Cover

Dedication

For my agent, Ger Nichol,

who was the first to take a chance on me

Epigraph

Who’s at the window, who?

Who’s at the window, who?

It’s the wee bogey man

With a sack on his back

Come to take you away.

Where will he take you to?

Where will he take you to?

To a wee dark shed

Over the hill

Far, far away.

Traditional song, sung to the children of Northern Ireland, source unknown.

Prologue

Ingrid

I was ten years old when I found out that monsters are real and they walk among us. I can pinpoint the exact day that everything changed, when the world I’d found to be fun and innocent and good turned into something dark and frightening.

Looking back, I pity my mother having to find the words to tell my brothers and me what had happened. I pitied all the mothers and fathers who were forced to have that same conversation with their children at the dinner table that evening.

There’d be no playing out in the street any more. Not on these dark nights. There’d be no nipping in and out of neighbours’ houses, or knocking on doors looking for a glass of water when we were parched from playing tig or Red Rover, or riding our bicycles all over the estate in and out of the dark alleyways.

We were never to go out on our own. Nor walk back from school on our own. Even though it would still be light then. We absolutely were not allowed to take the short cut through the overgrown fields at the back of the school, either.

And we were never, ever, ever to go into anyone’s house on our own. No matter how well we knew them. No matter how many times we’d been there before.

Because Kelly Doherty had been found and she was dead. And someone, some bad man or bad woman, had hurt her and killed her and our mothers didn’t know ‘how they would ever be able to cope’ if something like that happened to us.

I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t. For the first time, I hated that I had a room all to myself and my brothers got to share. They got to keep each other company. I curled into as tight a ball as I could manage, hugged Daisy, my tatty stuffed puppy, to me and squeezed my eyes tight shut. But every noise, every creak, every sound from the street had my imagination running wild.

I was scared to move. Scared to breathe. I prayed over and over again, channelling my earnest childhood belief in prayer and a greater good, for Jesus himself to protect me.