The Start of the Story

Chapter 9

9

Connor didn’t come back that evening. I went to bed and lay awake, alert for the sound of his key in the lock, but it never came. In the morning I got up to a quiet and empty house, made myself tea and was throwing the crusts from my toast out to the ducks when I thought to check my e-mails.

It’s late, I’ve been out for a drink with the drone boys, and I don’t want to wake you by coming in, so I’ll sleep on one of their sofas tonight. Don’t want you to think I’ve fallen in a bog and drowned!

Connor

I wondered if he knew that was what I’d been silently planning for him, and felt my cheeks get a bit hot. Was I really that obvious? Then I shrugged and decided to have a quick morning shower, just because I could. The house was mine again, in all its polish-and-old-wood-scented glory.

The gap on the wall where my map had hung snagged my eyes again as I walked past, and the map itself flopped half its length from the bureau where it was currently resting to leave my work desk clear. Would I rehang it? I ought to, it was useful in the way it showed me sites known only to folk tales and maps like this, but I didn’t know if I could. This wasn’t just a map, it was a memory-story, leading from that secretive bookshop near the minster where we’d met over the ancient volumes, to the day we’d hung it on the wall. The day we’d moved into the cottage and looked around at all that had to be done and hugged and laughed at the hard work waiting for us.

‘God, Elliot, I miss you.’

The words felt heavy and obvious. Of course I missed him, that went without saying, so why did I feel the need to breathe the words aloud? To keep his memory alive, somehow?

I shook my head and sat, damp and rosy from the shower, on the edge of the bed. This gave me a prime view, too high for the river to feature, so it comprised the brownish ribbon of track, pimpled with chippings and acned with the red of broken brick that the farmers scattered every year to try to stop the whole thing degenerating into mud. Then, further up, the greying sticks of heather and whortleberry and the occasional blast of colour from gorse, as though some wild impressionist had been by and decided that what the moors needed at this time of year was more yellow.

I was making lists in my head, which was hopeful. A mental track of all the sites that I’d either written about, recorded or found among my paperwork, everything centred on the Fairy Stane, and I had about enough to fill a book. A small book, to be sure, but then nobody would read a four-thousand-page tome of scholarly research into the whys and wherefores of some of the stories. Whether the drowned maids were a cautionary tale to keep young girls from going astray with the farmers’ boys, or the hobs and goblins were distant memories of the Celtic hermits living wild in caves – the reading public didn’t care. They wanted spooks; they wanted places they could go on the moor and put their ear to the ground in the – hope? Expectation? Fear? – of hearing the fairy world partying beneath.

They wanted, in short, local colour . I could do that, and hopefully in such a way that the grant committee would keep funding my research, because the book would pay for itself. It might not reach the dizzy heights of The Times bestseller lists, but it would sell regularly in the independent bookshops and tourist information places. People could take home a souvenir of ‘that time we went to North Yorkshire’, put it on their bookshelves and occasionally dip in to laugh at how funny we’d been in the past.

Outside, the sky, which had previously been bell-clear and cloudless, was becoming oppressed by the weight of incoming cloud. Time for me to drive through to York, see if any of those books that Chess had ordered had come in yet, and perhaps venture across to the university, where the music department was running a short course on Folklore through Lyrics. I’d promised to drop in for a chat with the students.

I gave one last long look out across the high moor and started to get dressed.

By late afternoon I was feeling proud of myself. I’d ticked off the things I had needed to do, listed some potential chapter headings for the book, given Chess a bulk of handwritten pages to start transcribing – which had interrupted her novel-reading at a vital page – and tidied the office so I now knew roughly where everything was.

There was no sign of Connor. I’d half expected a head around the door, or a text asking me what time I was leaving, but there had been no indication of his existence all day. He was probably hung-over, I thought with a degree of grim pleasure. Out drinking with his cronies and then sleeping it off on an uncomfortable sofa, then spending the day holding his head and moving slowly. It would be one less day that I had to worry about the Fairy Stane anyway.

So it came as something of a surprise to arrive back at Mill Cottage and find him firmly in residence, in the kitchen. There was a pleasing smell of garlic in the air, the back door was wide open and the pool of light that spilled out to illuminate the approach was studded with hopeful ducks.

‘Ah, there you are, now.’ He whirled around from the hob with a wooden spoon in his hand and a tea towel around his waist. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I made dinner.’

I wanted to ask how he dared take such a liberty, but I was hungry, and the food smelled good and the kitchen was warm and well lit in comparison to the bleak dark beyond.

‘What is it?’ I asked cautiously, hanging up my coat.

‘A recipe of my granny’s. There’s pork and garlic and – well, you’ll find out. You’re all right with those things?’

It really did smell nice and I found I was smiling. ‘I’ll eat anything someone else cooks,’ I said.

Connor looked at me, his head tipped slightly to one side and the steam from something boiling making his hair frizz. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve no idea what it tastes like.’

‘It smells edible.’ So, he wasn’t hung-over to hell, he wasn’t moping drearily around whilst swallowing paracetamol and slumping in corners. ‘How was your evening yesterday? You could have come back; you wouldn’t disturb me.’

‘We got to talking history – they are all Cavaliers in the local Sealed Knot brigade, they do reconstructions of Civil War battles and things. So, we spent most of the evening playing “my army’s bigger than your army” and drinking beer. It was great. By then I was over in York, and it was late and a taxi would be expensive so I slept on a sofa.’ He turned back to the stove and stirred something that bubbled. ‘Not entirely altruistic on my part.’

He served up the food and we sat in the kitchen and ate, without much chat. I didn’t really want to talk anyway; I’d used up all my words during the day and he seemed to be similarly sunk in thought.

‘How did the drone go?’ I asked eventually, after we’d cleared our plates in silence.

He shrugged. ‘There’s some interesting indications. The crop marks I saw online last year weren’t visible, of course, but there are walls that could be the remains of buildings over a broad area that could have been a trading post.’

‘Not a town, then.’

He shrugged again. ‘We’ve got roads going up over the moors, we’ve got forts, but we’ve not got anywhere that people could have been living. The army would be in the forts, but what about the families? The followers and the workers?’ Now he shook his head. ‘A previously unknown Roman settlement, now that would really make Mam proud.’

‘You’re doing all this to please your family?’ I looked at him over the table. This was the first sign I’d seen of any kind of personal vulnerability.

‘Four brothers, one in the Church.’ Connor gave me a smile. ‘It takes a fair bit to rise to the top of that pile.’

Then, as though he felt he’d said too much, he got up and began clattering plates into the sink and scraping saucepans, leaving me feeling as though I had been prying into secret places. ‘Thank you for dinner,’ I said, sounding stiff and obligated. ‘It was very nice.’

‘No problem. You can wash up though.’

‘Of course.’ Then I felt awkward that I hadn’t offered straight away. ‘Absolutely.’ I got up and went to the sink.

‘Oh, and I got this.’ Connor went into the living room and came back with the cardboard parcel that I’d seen him take yesterday from the van driver. ‘I thought it might be useful.’

‘What is it?’

He slit the card that wrapped the large rectangle, and pulled out more packing material. ‘It’s a new frame. For your map.’

I froze. My arms were up to the elbows in sudsy water, cutlery was chiming and clinking off the crockery as it floated to the bottom and, for a second, it was the only sound in the room. ‘What.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘You’re right, it’s a useful resource, that map. I’d never have heard of Evercey Manor if it weren’t for that, and the Civil War history guys had some interesting stories to tell about that place. D’you know that it stayed Catholic? Apparently the family that owned it had some dirt on Henry, or possibly Elizabeth, and they carried on being Catholic pretty much underground, throughout the Reformation.’

The frame slid out of the bundled packing material. It was modern pine with protruding metal staples, a thin poor replacement for the heavy original framing that had encased my map before. No weight to it at all.

‘And I think it might well be necessary to lift your stone,’ Connor continued, as though everything he was doing were perfectly normal. ‘We won’t do any harm, we’ll lift and photograph, maybe a TLS scan of the surface so we can recreate?—’

‘You are not lifting that stone.’ I pulled my arms back out of the water, feeling angry that I’d allowed myself to be lulled by his cooking, his seeming to care. ‘You can’t.’

‘We could replace it with an identical stone,’ he carried on, sounding as though this were perfectly reasonable. ‘No one need even know it wasn’t the original. But we’d only need to do that if the stone has some detailing on that needs preserving. Come on, even you must know how important it is to make sure that we guard against the stone’s weathering into illegibility, if it gives us any clues as to what was going on out there.’

‘No,’ I said again, my voice as tight as a straitjacket. Tiny domestic bubbles of froth spilled further up my arms until my sleeves were wet. ‘You can’t.’

Here it was. Everything that separated folklore from history. Everything that showed that I stood for the people; the lost and the voiceless out on those moors, wandering in their stories, whilst he stood for the surgical, factual demand for answers.

We stared at one another for a moment, then I turned and dashed the frame from his hand. I couldn’t have told if it was an accident, a mere contact of body against the pale, thin wood, or whether I’d intended to catch the corner and sweep it to the floor. Either way, it fell, spinning, from his grasp and broke on the tiles.

‘My husband made the old frame.’ My voice was so swollen by all the extra, unsaid words that it came out an octave lower.

Water dripped. We both stood and looked at the wreckage on the kitchen floor, a tangle of pine strips, staples and cracked glass.

‘You have a husband,’ Connor said. Then he turned and, without another look, opened the back door and walked out into the night.

I cleared up the second wrecked frame of the week and waited for him to come back in and explain himself. Why shouldn’t I have a husband? He’d never, at any point, asked about my domestic arrangements or, more importantly, how someone who lived on a grant for folklore research could afford a cottage and a car. And why should he care? He was living here against my better judgement until he could find somewhere closer to the university, not mooning at my heels like a lovesick swain. My domestic arrangements, my life, were none of his business .

So why should he care? Walking off into a dark, although unfortunately for his internal narrative not stormy, night – what a total overreaction! I put the twisted cardboard and fragmented mess into the bin and looked out across the ford, up the valley side where the track ran, and saw the slim shape of someone silhouetted by the bright light of the full moon into a stick form. He was heading to the stone, I realised. He was going to go up onto the moor and lift my stone, just because I’d mentioned that I had a husband. Why? Had he been hoping that he could somehow use Irish charm and sex appeal to persuade me to let him ruin an item central to local folklore? Had he been trying to get round me with his cooking and chat?

Shit. I could not let that happen. He hadn’t got a coat on – the big black coat was still hanging from its hook on the back of the kitchen door. He’d waded the ford and he was walking up onto the high moor in a black sweater and jeans, and from the way the moon’s light was crystallising out on every sharp angle out there, there was going to be a frost. November didn’t mess about out here, it could be sub-zero in an hour and if he stopped for any length of time the cold would get him, if the bogs didn’t or he didn’t break a leg.

‘Bloody idiot.’ I pulled on my own coat, pushed my feet into boots and headed out to the car. All the time my mind was full of the confusion of the last ten minutes, and I dropped the car keys in the mud, which necessitated a few fumbling minutes while I patted down the ground all around the car door until I found them. Why had he walked out? The normal response to hearing that someone was married would be – Oh? I didn’t know you were married. What’s his name? Where is he at the moment? I wondered how you’d managed to bag yourself a lovely cottage in the wilds… Then my mouth dried as I realised that any of those questions would have meant a conversation. About Elliot. A conversation that I still wasn’t sure that I was ready for, full of words I wasn’t sure I could say.

The car splashed reluctantly through the ford, the water spraying up the sides after the rain of the previous couple of days, and then gained purchase on the track beyond. Connor was gone and when I reached the top there was no sign of him further along, so I knew he’d gone out over the moor. There was only one destination point out here, unless he was going to stride moodily through knee-deep heather all night. The stone. He really had gone out to the stone, the utter shit. I spared a momentary thought for him scrabbling about at its corners, trying to find something to act as a lever. Eight square feet of heavy local gritstone would not be an easy lift solo, but he might decide to try it, and the thought had me leaving the car and sprinting out along the almost invisible path by the inadequate light of the moon, now filtering through cloud like a Halloween illustration.

I knew the route. I’d been out here so often that I didn’t slip on the very wet patch of peaty mud where the moor sloped gently downwards, or sprain my ankle on the loose gravelly part, where scree could take your feet from under you and sprawl you into the wet undergrowth. I ran until I could see Connor’s form, hunched into a hook shape as he looked down on the stone. The moon was relentless. There was nothing gentle about its light as it rendered the moor stark and endless and the stone a black slab.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I was a little breathless after my dash.

He kept his back to me, head bowed like a mourner at a graveside, and didn’t speak. The moon caught in his hair, in his clothes. He looked like an illustration in this monochrome landscape, a dark, upright foreground figure against the tangled shaded background.

‘Connor?’ His silence disturbed me. I walked across and ended up facing him across the Fairy Stane, both of us looking down on its pitted surface.

Finally he spoke. ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ he said, and now it was his turn with the low octaves. An owl hooted atmospherically from the trees near the river, and it echoed through the night like emphasis.

‘Why should it matter?’ I asked, pushing my hands into my pockets to try to warm them, and shrugging my shoulders up. It was definitely going to be frosty tonight. There was already an element of crunch about the long reedy grass at our feet. ‘My marital status is nothing to do with you.’

Connor sighed and sat down on the edge of the stone. This made him hunch even more, so that he looked like a grasshopper taking a break. ‘I had to leave Dublin,’ he said.

‘Yes, I know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, would you?’ I walked around the stone now so that I could face him, and I could see that he was shivering slightly. Good. That would teach him that you couldn’t do ‘moody stomping about the night’ in North Yorkshire in November – it wasn’t practical.

‘No, I mean…’ He looked up at me. His face was stark in the moonlight. ‘I had to leave Dublin. I got… involved with a girl and I thought it was getting serious. Turned out she had a husband who thought very differently about our relationship.’

He looked so miserable and pathetic that I didn’t laugh, even though I half-wanted to. I blinked at him until he realised that this probably wasn’t sufficient to explain his walking out.

‘We met in a bar, she was very chatty, great company, so we started meeting up the odd evening and it – well, it turned into overnights and dinners and I thought we… I thought it was turning into something that could be something, if you know what I mean.’ Now his expression was almost pleading. ‘I took her home, everyone loved her, the brothers, Mam, Dad, she was a real hit with the family, and I thought, This is it. I really thought I’d got myself a good one. And then…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Then one day, I was at work, up at the university, and this bloke walks into my office and asks if I’m Connor, so I say yes, and he takes a swing at my head, puts a load of photographs down on the table and tells me to lay off his wife.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, inadequately.

Connor slumped forwards and put his face in his hands. ‘She’d been telling him she was away with girlfriends,’ he said, his words filtered through his fingers. ‘She’d got two wee ones at home, and she was telling him she was helping a friend with an emotional crisis.’ A half-laugh. ‘Well, the emotional crisis came later, and there wasn’t any helping.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I sat down next to him. The stone was very, very cold.

‘So, I not only lose the woman I was falling in love with, but I have to face that everything she told me was a lie. She wasn’t a photographer, she was a mum who’d worked as ground staff for Aer Lingus. She wasn’t orphaned, she didn’t want me to meet her parents because they’d have spilt the beans, and, more importantly, she wasn’t fecking single. ’ I heard him swallow hard. ‘So, you can see, I’m a little bit sensitive when I suddenly hear that there’s a husband who might be home any minute, swinging his fists and demanding to know what the hell I’m playing at.’ He looked across at me and there was a long, and slightly desperate, pause. ‘But I’m looking at you now and realising that I might have gone off the deep end and overreacted just a touch. I’m sorry. It was a shock, y’know?’

I could feel my face had frozen and it had nothing to do with the temperature. ‘He won’t be home,’ I said. Repression was practically my middle name by now; the feelings stayed locked down where I could see the very tips of them, waving up at me from beneath the heavy weight of suppressed memory. I wasn’t about to let them out now.

Connor kept looking at me. It was hard to read his expression in this blank light, when his face was eye sockets, the shadows under cheekbones and a tangle of hair.

‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘Divorced?’

I kept my chin up and switched my focus to the moon, a watching circle poised above a mountainscape of cloud. ‘Widowed,’ I said, and stopped.

‘Okay,’ he said again. And then, ‘Okay,’ as though he were talking himself down from a precipice. ‘I’m sorry.’

I wasn’t sure what he was apologising for. Bringing all this up? Walking out on me for a simple misunderstanding? Making me sit here on this bloody hard and freezing cold stone in the middle of the night?

My fingers traced the edge of the stone, where it ended in softly rounded contours and mossy beds. They curled into the lip of stone, almost as though I were about to lift it myself, and neither of us spoke. The owl called again, a lost and lonely note that wailed into the silence like a siren.

‘We need to go back,’ I said at last. ‘It’s going to freeze out here tonight.’

‘Did you drive up?’ He sounded almost conversational now.

‘No, I got a bloody piggyback – of course I drove.’

‘Why?’ He turned so I could see his face fully and it was washed pale by the moonlight.

‘I couldn’t be sure of catching you if I walked.’

‘You seriously thought I’d come up here to turn your stone?’ Connor slapped at the stone between us. ‘ Really? I mean, I’m pretty keen on my job but I’m not that dedicated that I’d be up here in the dark and the cold.’

‘But you are up here in the dark and the cold,’ I pointed out, and he sighed.

‘Fair play.’ He nodded and then looked down at the stone’s mossy granulated surface. ‘And fairyland is really supposed to be under here?’

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was what the stories said, those legends of the moor, but right now, here, in the dark with an owl being atmospheric and the moon breasting the cloud banks like a schooner in a dark sea, I didn’t really want to think too deeply about it. ‘Yes. You’re supposed to be able to hear the fairies, if you put your ear to the stone.’

‘Have you tried?’

I didn’t know what to say. Did I admit that, yes, after Elliot died, I’d come out here in the deep of another sleepless night and lain on the stone? That I’d begged and pleaded with the fairies to come and take me so that I didn’t have to exist any longer in this world that had lost all meaning for me? ‘No,’ I said, reasoning that admissions like this would open a can of worms that would wriggle all over my carefully cultivated calm exterior. ‘What are you doing?’

Connor sprawled the length of the stone, with his head at the top and his legs bent at the knee so that he’d fit entirely onto it. ‘I’m going to listen. Come on.’ A hand reached out and pulled me so that I half toppled next to him. There wasn’t a lot of room. ‘Let’s see if we can hear them partying down there.’

‘It’s just a story,’ I tried to reason with his new and energetic mood. He seemed to have flipped from the sadness of his disappointing love life to a more whimsical turn of thought.

‘Yeah, but stories come from somewhere , Rowan. All stories come from somewhere. Maybe not fairyland, maybe there really was a Roman buried out here, under this stone. Maybe they had a reputation for being a bit wild and the story has come down, word of mouth, generation after generation.’ He stretched his legs off the end of the stone and out into the heather. ‘Every story has a beginning,’ he said again, quietly now into the night.

I lay with the cold biting into every joint. All I could hear was the sound of Connor’s breathing, the distant sound of the river running over the ford, and the owl that was becoming really rather insistent.

No fairies. No parties. No midnight abduction of humans, taken underground and kept. You weren’t supposed to eat fairy food, because that meant they had power over you, but how long could you stay hungry?

‘They aren’t there,’ I said when the cold got too much. ‘It really is just a story, Connor. There are no little people out here.’ The tears of an unaccountable sadness rose up my throat and threatened my eyes. ‘There’s nobody here.’

‘Ah, now. We’re here.’ He rolled onto one elbow and looked over at me. ‘And you’re awful sad now, Rowan. I’m sorry.’

The tears were falling, pushed out by the weight of my heart. ‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, all the words in a rush to be said. ‘I – I don’t often think about it now.’

‘Can you tell me?’

Oh, it was the voice, that soft Irish lilt that gave his words gravity. The gentle accent put an emphasis on his sympathy and it cut right through those memory barriers like a welding lance.

‘He got up to go to work one day and said he didn’t feel well. Collapsed at lunchtime, they called an ambulance and then me. By the time I got to the hospital, he was dead.’ The tears felt divorced from the emotion now, as though I were crying over something else. ‘Some kind of cardiac incident. I don’t know.’ I wiped a hand over my eyes and then my nose on my sleeve. ‘I’d done a pregnancy test that morning, and it had been positive. I was waiting to tell him when we got home that night. We’d been trying for months,’ I finished, as though Connor needed to know that.

‘Oh, Rowan.’

‘It didn’t last. A chemical pregnancy, the doctor said. Or maybe I misread the test – I was so keen for it to be positive I may have made a mistake. But I never got to tell him.’ I sat up now, curling myself over my knees as I tried not to fall back into that awful litany, those words echoing inside my head and squeezing themselves out with the tears – I never got to tell him.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Connor spoke quietly. ‘Truly, I am. When did… I mean, how long ago was this?’

‘Three years. We’d been married for two years when he died, together for five years before that. We wanted to get the cottage restored and liveable before we got married, I’ve no idea why now, but it seemed a good idea at the time.’ I gave a snotty half-laugh and wiped my face again.

‘And the stone?’ Connor looked down at it for a moment and then leaped up as though an electric shock had gone through him. ‘Oh, Lord, he’s not under here now, is he?’

That made me laugh, properly, for the first time in a very long time. ‘No! Of course he isn’t! He was cremated and his ashes were buried in the church over there.’ I pointed in the general direction of the tiny parish church, which snuggled into the valley about three miles further down the river.

‘Thank the Lord for that.’ Connor watched me clamber inelegantly to my feet. ‘You do seem very attached to the stone though, so I wondered.’

‘When we bought the cottage I came up here.’ I led the way onto the track so we could leave the moor. I’d had enough of the cold biting me through my clothes. ‘Just to explore. I found the stone, of course, I didn’t know what it was then, and I sat up here, on my own, looking down the dale. It was summer and the sky was so blue it looked like china, and you could hear the river trickling away in the valley bottom. We’d got our little house, even if it was falling down, and we were in love and it was all so… perfect.’

I kept my head down, eyes on the tricky path. Even in the moonlight, filtered now through running cloud that dashed across its face and away, I could see glimpses of Connor’s expression and I didn’t want to. There was compassion there, and a kind of sad horror.

‘I decided to find out what the stone was doing here, it looked so odd, so out of place. I’d been a social historian since I left university and – I kind of slid sideways into folklore from there. The stone and the cottage, they’ve always been made of stories.’ I was hanging on to those stories now as hard as I could.

‘So, this is your happy place? And you don’t want those memories disturbed, yes, I can see that.’

‘It’s more than that.’ I trudged on. ‘Elliot was…’ I could do it now, I could speak about him in the past tense. ‘He read a lot. He was the one who told me the stories about the fairies, when he read up about the area as we were taking on the cottage. He did all the research, you see. For the restoration. So the stories, the fairies, it’s like…’ I shrugged.

‘Part of him,’ Connor supplied.

‘Then there was this day…’ My memory rushed in to fill my words with the emotions of that day, the sun hot and full overhead. The sky so blue that it felt as though darkness would never come. Elliot leading me up to the stone, our hands clasped, for a ‘surprise’. ‘He brought me up here and when we arrived he’d already been to the stone and he’d laid out a picnic on it.’

The birds had sung to us from the gorse bushes and the air hadn’t moved as Elliot had told me that the picnic was fairy food provided by the Little People from their land under the stone. It had been a surprisingly fanciful statement from my normally pragmatic boyfriend and had made me laugh as we ate thick-cut ham sandwiches and drank warm cordial from a bottle.

Then he’d produced the ring and a speech he’d obviously spent hours rehearsing. He’d carefully sat me down on the edge of the stone and gone down on one knee – disconcerting a passing sheep and putting his foot in the remaining sandwiches – and proposed. ‘We had to be together always, he said. We’d eaten in fairyland.’

‘Oh, Rowan,’ Connor half sighed, as though he didn’t want to be heard.

I shrugged yet again. ‘So, that’s it. That’s me. A widowed, accidental folklorist, living in her tiny old cottage in the middle of nowhere.’

‘But there are ducks. I feel you are overlooking the ducks, somewhat.’

Surprised, I stopped walking. ‘What?’

‘Ducks. You know, quack quack, splash splash. You feed them your morning toast crusts and they hang around outside waiting for it. Incidentally, you’re not meant to give bread to ducks.’

‘I have to, otherwise I’m worried they might attack en masse and have my eye out.’ But I could feel my mood rising with his levity. I was almost smiling now. ‘And the fish get most of the bread, it’s the dinner leavings the ducks really want. They just like fighting over toast.’

‘But it does go to show that you’re not quite the nihilist that you’d want me to believe. Anyone who can save their crusts for the ducks is not completely gone to the other side.’

Then Connor walked off ahead, leading the way down the invisible path back towards my car, leaving me to follow and wonder what on earth he was talking about.