My neighbour stripped every apple from my late husband’s trees the day we buried him. By morning I’d laid something across her front lawn — and she screamed so loudly the whole street came out.

And I stood at the back door and every single tree was bare.

Not a few apples missing. Not half the crop.

All of it. Every apple and every pear, on every branch, as high as a ladder can reach.

Broken twigs and crushed leaves were all over the grass. Somebody had pulled on the branches instead of lifting and turning, and some of them had split.

And Hamish’s wooden ladder, which lives against the shed, was lying on its side by the fence.

That was the loud noise.

I walked slowly across the wet grass to the nearest apple tree, the old Bramley, and put my hand on one of the empty branches.

The afternoon before, it had been so heavy it was bending.

Now there was nothing on it at all.

When I looked over at Glenys’s house, her kitchen light was already on, and the sun was barely up.

She had come back in the night. After I had told her to stay off my property. After she had seen my children on the day of their father’s service. After she had been told, to her face, exactly what those trees were.

And she had taken every last piece of fruit my husband had spent eleven months looking after.

And then I turned round to go back inside, and I saw the shed door.

He wrote on it every year. In chalk, in big capitals, so that he would not forget and so that Rory could see it from the kitchen window.

SPRAYED 29th AUG. NOT BEFORE THE 28th.

Nine days before he died, my husband sprayed those trees for a fungus that had come through the fence from somewhere up the road.

And the product he used has a waiting time on it. Twenty-eight days between spraying and picking, before anything on the tree is safe to eat.

It is on the label in large print. It is on the shed door in chalk. It is the reason he had a rule.

Not before. Never before.

Twelve days before our apples were ready — that was never a sad little detail about timing.

That was the waiting time.

And Glenys had picked every single one of them, twelve days early. And she had told me, to my face, the afternoon before, what she was going to do with them.

She was going to sell them.

PART 3

I knew at half past five that morning.