‘How’s life treating you, my old Mop?’

I heard it all, how he was coming down that night instead of in the morning and would be here by midnight. She might pass the message on to her mother, but not to worry as he had his own key. And his kind regards to jolly old Margarine if she hadn’t, by this time, melted away into a little puddle!

Mrs Felton came back at five in Peter Elsworthy’s car. There were leaves in her hair and bits of grass on the back of her skirt. They pored over the vinegar mother, moving it back into a cool dark corner, and enthusing over the colour of the liquor under the floating liver-like mass.

‘A tender plant that mustn’t get overheated,’ said Peter Elsworthy, picking a leaf out of Mrs Felton’s hair and laughing. I wondered why I had ever liked him or thought him kind.

Mop and I were given rosé with our supper out of a dumpy little bottle with a picture of cloisters on its label. By now Mrs Felton must have learned that I didn’t need wine to make me sleep, so she didn’t insist on my having more than one glass. The vinegar mother’s vessel was three-quarters full.

I was in bed and Mop nearly undressed when I remembered about her father’s message.

‘I forgot to tell her,’ said Mop, yawning and heavy-eyed.

‘You could go down and tell her now.’

‘She’d be cross. Besides, he’s got his key.’

‘You don’t like going down in the dark by yourself,’ I said. Mop didn’t answer. She got into bed and pulled the sheet over her head.

We never spoke to each other again.

She didn’t return to school that term, and at the end of it my mother told me she wasn’t coming back. I never learned what happened to her. The last – almost the last – I remember of her was her thin sallow face that lately had always looked bewildered, and the dark circles round her old woman’s eyes. I remember the books on the bedside table: Fifty Haunted Houses, the Works of Sheridan Lefanu, The Best of Montague Rhodes James. The pale lacquering of moonlight in that room with its beams and its slanted ceiling. The silence of night in an old and haunted countryside. Wine breath in my throat and wine weariness bringing heavy sleep . . .

Out of that thick slumber I was awakened by two sharp explosions and the sound of breaking glass. Mop had gone from the bedroom before I was out of bed, scarcely aware of where I was, my head swimming. Somewhere downstairs Mop was screaming. I went down. The whole house, the house called Sanctuary, was bright with lights. I opened the dining room door.

Mr Felton was leaning against the table, the shotgun still in his hand. I think he was crying. I don’t remember much blood, only the brown dead nakedness of Mrs Felton spread on the floor with Peter Elsworthy bent over her, holding his wounded arm. And the smell of gunpowder like fireworks and the stronger sickening stench of vinegar everywhere, and broken glass in shards, and Mop screaming, plunging a knife again and again into a thick slimy liver mass on the carpet.