‘Plenty!’ Viola recruited each one of them in turn with a fervent stare.

She was not as steeped in all this as they were, but she had read books that they hadn’t, seen films, visited museums. She knew the extremes – where they needed to tread. An image came to her of a glass cabinet in a gallery seen on a school trip, way back. Within that cabinet a grisly offering, the bloody object of a curse, with a handwritten card explaining how it had been used.

She relayed it to the girls, Anna looking sick at the suggestion.

‘But that’s a bad spell,’ said Jade-Marie. ‘We don’t do bad spells, only good.’

‘Says who?’ Britta replied quickly.

Jade-Marie was emphatic. ‘No, Brit, that’s not right. We turn our cheeks, like my dad did. We respond in the right way, we don’t stoop to their –’

‘And how did that work out for your dad, then?’ Britta was enraged. Jade-Marie’s eyes welled. ‘Turn the other cheek?’ Britta spat. ‘Turn the other cheek! You know how the rest of that passage goes, don’t you? It says that, if they’ve taken our shirts, we should hand them our coats too. You want to do that, do you?’

Jade-Marie hung her head.

Britta bellowed out a great cry of frustration. Anna put a hand on her friend’s shoulder, pulling her back from the edge, before carefully manoeuvring herself towards it.

‘But if we were to do this,’ she said, ‘and we were acting against evil, then it would be a good thing.’ They all looked at her – cool, calm Anna, the voice of reason. ‘We would be doing God’s work even,’ she went on, ‘because, well, that man would deserve everything he –’ She paused here to glance at Viola, ‘– everything he fucking gets!’

They allowed themselves to laugh at that. Viola thought of Macbeth, the play text she had almost given the girls, and a school production she’d seen back home where the Weird Sisters had cackled manically at the end of every scene. How she’d rolled her eyes at their performances, but just look at her now.

‘We have to believe, though,’ Viola put in, returning them to the seriousness of their cause. ‘It will never work, if we don’t truly believe.’

‘I believe,’ said Britta defiantly, as if swearing an oath.

‘I believe,’ said Anna.

‘I believe,’ said Jade-Marie.

Viola echoed them – ‘I believe’ – because in that moment she did, or she truly wanted to, or she understood that this was all that was available to them. These girls were her family, her sisters, and there had to be a way to stop terrible things happening to the ones you loved.