The moon glistened on the rocks of Winnats Pass as Fiona and I drove through. It was nearly midnight, but so bright it might as well have been daytime. I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t yet been home to see Dad, but he’d understand. The key was in the safe so he could get in. And Hamlet would hopefully rouse himself from a postprandial sleep on my neighbour’s knee, welcome Dad, and show him around the kitchen, or at least to the cat food cupboard.

An owl – pale and solid, lit by the moon – glided in front of the car and then swooped through a gap between the silver rocks.

‘I asked my granny if she knew the story behind the Pale Child,’ Fiona said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘It originated from a murder in the 1870s. But the weird thing is that it involved this well-off family who lived in a big house in Derwent village, and they were called Nightingale. Tony must be descended from them.’

‘Now that is weird. So how does the story go?’

‘The people in this house had a daughter.’

‘Oh God, the girl’s wearing a red T-shirt, isn’t she?’

‘What?’ Fiona said.

‘Oh, you know … Star Trek. Never mind.’

‘Right. Anyway, the woman – the mother of the girl – was apparently involved in the first wave of feminism. The early suffragists. Gran was obviously impressed, even though she claims not to be a feminist.’

‘I don’t see how anyone can not be a feminist.’

‘She is quite old, I suppose. Thought you had to burn your bra.’

‘That mass bra-burning didn’t even happen. Great way to trivialise an important issue though. But anyway …’

‘Anyway, a lot of people didn’t like this woman because her views were pretty radical at the time. They claimed she neglected her child, even though it was normal for children in rich families to be brought up by a nanny. And they said she was unwomanly and against God and so on. Of course there was no concept of the father neglecting the child.’

‘Lord, no. It was probably against nature for him to look after them. Separate spheres. There was an article in the Lancet around that time saying that if you educated women, their ovaries shrivelled up and they grew beards.’ If Jai had been around I’d have felt compelled to make a crack about the women who studied science at Cambridge. I was relieved he wasn’t.

‘Really?’ Fiona said, because she wasn’t a wisecracking idiot. ‘Well, this poor woman had taken the girl out to get some air in the countryside and she got mobbed by a bunch of anti-suffragists. She argued with them, and took her attention off her girl, who was with a nanny anyway. And the nanny was knocked unconscious and the girl strangled. Nobody saw anything, and the woman got the blame.’