But then came another realisation, sly, fierce, rising fast – the heart had worked. Incorrectly and indirectly, it had worked! The power that Viola and the Eldest Girls had tried to harness within themselves existed; it was real, and this fact, separate from any affection she now felt for the late gamekeeper, gave Viola a sudden sense of boldness, of invincibility.

‘You should keep your trap shut,’ she shot back.

Michael’s eyes widened. ‘Why should I?’

Viola smiled darkly. ‘In case they find out who it was who fetched that heart for us, that’s why.’ Then she shoved him hard, so that he fell backwards ingloriously, into the hedge. She rejoined the queue of mourners and the boy chased behind her, dishevelled, heckling weakly in her wake, ‘What’s that supposed to mean? What’s that supposed to mean?’

This boldness carried her through the service, forming a dam against the memories she did not want flooding back.

Mary stood beside Jade-Marie in chapel, her arm around her, as Father Daniel led the coffin’s procession up the aisle, declaiming, ‘I am the resurrection and the life!’ and only then did Viola join up the dots – Mary was Jade-Marie’s mother. Why had she not worked this out before? Probably because Jade-Marie talked mostly about her father (Neil, dead at sea) and because the girls stuck close to one another for mass at the weekends, giving few hints as to who in the congregation were their parents.

Here, at the funeral, the girls were hand-in-hand with their respective mothers, the family resemblances startlingly obvious. Anna’s blonde, bobbed hair was the image of her mother’s, and the discovery that Viola’s Provisions Store nemesis was Britta Sayers’ mother was perhaps no surprise at all.

The girls were being held close that day because they were not welcome. Yet, they had to be there; absence would have been an admission of guilt. Mary’s failure to mention this to Viola seemed an enormous oversight. Did she not know of the coycrock’s friendship with her daughter, of her involvement in all of this? Or was it like Jade-Marie not speaking of her mother, was Viola no topic of conversation away from the stones?

Viola decided the omission was a kindness, so that she had not been afraid to come, and also a denial by Mary that the girls could ever have hurt her beloved Peter. Still, as Viola studied the backs of Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie, she imagined their potential, seeing it as something shimmering and actual, rising from the girls’ shoulders. What might they do next with this great power they possessed? Oh, the scores they would settle! Oh, how the guilty would suffer at their hands!