, one maneuvering a tractor fitted with a toothed digging bucket. The trunks of the felled pines, decapitated, their limbs amputated. A big trailer, half full of rubble. A huge mound of brick and slate and jutting broken timbers that had been the barn.

A stocky man in dirty blue overalls and Wellington boots was poking around in the wreckage. He lifted something on the end of a stick: the sleeping bag — their sleeping bag — barely recognizable, the filthy ragged skin of an ancient roadkill.

“That look like some ole tramp’re being sleepun rough up here, George.”

Grinning.

His father laughed from on high.

“Aye. The bugger’ll get a right shock if he comes back tonight.”

The third man, rolling a cigarette, said, “’Specially if he’re got your sister with him, Will.”

Clem fell onto his back among the damp leaf fall, stunned by loss.

Frankie.

He knelt again, and there she was, appearing and disappearing beyond the swirling smoke, she and Marron silhouetted motionless on the low swell of the land.

He went home. A few minutes after twelve thirty, the phone rang.

“Clem?”

“Frankie?”

“Clem. Oh, Clem.”

“Can you talk?”

“Only for a second. I had no idea, honestly. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“The bastards.”

“Yes. Can you come to the woods later? Where we used to meet?”

“When?”

“Three.”

“Okay.”

Ruth came in the back door.

“Who’re you talking to, Clem?”

“Goz.”

“Clem?”

“I’ll see you there, then. Cheers, Goz.”

He put the phone down.

“What was that all about, then?”

“Oh, nothun. Said I’d go round his later. Bloody English prep.”

Ruth hung her coat on the pegs under the stairs.

“Takun up swearun now, hev you?”

Frankie came on a bicycle. He hadn’t known she could ride one, or had one.