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stopped inviting him or whether he’d just stopped bothering to go without her to bully him, he wasn’t sure. A bit of both, probably.
    Gil took his pint, his suit and his paperback – Rankin today, only one more to go and he’d be done with Rebus and have to find a new curmudgeon to spend his days with – to an armchair in the corner, as far away from tourists as possible. Through the rain-streaked window, he could see his usual table, standing empty in the corner of the courtyard; wood sodden, fag butts swimming, he was sure, in the brewery ashtray put there by Ray in a futile attempt to stop Gil grinding his stubs out on the cobbles. Far enough away from others not to have to make small talk, close enough for people watching.
    He caught himself: usual table.
    Christ on a bike, he’d be getting a hobby next.

4
    She didn’t sleep that night, not really. Nor the next. Each night passing broken and jumpy, pitched on the very edge of the promise of sleep until a moaning joist or yawning floorboard dragged her back from welcome darkness just as she threatened to slide over. The yelp of a fox or whatever other animals haunted the Dales, the scraping of a branch and the scrabbling of tiny rodent claws in the rooms above her head, made her start and turn uneasily, neither fully awake nor asleep. On the plus side, no sleep meant no nightmares.
    Sometime in the middle of the third night – or was it the fourth? Helen had lost all track of time – the rain eventually stopped. Perversely, when it did, she was finally napping, caving to exhaustion in the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other hours before dawn. The first she knew was when she emerged from an uneasy doze to a cracked ceiling moulding flushed pink through a triangle in the curtains. The jaundiced light of the previous mornings ousted by its healthier outdoorsy younger cousin. From the leaf-stuffed gutters outside her window the occasional drip of water on to stone slabs below. Nothing more.
    She’d never bought that red sky in the morning shepherd’s warning business. Waking to a pink-tinged sky always gave Helen hope and, in spite of everything, today was no different. Within seconds she was up, floral quilt kicked to the floor, rotting curtains thrown wide, the Dales blushing under her gaze.
    Suddenly, she had to be outside. There was something freeing about slipping into trainers and turning your back on everything. Optimism surged through her as she rifled in the carrier bags that still contained her new running kit. Without stopping to think, without checking the time, she ripped carelessly at the tags that swung from her new running bra, cheap knee tights and wicking top, and slid her feet into the trainers, wishing she hadn’t forgotten to get socks, and grabbed the door keys from the floor beside the bed where she’d left them after her final midnight tour of the house.
    In less than a minute Helen was out of the house and halfway down the gravel drive, not so much as a backward glance when the door crashed to, rebounded and then clicked shut behind her. At the end of the drive, she turned left, away from the village, and ran squinting into the low sun. The road was quiet, not even the distant growl of traffic. She was used to running on urban roads, with no real protection from the traffic, but even here, in this relatively remote part of the country, she didn’t fancy meeting a lorry head-on. It was half a mile before she came to a gap in the drystone wall that would let her into the rocky fields. Clambering over the stile, Helen felt her knee complain. She hadn’t run for more than a week and she hadn’t stretched properly, or at all, before she left Wildfell.
    ‘Serves me right,’ Helen thought as she felt the muscles in her calves tighten and a familiar burning begin at the front of her thighs. So what if the fresh air bit at her still-sore lungs? Ignoring the aches, she ploughed on, something remote and forgotten flickering to life inside her, the