‘People see her in the woods around the village. A girl dressed in white, old-fashioned clothes. Supposedly, if she sees your face, you’re going to die.’ She lowered her gaze. ‘Which is clearly not true.’

‘So she’s a child who lives in the village?’

‘She’s not a real child. The whole Pale Child thing is a myth. I don’t know why Esther even brought it up.’

‘Did Violet see this Pale Child?’

‘Of course not. I don’t know why you’re even asking about this.’

I wrote ‘Pale Child’ in my notebook and underlined it twice, then looked up and said, ‘Okay, tell me about the threats you mentioned earlier.’

Anna’s leg jiggled up and down before she stilled it with a hand. ‘You obviously know who Violet is. Her videos?’

‘I know she’s famous for videoing herself cooking meat-based products in a bikini.’

Anna sighed. ‘Maybe we used her, you could say.’ She fiddled with a loose thread on her vest-top. ‘I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while, to debate this stuff. Meat, the environment, welfare, etc. Violet helped. She got us attention. I never knew it could be … dangerous.’

‘Okay, you’d better tell me from the beginning.’

‘It’s all so polarised now, like everything. I wanted to have an intelligent discussion. We set the website up – The Great Meat Debate – and put videos and posts on it. Discussions about the ethics of meat, and about how we’d designed the abattoir. Gary does stupid strength challenges with vegans. Lifting vans and ripping up books or whatever. I mean, that wasn’t part of the intelligent debate, but people love that kind of thing. As for Violet … well, Violet’s just Violet, and she brought us most of our visitors.’

‘You’ve had threats?’

‘Yes. I never expected that to happen. It’s not like we’re doing anything bad, but we attracted a load of attention. You know what it’s like – sometimes the more ethical meat producers come in for more vitriol. As if it’s almost worse to be nice to the animals before you kill them. People can’t seem to handle that. Like that farmer who let kids meet the turkeys at Christmas. It’s irrational, but there it is. We get a lot of haters. Especially a group called the Animal Vigilantes. Do you know them?’

I nodded. They’d been on our radar for a while. They wore clothing printed with a design that made it look like their skin had been removed and you could see their insides. They looked like meat. And their violence levels had been escalating.