Viola worked it out when she arrived one midnight to find the detritus of a ritual recently discarded. She started coming earlier too, retreating to her old position, crouching low in the ferns to watch. The girls stretched their arms to the sky more desperately than before. They called out to the goddesses of nature, time, the sea, the earth, to Bethany Reid, to the lost fishermen, to their guiding saints, Rita, Brigid, Anne – mother of Mary – and to St Jade. To everyone, anyone.

Like before, Viola chose her moment to step forward.

‘I could have told you so,’ she said coolly, as she entered the circle of stones.

The girls’ arms drooped, swallowed by the folds of their voluminous nightdresses.

‘You were punished, I suppose,’ she went on.

They looked at their feet.

‘Why did you listen to that piece of shit?’ Viola watched the insult ripple through them. ‘In the end, he’s just a man. In the end they’re all like that, they let you down.’

She choked on these too-grown-up words, the emotion catching her unexpectedly. She was talking about Saul, she thought, but it was her dad she meant, and Seb. Their dying felt like a deliberate desertion, the worst betrayal ever.

Britta turned to the other two, that unspoken language passing between them, and they rejoined their hands, reforming their circle of just three, whispering one of their old incantations.

Clean we are, pure we be

Our minds fall open and we can see

Take the dark, turn it to light

Wash this away before the night.

They went back to the start, murmuring the verse again, faster, faster, Viola watching, thinking, I’ve lost them, I’ve lost the ones I love to Benjamin fucking Hailey.

But she would not be like Saul. She would not give up. She could still be the hero.

‘Speak to me!’ Viola begged.

The chanting stopped, the circle broke. They lined up to face her.

The coldness of their gaze was so unbearably painful.

‘You’ve been causing trouble,’ said Britta.

‘What?’ Viola didn’t understand.

‘You’ve been meddling in Mr Hailey’s business,’ said Jade-Marie.

Anna nodded, the final verdict. ‘And he told us that we are never to trust you again.’

Friday the 13th – April 2018

FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

They stand outside the bedroom and wait, impatiently. They will kick down the door if they must.

It has been done before and can be done again, explains the woman on the stairs whose name is Hannah Pass. She has done it herself, without any help from the gardeners, without even a change of her neat buckled shoes. She directs Viola’s attention to the scars in the wood, says the door will never be the same again, which is a shame because much of the interiors are original … different handles but, you know?

‘Sorry,’ Hannah added, ‘I talk too much when I’m anxious.’