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rail. A row of semis on the other, council once but all privately owned now. Julie thought: Would this still have happened if we lived somewhere else?
    Vera asked her to point out the exact place where she’d seen the car the night before. She tried her best but her heart wasn’t in it. All the time she was thinking of things she might have done to avoid the loss of her son. She could have moved, or not gone out with the girls, or had Luke put into a special school, a boarding school where he’d have been properly looked after.
    Vera pulled up carefully right outside the house. There was still a policeman on the doorstep, but Julie knew that Luke had gone.

 
Chapter Six
     
    When Vera arrived home that evening, there was a buzzard sailing over her house. The rounded wings were tilted to catch the thermals and the last of the sun caught it, so it shone like polished wood, carved in a totem. The buzzards were only just returning to this part of Northumberland. Common in the west of the county, the keepers here had shot them to buggery, stamped on eggs, put out poisoned bait. Vera knew there was a keeper on a neighbouring estate with murdering tendencies. Let him try, she thought. Just let him try.
    Inside, the house was stuffy and untidy. She’d not been home for twenty-four hours. She opened windows, picked up mucky clothes from the bedroom floor and shoved them in the washer in the lean-to. Then she wondered if there might be anything in the freezer worth eating. Since the death of her father Vera had lived alone and knew she always would now. There was no point considering whether she could have survived a relationship. There had been someone once who’d kept her awake at nights dreaming, but nothing had come of it. It was too late now for regrets. Which didn’t stop her, late at night, with a whisky in her hand.
    She took a beer from the fridge, flipped off the top with an opener and drank it straight from the bottle. Even when she hadn’t bothered to buy in food there was always booze in the old station master’s house. She drank too much. Too regularly at least. Emotionally dependent, she told herself. Not addicted. She carried the beer with her back to the lean-to and ferreted in the chest freezer. Her father had stored the animals and birds for his taxidermy in there; she could do with a smaller freezer now. In the bottom she found a plastic tub of venison stew. The venison had been donated by the same keeper who hated raptors, but she’d accepted it without a qualm. Here in the hills you had to keep up a pretence of liking your neighbours. You never knew when you’d need a tow out of a ditch on a snowy day. She’d spent a wet Sunday afternoon cooking the venison, using lots of root vegetables to keep it moist, bay leaves from the garden and red wine. She’d thought it had all been eaten and finding a portion gave her a brief moment of joy, an uncomplicated pleasure of the kind you rarely experienced as an adult.
    All the time she was stamping around the house, she had the Armstrong case at the back of her mind. Like an actor, she was feeling her way into the characters, living them. She already had a sense of Luke Armstrong. Julie’s words had brought him alive for her, and anyway she’d met boys like him before. Mostly she’d bumped into them in police cells or Young Offender Institutions. The system had failed them, as it would have failed Luke without a mother like Julie to fight on his behalf. Luke had been a boy who had struggled. Everything had been difficult for him – school, relationships and the boring stuff of everyday life. He would have seen the world through a fog of misunderstanding. He hadn’t ever quite made sense of it. He would have been an easy boy to manipulate. A few kind words, the prospect of a simple treat and he would have welcomed a stranger as a saviour. Vera could have understood if he had died in a pub brawl. She imagined him wound up and wound up and then lashing out