‘You could say that,’ said Pamela eventually. She reached up and nervously fiddled with the alice band. ‘It’s a place of great energy. You really have to go there to feel it …’ But all the previous enthusiasm had drained from her voice, and instead she went back to staring at her tea.

‘So, what was it like? What did you do?’ Heather smiled encouragingly. ‘Smoked some weed, listened to music? A sort of nature worship? I’ve read some bits and pieces online.’

Pamela frowned. ‘There was a group, and I was on the fringes of it I suppose, but yes, they were very much concerned with nature worship. The idea of the haunted landscape, of returning to an earlier time when people always carried the earth under their fingernails, when we knew the rhythms of the forest …’

Heather thought of Michael Reave, sitting in his little yellow room in prison, saying similar things.

‘Forgive me, Ms Whittaker, but what does that actually mean? Were there rituals? Did you sing hymns, cast spells? That sort of thing?’

Pamela looked up sharply, clearly expecting some sort of mockery, so Heather kept her face carefully blank.

‘Sun up, sun down, chanting …’ She was becoming vaguer, staring at the window again. ‘There was dancing, and drugs, yes. There were the two priestesses, thought they were better than everyone else, lording it about. But it was, that was, the softer fringe of it. If you got close to the centre …’

Suddenly Pamela Whittaker’s demeanour changed completely. She shook her head and crashed the mug down on the coffee table, causing little waves of tea to splash over the sides, soaking an embroidered tea cloth.

‘Ms Whittaker, are you—’

‘I saw things! Terrible things. Women being used, and hurt, but when I complained about it, they told me that I was imagining it, or even worse, that I was just jealous because I wasn’t part of the inner circle. They told me I just didn’t understand, because I was …’ Her sallow cheeks had turned a hectic pink. ‘I saw blood, in the woods, but we weren’t to talk about it.’

Despite the close warmth of the living room Heather felt a chill travel down her spine.

‘Didn’t you go to the police?’

Pamela Whittaker shot her a pitying look over her glasses. ‘A strung-out hippy lesbian, talking about abuse in the woods? They would have dismissed me out of hand, Miss Evans. That’s if they didn’t just arrest me for being a pot head.’

Heather found herself reassessing whytewitch59. Yes, she had the flighty neurotic artist persona, but there was a steely streak of realism to her too.