Rachaela was not tired, which was as well, she had the walk back to contend with, almost three hours in itself. Anna had not perhaps lied about the distance.

The village was disheartening.

Grey stone houses cluttered both sides of the novice road. Dark winter fields stretched up the hills, one with a rusting broken tractor in it. There were groups of abandoned cars, their roofs caved in, and ink-black crows cawing on their bonnets.

They walked down into the street and passed an umber little pub with a creaky board: The Armitage.

There was open ground inside the village and there, already drawn up and ready for business, was the large blue van. No one else was out to buy. The denizens of the drear village must have made their purchases already and gone back inside their bleak stone houses. A phone box poked up beyond the van. From some way off, Rachaela saw the receiver depending useless on its cord. Wires sprouted. She felt a start of unsurprised but actual fear. The phone box, out in this remote nowhere, had been vandalized.

Presumably the houses concealed phones, some of them at least.

She visualized walking the miles to this stone village and knocking on house after house door, and not one opening, and the crows coughing in the ruined cars.

They went to the back of the van and a fat man in an anorak rose up, and a skinny woman with a red nose and chilblained knuckles on her bluish hands.

‘Here you are,’ said the man, with fake cheeriness to Carlo and Cheta, obviously accustomed to them. ‘What can we do you for today?’

He had an accent of London, the city Rachaela had left.

Cheta handed him up a list.

‘Just the usual,’ said the man.

‘The lady will want some things,’ said Cheta.

The van man looked at Rachaela, cunning, and she felt the familiar old shame of childhood at having to ask him for intimate items, but there the jolly boxes of Tampax were, blatantly displayed among the soap and bread.

The woman began to pack flour and butter, sugar and toilet paper into the canvas bags Cheta had produced out of her coat and handed up. The man hauled out two huge cans of oil and set them by for Carlo.

Rachaela had believed she would have to carry her own items and had been discreet. But Carlo took up the plastic carrier. He was the servant of the Scarabae.

Cheta said, ‘Can you bring some of the brandy next time? Two bottles.’

‘If they can get it, I will.’ The man totted up the load of goods and read off a price.

Cheta paid from a roll of brown notes.

From where, oh from where, did the Scarabae take their money?

Rachaela was not invited to pay. She was relieved, but not astonished.

At once Cheta and Carlo, now burdened like RSPCA posters of cruelty to donkeys, turned from the van.