Hope’s scissors stopped. ‘Checked them how?’ she asked.

‘You know,’ said Martha. She cupped the grey hair clippings in one hand and rubbed them between the thumb and forefinger of the other. ‘Extra nipples, bloody moles, strange warts, that kind of thing.’

‘Why on earth,’ said Elizabeth Bishy, her voice high, constricted, affronted, ‘would he want to do that?’

Martha Signal had winced a little at her choice of verb – to want to. ‘Because that would show that they have felt the devil’s touch, wouldn’t it?’

No one seemed to know how to reply. Eyes skittered from the powerful Mrs Bishy, reduced somehow by the limp wetness of her hair, to the short, dark wife of the island’s accountant, who had recently developed a new and bolder way of speaking.

Martha persisted. ‘And they hide things in there, don’t they? That’s what they say.’

‘What who says?’ Elizabeth Bishy’s voice broke. She fumbled her words. ‘Hide what in what?’

Martha’s palm closed around the hair cuttings.

‘Men say it, mostly,’ she replied obliquely, ‘I would imagine.’

‘Men say what!’ demanded Mrs Bishy, twisting in the hairdresser’s chair. ‘You come back here and tell me what you mean!’

But Martha had already put on her coat, dropped the cuttings into the pocket and exited the room.

Friday the 13th – April 2018

FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

Viola stands in the front room, disorientated.

The layout is identical to Leah Cedars’ cottage next door, but the floorplan is flipped – a mirror image – and where Leah’s place was a temple to a life half-lived, this home explodes with things: paintings, candlesticks, small statues of frogs and insects and fish.

In the recess by the fireplace, there is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with texts on crystal healing, past lives and the power of runes, the sorts of books Viola had searched for when looking for a gift for the girls, and now cannot believe are able to exist on the island like this, in so many volumes. In the centre of the room there is a green-baize foldaway table, lit by a fluttering tealight. A tuft of grey hair lies beside the candle, alongside a spread of cards that contain images of fire and sticks and queens. The card on the very edge of the table depicts a heralding angel. It reads: Judgement.

The old woman, cloaked in a pink dressing gown of pitted chenille, had grabbed Viola by the shoulder in the ginnel and steered her forcibly into a backyard, ordering her to tie up Dot outside, before bundling Viola into the kitchen.