THE SECOND FROST

The drawer by Duncan Reid's stove has been shut for fourteen years. When he finally opens it there are three things inside where there should be thirty, and a clean rectangle in the dust at the back where something sat for a decade.His wife has been dead since 2012. He has four sentences about her and nothing else, and he has spent fourteen years calling that grief.It was not grief. It was a removal. A kind woman in a navy coat has been coming to houses after a death and taking the hard part off people's hands, and everything she carries out of them is currency in a war on the other side of a door.Then a man walks into Duncan's repair shop at minus six with no coat, no papers and no name, and one memory in him that is not his own.Nine weeks to the turn of the year. When the account falls due it balances itself out of whoever is nearest, and there are three thousand people in this city who will wake on New Year's Day lighter, and never know by how much.Duncan can save one of them.