Remembering the torn page she’d found on her mother’s dressing table, Heather began to flick through it, looking for the story it had been ripped from. But quickly she realized this was going to be harder than it looked; many pages had been ripped out and apparently thrown away. There were still illustrations of round-cheeked boys and girls, of bears and castles and soldiers, of fairies and goblins and boggarts, their capering figures appearing every few pages.

No wolves though. No wolves left at all.

11

‘Nikki, it was so fucking creepy I can’t even tell you.’

‘It sounds it.’

They were in Nikki’s living room again, the remains of a Chinese takeaway strewn across her formerly pristine coffee table. It was late, and the windows looked too dark to Heather. She was glad her friend had put all the lights on, and even the television with the sound off was a reassuring presence.

‘He wasn’t what I expected. But what do you expect? I don’t know. People like Fred West – he looks like he’s crawled out from under some bridge somewhere. Ian Brady has the most amazingly punchable face. Or he did. Jeffrey Dahmer looks like he has creep written through him like a stick of rock. But Michael Reave was like … I don’t know. A pub landlord from up north who looks after himself. Or,’ she snorted with sour amusement, ‘or the dubious love interest in a Mills & Boon. He broods.’

‘You think those people look evil or unpleasant because you know what they did,’ Nikki pointed out. She was sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked under her. She had changed out of her shirt into a big purple jumper, but was still wearing her work tights. There was a ladder in the knee. ‘Look at Bundy, or Harold Shipman. They looked normal. Shipman looked like a kindly old man, and he’s our most prolific serial killer.’

‘Hmm.’ Over the last couple of hours, both she and Nikki had taken a crash course in serial killer research. ‘Bundy. What a cunt.’

‘My mum would murder you herself if she heard the language you’re using in front of my porcelain figures. That story though …’

‘I know, right?’ Heather snatched up one of the remaining prawn crackers and munched on it. ‘What a weird thing to come out with. And he reckons my mum was a huge fan of these things.’ She paused, wondering whether to tell Nikki about the book, then decided against it.

‘It’s hard to imagine your mum having much time for grisly fairy tales, I have to admit.’

‘Huh. Yeah. And the thing is, it’s a real story. As in, it’s a fairy tale that exists. More or less.’

Nikki paused with a prawn cracker on its way to her mouth.

‘It is? How do you know?’