‘Anna, while you were there, did you know a woman called Colleen?’

Heather pulled an old photograph from her satchel and laid it on the table between them. It was a photo of her mother at a birthday party, standing next to a cake covered in unlit candles. Heather guessed she was in her late twenties at the time, and she looked, as she did in all photos, slightly uneasy. The tops of her cheeks were flushed pink.

‘Colleen?’ Anna was peering at the photograph.

‘Yeah. She might have been at Fiddler’s Mill at the same time as you. Do you recognize her at all?’

‘Why? Why are you asking about this?’ Anna looked confused. She touched her fingers to the photograph and then brought them away quickly, as though it had burned her. ‘I thought you were a friend of Pam’s?’

‘Oh, just curious. It turns out I knew someone who went there too. Weird coincidence, isn’t it?’ Heather smiled, watching Anna’s face for any sign of recognition, but there was only bafflement.

‘There were lots of girls there,’ Anna said eventually. ‘And a lot of drugs. I don’t know. It’s a miracle I remember Pamela, to be honest.’ But as she turned away from the photo, Heather thought she saw another expression in the set of her eyes, and the corners of her mouth: guilt.

Heather picked up the photograph and put it back into her satchel.

‘Was there other stuff going on, Anna? Weird stuff, I mean.’ For a second she considered asking about the scars on her arm, but Anna had turned her chin up to the ceiling and narrowed her eyes, as if looking up at a bright summer sky.

‘They grabbed you so hard sometimes, it bruised. Would wake up in the morning with these dark smudges all up my arms, you know? I would think it was dirt, but it wouldn’t wash off.’

‘Who? Who would grab you?’

‘They said it all had to go back to the land, it’s what they always said – that the land was hungry, so thirsty, and we had to make it better again. I think that’s where …’ Her chin and lower lip crumpled, as if she were about to cry. ‘I think that’s where they put her.’ She spoke her final words in a whisper.

‘Put who, Anna?’

‘My baby.’ She dropped her head and looked directly at Heather. Her eyes were abruptly full of tears. ‘My baby. They took her.’

‘You were pregnant at Fiddler’s Mill, and gave birth there?’

‘He took her.’ Anna’s voice had risen, becoming wavery and shrill. Heather felt rather than saw the other occupants of the room turning to look at them. ‘I gave birth to her in the woods, in the mud, and they ripped her from me while she was still covered in my blood.’

‘Anna, it’s okay, you don’t have to talk about this—’