It was the blood on the doorknob that caught his eye.

There wasn’t an all-body plunging sensation, his animal instincts alerting him to the horrors that lay in wait beyond the door to room number four; the smell of death in the air and the darkness within didn’t yet make all the hairs on his body stand on end and his stomach swan dive to the pit of his bowels. All that would come later. For now, Rob Winter, publican of the Redbelly Inn, simply stopped and looked at the smear of red and knew his morning routine had been disrupted.

It was a strict routine. At a march, Rob exited his car at precisely seven o’clock every morning, leaving it in the gravel space by the keg room door understood by locals to be his spot. He went directly to the beer garden, where he lifted the lid off a steel bin and scooped out a half-litre of birdseed and poultry pellets, using a cut-down plastic milk bottle that lived in the bin. If he didn’t feed the peacocks first, they followed him from room to room issuing their ear-splitting cries, now and then tapping at the windows with their beaks, waking the guests at the inn. One had even come into the office once. Annoying, bossy birds. Rob didn’t know who had originally owned the peacocks. Two had simply shown up in the beer garden, and before he could settle on whether to have them carted off by the council or scour the internet for someone who might adopt them, there were six. Not a simple task, getting rid of six peacocks.

After turning on the coffee machine, starting the pumps, clearing the keg lines and opening the basement doors to clear out the stink of spilt and ancient beer—some of it had first seeped into the sandstone one hundred and fifty years ago—Rob made his coffee and sat down to emails. Having completed that infuriating technological kerfuffle and being well into his walk-through of the inn’s accommodation floor now, he was on his way to the blessed terminal step of the morning routine—sitting for a quiet moment in the front window of the empty bar and watching the river across the street, whispering to himself his daily prayers.