‘We’re not so different, you and me, kiddo,’ said Saul, placing a heavy hand on Viola’s shoulder. ‘We’ve both lost the ones we love to Benjamin fucking Hailey.’

Her eyes were still on Luke, the two of them silently renegotiating their debt, so this summing-up of Saul’s almost flew past her ear. Almost.

‘What do you mean?’ Her attention returned to him, the childish voice back. ‘I haven’t lost anyone.’

‘No?’ Saul removed his hand, shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, coycrock.’

Then he walked away, back to his new friends, his old friends, his brothers, and Viola kicked at the stocks – hard – made the boards clatter in their frame.

He was right; she knew it.

In the run up to the mid-Lent play, the girls had not shown up at the stones. In the days after too, no sign. Viola threw back her covers every night at 11.30 p.m., put on her mother’s coat and sneaked out of the farmstead, skirting along the edges of the hallway to avoid the nosiest of the floorboards, stepping over the piles of brittle, incoming leaves. It wasn’t that she risked waking her mother who slept like the dead – an analogy Deborah Kendrick used commonly before the incident, and once inadvertently afterwards, leading to the most terrible silence. Viola’s tiptoeing was for Dot’s sake, dreaming by the stove behind the closed kitchen door. If disturbed, she would be too eager to come along.

The girls had given Viola their excuses.

‘We have to go and work on our project with Mr Hailey,’ Jade-Marie had said the last time Viola had seen them. They had exchanged complicit smiles, Anna sensuously winding a piece of blonde hair around a finger.

Viola refused to ask what the project was, or to suggest she should join them; she wouldn’t lower herself. She understood the games girls played, had observed and participated in far more than any of these three amateurs had. They were pushing her to ask the questions only to have the satisfaction of turning her down.

Oh, we couldn’t possibly say.

Oh, I doubt Mr Hailey could agree to anyone else joining in.

Once she had seen this play of theirs – the ‘project’ – she knew there would be consequences. Not that Viola was apportioning any blame to the girls – she wasn’t Leah fucking Cedars. The play had done what it set out to do: prick the island’s conscience. Souls had been sold to the devil, it said, and not the obvious ones, not the souls of those who tattooed their wrists and congregated at the Neolithic circle. But that play had been a hand grenade, and Viola was appalled at Mr Hailey for pulling the pin. She was even more furious that the Eldest Girls had trusted his guidance on this, without consulting her.

They were meeting at the stones earlier.