The night of Jim Cullen’s funeral I slept uneasily and awoke from the strangest dream with the scene still vivid in my mind: a drunken man stumbled up a lane, struggling to stay upright. A car pulled up beside him, almost knocking him to the ground. The window rolled down. A hand emerged, clutching a brown leather handbag.

‘Here. Take this and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! This and everything in it.’ The hand was trembling but the voice was steady.

‘Why the… why the hell should I?’

‘Because if you don’t I’ll tell everyone what you did. Do you really want me to tell them about -’

‘Fine… I’ll burn the bloody bag. Whose is it anyway?’

He got no response. The car reversed out, leaving tyre marks in the earth. The drunken man continued up the dark lane, the bag dangling from his right hand.

Once was unsettling enough, but I’d had the same dream nearly every night that week. The way it was so clear in my mind was starting to scare me, and there was one particular thing about it that really freaked me out. I recognized the lane. It was the one that led to our new house. I didn’t recognize the men though. I’d never seen them before and I certainly had no desire to. Particularly not the one sitting in the car. His pale eyes held a vicious manic stare that I couldn’t forget.

As I tried to get back to sleep, the image of the bag kept coming into my mind. It was a satchel made of chocolate-brown leather, with a little handle as well as a longer strap, and it swung back and forth as the drunken man moved hesitantly along, the moonlight glinting off its gold buckles. The bag looked familiar, like something I’d see when I was searching through vintage shops for clothes.

I hate it when I’m trying to get back to sleep in the middle of the night and my mind won’t stop racing. I tried hard to think about something else. Maybe I was so fixated on the dream because I didn’t have anything more exciting to distract me.