Ma Tunstall saw the sleek black car wind down the low road tracking the dunes. Three gulls hovered beyond the Lorimer place. Three clouds, thin as scythes, cut white fatty slits into the blue flesh of a high summer sky. And earlier, three crows had chased Bede, their fat, aging tomcat, back into the kitchen. He was there still, grumbling at the day from the safety of the dog’s bed, his one good eye fixed on the farmhouse door.

  Ma had seen enough. As sure as meat rots and maggots become flies, the storm was coming. ‘Deals have their price,’ she muttered to herself, waddling across the yard, scattering chickens. She stopped at the stone wall, shielding her eyes from the sun. Ma’s teeth, including the couple she’d lost, were on edge even before she spotted Toby haring down the field in the combine, drawn inextricably towards the black car. She turned away from the inevitable collision, distracted by the pitiful whine of Fin.

  He lay in the shade of a bent-backed apple tree. Wasps worried the decaying windfall nestled amid the grass, parched brown by the rainless summer. Fin panted, saliva foaming around his muzzle. His eyes had already fixed on the mists of the next world. The old dog’s chest pumped rapidly, as if he had the legs of a younger hound tearing after a rabbit.

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  ‘Agh ol’ boy!’ Ma lamented, both for the dog and the last ugly portent. She stroked his flank, along ribs clad in tatty fur and back up to his downy soft ear. A good dog’s ear was better than any knotted handkerchief for thinking. They’d done a lot of thinking together over the years, sitting before the hearth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed, and Fin whined as if hearing her, but his eyes stayed fixed on the beyond.

  She pulled the old boy half up onto her lap and stroked his head with one hand, while the other drew the pruning knife speckled with rust from her apron pocket. Rubbing his ear between her fingers one last time, she whispered, ‘Safe travels,’ and slid the blade into the hole in the dog’s skull, right up to the hilt.

  Fin’s panting chest stilled, and his gaze clouded as he slipped away to another place. Ma blinked the tears from her eyes.

  Only the three thin clouds scored the perfect blue sky, but the tempest was already on its way. As sure as old dogs die and Lorimers must return to cross the dunes.