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register for non-payment of something and the third was a handwritten envelope containing nothing and addressed to J. DUNN DECEASED . The postman had still delivered it.
    Ah, my dears, Sarah said to herself. It’s as well that I need you more than you need me. I do not wish to be needed. Wanted? Interested? That was another matter. I have a slight unofficial mission to begin to reconcile Jessica with her obviously estranged mother whom she has not seen since sheleft, and although she has not specifically asked me to do that I have a feeling that it’s what she wants me to do. She wants me to find out things she cannot tell anyone, and yet she can’t demand it. Otherwise I have no moral obligations to do anything other than to BE. Thus there is only one family I want to know about and that’s Jessica’s lot. No, I lie: I want to know about them all, but they are slow to tell me. One moves slowly here and there is plenty of time, especially when you have made a vow only to look at your e-mail once a week and rely on verbal communication. I’m doing fine, fat and lazy. Sarah’s dear, anarchic friend Mike, who had carried her here, reluctantly, in a borrowed white van had said she would never last the hectic pace.
You’ll go mad, doll.
She missed him most of all, more than any of the other lovers; missed his reckless and nicely opportunistic way of life as well as his knowledge of an alternative world, but she was determined to prove him wrong.
Call any time, doll. I’m always there for you.
She had not called. He was one of the reasons she had wanted to leave, because she was at risk of needing him. It was confusing to need someone you could never quite trust.
    It was nine-thirty when Sarah saw the single police car, visible through the winter trees, stopping in the vicinity of the shops she could not see. There was a tingle of excitement from seeing such an urban thing as a police car. Maybe someone had come to find Mr J. Dunn and his dog. She turned her back on the village and faced the sea. This, after all, was what she thought she had come to find. The rest could wait.
    P C Chapman opened the door of the butcher’s shop and found him alone, save for the omnipresence of dead meat. His eyes went straight to the back wall.
    ‘What a beast!’
    ‘Yeah, big fella, once.’
    ‘Big all over.’
    ‘Heavy, for sure.’
    ‘Never seen anything like it.’
    ‘Haven’t you ever been for a walk, then, and seen a cow in a field?’
    ‘Scarcely.’
    The butcher nodded. ‘That figures. Blokes like you drive round in cars and only get out when you’ve run someone over. Or when someone else has, right?’ He shook his head, mournfully, taking any slight sting out of his words by smiling and pointing. ‘I tell you what, son, do you think you could move that car of yours before we have a riot round here? Only it’s rush hour. Pull it in next to the van, for God’s sake. We’re not due a lynching for at least another month.’
    The policeman nodded and went out and moved the car so that it stood next to the butcher’s van on the narrow apron outside the shop. Parking it next to the van somehow diminished his own vehicle and made it look domestic. In the time that took, Mr Sam Brady flung a pile of meaty offcuts into the mincer, knowing that all he had to do if he did not feel sociable when the bloke came back was turn the damn thing on and drown him out with the noise. The visitor was only a copper from town and he hadn’t made an appointment. Nothing urgent, anyway, otherwise there would surely be two of them. The policeman came back, stood and stared at the rear wall of the shop where the two quarters of beef hung on the rail, waiting attention. His eyes had glazed over in lustful admiration. Definitely a meat eater, then, because he was looking at the hind quarters of a well-hung carcass as if he wanted to stroke it, like ahungry man looking at a pole dancer, jangling the coins in his pocket.
    The beef quarters were