She had started speaking low and fast, the coycrock girl – like wizards do when communing with the dead, if the Book of Isaiah is to be believed. She told them all the things that she’d seen, all the things that she’d heard, all the things that she absolutely knew. Britta put an arm around her, Jade-Marie too, the sides of their oversized nightdresses becoming wings. They gathered her up, these seeming angels, and whether they laughed there in that close embrace, or sighed, or wept for one another, for all that they had endured, one thing was true, no matter the interpretation – three were now four.

Four became one.

Friday the 13th – April 2018

FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

Viola is running again, bones juddering as her boots strike the hard earth. The two-way radio in her pocket bangs against her thigh. One foot lands in a grassy pothole and she bites her tongue at the jolt of it. There is blood in her mouth. She doesn’t stop.

Sitting still was no longer an option. The women were arriving for their early shifts at the Provisions Store. Tobacco smoke coiled its way into her shell hideout – the men making for the harbour, lighting their first roll-ups of the day.

The island was closing in on her and she was flooded with memory.

Hide and seek, played with her brother in the generous spaces of their 1930s house on the outer reaches of the M25; making herself small behind the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs, breathing in the dry fug of its dust bag; Seb’s voice calling out, ‘Coming! Ready or not!’; his footsteps immediately there, the door swinging open to let in a brutal light. ‘Found you,’ he’d say with a sigh, expecting better sport.

This glimpse of the past was a warning, a premonition. She had to find a better place to hide, not make it so easy for them.

At full tilt, Viola drops into the channel that runs between the netted allotments at the nunnery. The narrowness of the passage makes her speed feel wild, her breath loud. Dot does her best to keep up, mouth open with the joy of it – a joy that is spiked each time she falls out of step and the lead snags her neck. Viola prays that the holy sisters are too busy with their kneeling and contemplating to see the flash of maroon coat and grey dog streaking across their land. Even if they were to report her, they’d say she is heading where she isn’t.

This is a roundabout route. This is a ruse.