I hopped into my car, opened all the windows and drove rather too fast up the main road through the village. A secret about the Pale Child. Everything kept coming back to the Pale Child. But it made no sense. Who was the girl in Hannah’s video? Wasn’t the Pale Child supposed to be a ghost?

I drove down a side road. A sign for a school hung from a red-brick building, and a couple of children stood on the grass outside. They were oddly still. I looked again. Not children. Bollards in the shape of children, positioned firmly in the uncanny valley. Like the sinkhole in the road into the village, they were presumably intended to slow drivers down and prevent accidents, but I nearly crashed into a railing, freaking out at how sinister they were.

I called Jai back, and talked over his attempt at a greeting. ‘What the hell is it with this village? All the railings and gates and ways to make you slow down. We’ve been sidetracked by the whole meat thing and the Animal Vigilantes. I think this is about something else completely. It’s about this weird village and the bloody Pale Child.’

‘All right. I’m getting the message. I’ll find out what I can about the Pale Child.’

I thanked Jai for putting up with me, ended the call, and drove through Lower Gritton, before pulling into the campsite and parking by the sat-down caravan. I shouldn’t have been going alone but this was me, and anyway uniform had been called. I got out of the car and headed for Daniel’s caravan. The rock-balancing art had been kicked over, the stones lying forlornly on the dry grass. On the side of the caravan, daubed in red paint, were the words PIG TORTURER. YOU’RE NEXT.

The door of the sat-down caravan crashed open and Daniel jumped out. ‘Look what they did! They’re coming for me!’

‘Did you see them?’

‘No. Dotty saw. She’s called the normal police, but I thought you should see. She said they were dressed in those horrible meat suits. Went right up and did it. She set the dog on them and they ran off.’

‘Did they get inside your caravan?’ The edge of the door was dented as if someone had tried to lever it open.

He shook his head. ‘No. No they didn’t.’

I looked more closely. ‘It does look like someone’s broken in, Daniel.’

‘No. It was already like that. But someone’s going to come and kill me in the night. They fed Violet to the pigs. They put a pig’s head on Gary’s corpse. What are they going to do to me? This is so wrong. I do my best for the animals. Why are they targeting me? I love animals!’