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R ose supposed it made sense, walking the five miles into town and getting Andrew Ford to drive them back.

They had been largely housebound since they arrived, but Simon had never been the indoors sort.

As a child, he’d be forever climbing out of bedroom windows, camping in the garden, sleeping in trees whether allowed to or not.

After the best part of three days tied to the bungalow, he was ready to explode.

All the same, it was hard to hike with him. He was quite incapable of setting or following any kind of pace. He would march off and then suddenly stop when an animal or bird came into view or might be hiding or could be heard. He would photograph and dictate notes and sometimes mimic a call.

Rose found it exhausting. She set off at a steady pace and let him catch up when he wanted to.

They started at seven thirty and followed the road into town which for the most part was unfrequented by traffic. The sky was cool and overcast making everything dull, from the forest up the slope to their left and the open countryside to their right.

Simon fell behind, then caught up, then fell behind again.

Rose continued in her own thoughts, breathing in the clean new air and singing in her head to the rhythm of her footsteps.

Assuming Simon hadn’t lost his mind, then Sky was a wolf, somewhere in the forest, waiting to transform into a human again.

But maybe he had and Sky was just a disturbed woman who needed help.

The wound on Simon’s shoulder where the bullet had passed through had healed into a sliver of silver at the front and a mass of silver at the back.

But his mind was another matter. She wasn’t sure if it had healed up or simply healed over.

Could he really not remember what had happened?

Or did he choose not to? All anyone had told her was that Simon had been attacked by a wolf and was initially phlegmatic, apparently not badly harmed.

What happened a day or so later when the crew was packing up was a mass of confusion.

Someone had arrive in the camp, fired a gun apparently at random, and then disappeared into the trees. And before anyone could act, David was dead and Simon was bleeding out.

How could Simon obliterate the whole thing? How could an entire camera crew fail to record it?

Rose breathed in and paused to survey the scenery, trying to calm the whirl of thoughts and stop her inner eye from staring into the mental abyss. It had been like this for a year, the shock and grief ebbing and flowing.

If only she had some answers, and if Simon could be cured, then maybe she wouldn’t be ambushed every few days by a tornado of fury and confusion.

Rose started to walk again, humming - folk songs her father had loved, then some classical pieces.

After a few minutes, she realised she was striding to the rhythm and tune of Rob’s composition instead and her mind was scoring the cello accompaniment.

Rob’s face, one moment intent on his playing and the next catching her eye and winking, popped into her head and she blushed.

‘What are you grinning at?’ asked Simon, jogging up alongside her.

Rose shrugged. It was silly, this reaction to Rob.

Just physical. She had been on her own for a year, more than that if you counted the months when David had been away with the film crew.

She still ached for him, ran through photographs on the computer to boost her fading memory of that face, those dark eyes, those black curls, that lazy smile.

Rob was just an attractive man who liked music. It was flattering. Just physical.

‘Seen anything?’ she asked. She wasn’t especially interested, unless he’d seen something unexpected, but it was habit.

‘Nothing out of the way. I wonder what she’s doing?’

Rose was blank for a moment and then realised she meant Sky.

‘Sleeping if she’s got any sense,’ she said, wondering what wolves did with themselves all day, but reluctant to ask.

‘Do you suppose…’ Simon began. ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you?’

‘Last time I looked.’

‘Do you understand other women?’

What a question. ‘Depends on the woman. I don’t get some of them at all. I never did the herd thing.’

‘Well can you tell if… I don’t know how to put this… When Sky is a young woman, she’s quite young. When she’s a wolf, she’s fully grown. In the normal course of events - as a wolf - she might have left her family’s pack, found a mate and started a new pack. She could have had cubs by now.’

‘Simon, honestly, the things you ask. If you mean did she look as if she’d been pregnant, I have no idea.

I didn’t take a huge amount of notice of her naked body as I was too busy trying to get her into a dressing-gown before she froze or Emmeline discovered her wandering about starkers and jumped to any more conclusions.

If - I can’t believe I’m discussing this - if as a wolf, she’d cubs, maybe she’d have stretch marks as a human.

I didn’t notice any, but then maybe not everyone gets them.

It’s not something I know anything about.

Equally, if she had cubs, you’d have thought she’d want to be with them, not wandering about looking for you. ’

‘Why wouldn’t she look for me?’

‘Because I’d have thought the cubs would be more important to her animal persona. It’s sort of an animal mother’s job, isn’t it? And besides, the way she talked about her family, it sounded as if she’s still with the pack you knew in Denmark.’

Simon turned to stare at the forest as they walked along. Its boundaries were receding now as the slope reduced and dwellings increased.

‘You could be right, hard as it is to admit it,’ he said. ‘Come on, move a bit faster, only a mile to go and a full Scottish breakfast awaits. Burn a few more calories before you shove some in. We could even walk back.’

‘Forget that,’ snorted Rose. ‘I’m getting a lift. You walk if you want.’

Town was busier than it had been the other day, the centre clear of cars to allow room for a farmers’ market.

A couple of joggers passed. They looked vaguely familiar and Rose thought they might be two of the book-club women, but it was hard to tell.

They smiled and nodded but didn’t break pace as they carried on out of town.

The pushchair assassins were out too. Toddlers waved sticky buns before dropping them on the pavement, babies squirmed in their restraints. Pushchairs festooned with carriers from the 24/7 shop bypassed the farmers’ market to shoal down a side street.

Rose thought she saw Hester pushing a wheelchair at the end of the stalls but couldn’t be sure. She was so beige as to be camouflaged.

‘I’ll meet you both later,’ Rose said to Simon, as they neared the hotel. ‘I’ll have a lighter breakfast in the café with Sam instead. I don’t fancy a fry-up.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Simon, heading up the steps.

Rose waved at Andrew who sat in the window, nursing a coffee. The hotel seemed to be a male preserve today. Thin businessmen were pushing bacon round a plate and prodding phones or refolding newspapers.

There were two cafés. Each was fairly full. Another shoal of pushchair-driving charioteers were increasing their speed towards the one where Rose planned to meet Sam and she dived in through the door just as they swept up, imagining daggers in the wheels within millimetres of her ankles.

Inside, she found Sam sitting in a low leather chair reading one of the national papers.

The café was buzzing. Local artists’ paintings and photographs covered bright yellow walls.

Huddles of women who had come out armed with toddlers regardless of anyone’s disapproval, lolled in sofas periodically grabbing a straying child or admiring a crayoned scribble, or shifting a feeding baby from breast to breast, meanwhile maintaining two conversations, one adult, one maternal, which blended in edgeless swamp of words.

While Sam went to the counter to put in the breakfast order, Rose picked up the paper and started to read.

She had averted her eyes from papers for months.

Last year, the tabloids with their lurid images and wild imaginations were unbearable.

Bloodbath in the Forest , Cuts lead to Murder, Lamb to the Slaughter were the least abhorrent.

Simon’s ex-girlfriends were interviewed.

Had the incident been the result of his risk taking?

The beautiful women posed for the cameras while stabbing him in the back with their pouting mouths, difficult to get to know , self-absorbed , obsessed with work .

Broadsheets asked serious questions about modern film-making.

Was the need to make more engaging documentaries year on year driving producers to take greater and greater risks?

Even though it was a gun which had done the damage, hadn’t there been a wolf attack earlier in the same week?

Had the film crew been too intrusive? What about the impact on the pack?

What about the local people in the area?

Had their interests or traditions been ignored?

Was the attack about animal welfare or local concerns?

Or - and all papers asked the same question eventually - was it a planned murder which went wrong?

Newspapers would hint at anything for sales, but David was just an anonymous cameraman and photographer. There was no dirt to be dug. The most interesting thing they discovered was that he lived with Rose and Simon in the house they’d inherited from their parents in their teens.

Pictures of the motorway pile-up all those years before were dragged out of the archives .

‘Of course,’ said the ex-girlfriends. ‘It must have traumatised him, I mean them, losing their mum and dad that way. The two of them rattled about in that house. It’s all rather domestic.

She and David have the ground floor and Simon has the upper floor.

They have the kitchen in common. Not that anyone cooks.

She locks herself in the office when we’re there. ’

Those weeks on the front pages had dragged on until some minor royal caused a scandal followed by an unrelated wobble on the stock market and the papers sharpened their claws for fresh prey.

Flicking through the pages now, Rose found nothing much had changed in the week or so since they’d moved.

She put down the broadsheet and picked up the local paper.

It was bound to be more calming. Sure enough, there was a stolen bicycle, a debate on skirt lengths at the local secondary school and arguments over the building of a new arts centre in the town.

‘I am concerned that we shall be bringing in too many foreign imports and losing our local heritage,’ says local townswoman Mrs Emmeline McPherson.

‘If the arts centre becomes a centre of excellence for local culture and the maintenance of local history and customs then all to the good, but I fear it will be a means to draw young people away by presenting the outside world as more interesting and inviting. There will be more temptation pulling women away from creating the heart of their homes and we will have a rapid breakdown in family life in our community.’

This all seemed a bit of a heavy reaction for somewhere which seemed likely to keep young people in the area rather than drive them away. Not all of them perhaps, but some. She could see that there needed to be other initiatives to keep the others, but surely this was a start.

Rose flicked through the pages. The What’s On pages seemed to indicate a lively world of clubs, social groups and skills workshops, albeit that these ran heavily on the distaff side with weaving, knitting, cookery courses.

Best not let Simon see those. Something puzzled her about the small ads but she couldn’t work out what.

Shrugging, she turned over again and recoiled at the name Simon Henderson in large font blaring out of a full-page announcement.

We are delighted to present an evening with Simon Henderson, who will regale us with tales from the wild.

Information from The Guild Secretary Hester Straun or President Emmeline McPherson.

It gave a telephone number and email address.

That was it. Flicking back, she looked at the small ads with the clubs and so on. Each one had the same contact number .

‘Getting the flavour of the place?’ said Sam, putting down two coffees and a selection of mini danish pastries. ‘What are you going to take up?’

‘Is everything run …?’ started Rose, before she could stop herself.

Whether it was true or not, she felt as if someone behind her had shifted position. She dropped her voice, aware that just because a place is noisy, doesn’t mean you can’t be heard.

‘The Guild seems to have a lot going on,’ she continued.

Sam looked into her coffee and then up at Rose. ‘Mmm,’ she said, taking a bite of a cinnamon whirl. It was hard to know whether it was a comment on what Rose had said or in appreciation of the food.

‘I see your brother’s giving a talk,’ Sam said.

‘That’ll be news to him,’ said Rose. ‘He hasn’t even agreed to it yet. Emmeline only asked me to speak to him a couple of days ago and this paper was printed two days before that. Has someone got second sight?’

She wasn’t imagining it, there was a definite lull. One of the feeding babies started to cry and turning instinctively, Rose found there was a toddler standing right next to her staring.

‘Hello,’ said Rose.

‘Lo,’ said the child. ‘I drawed a picture of Mummy.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. Look.’ The little girl held out a drawing. It seemed to consist of a lot of attempts at circles with some random lines.

‘Lovely,’ said Rose, uncertain of how to respond, flicking her eyes over at the watching mothers to try and work out which belonged to this child. ‘What’s she doing?’

‘Stirring inna pot,’ said the child, stabbing at some of the lines with her free hand before walking away.

Sam, eyebrows raised, finished off her coffee. ‘Have you looked round town properly yet?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Rose. ‘It sounds stupid, but I haven’t had time.’

‘Even before you moved here?’

‘No. We just stuck a pin in a map. It’s a bit hard to explain…’

‘Never explain. Would you like a tour?’

‘If you don’t mind. ’

Wrapping up the rest of the pastries, they left the cafe. Outside, Rose took a lungful of fresh air. Looking back, she saw the child, sticky hands against the window, staring at her again.

‘I expect it’ll be you in the next picture.’ said Sam.

‘Should I be worried?’

Sam paused. ‘Possibly,’ she said.