Benny smiled as he struggled with a string of sausages. “What gave it away? Don’t write that down in your little book, mind. I’ll deny it. Truth is, none of us other kids liked them very much at all. The grown-ups treated them like the sun shone out of their collective arses and we could never really understand exactly why. Probably something to do with the Claypath twins. Maybe they were just all happy the twins calmed down.” Benny came to the end of the link of sausages and thus to his sentence.

“Calmed down? What do you mean?”

Benny smiled. “Back in primary, those two were utter psychopaths. Tim used to bite people and Rachel used to accuse people of touching her—you know, on the... But put both of them together and they were evil geniuses. They used to trap animals, you know. They started off with rats and what have you. Used to corner them and play with ’em—like cats play with food. Then they progressed somewhat—rumor has it they got a cat themselves once.”

“What do you mean by ‘got’?”

Benny picked up a batch of steaks and started unwrapping them, placing them inside the counter. “What don’t I mean would be more apt. It was never proved but kids round the playground said Tim took it out in the woods and skinned it alive. Just a rumor, maybe a tall tale. But still, makes you shiver—makes you think.”

“He skinned a cat?”

“Allegedly. There weren’t no proof, but you know kids—there doesn’t need to be. Anytime a cat went missing, we always thought it was the twins. Hell, even to this day, I’d think that one was him if he weren’t dead.” Benny waved a raw steak in the general direction of a wooden noticeboard. There was a poster of a black-and-white cat named Mittons with the headline MISSING. Benny looked at it for a soul-searching moment. “You think they actually wanted to call it that or they just misspelled Mittens?” He thought for a moment and then shrugged the thought away.

Robin didn’t follow the diversion. “But the group calmed the Claypath twins down?”

“Yeah. Well, that or the rumors died down anyway. To some they just became more boring after—kids like to gossip, I guess. But I think all the adults of Marsden were happy to see them settling into something. The adults heard the whispers of the stuff that they were doing and they were obviously a little unsettled.”

“The adults heard about the cat?”

“Yeah. No surprise. You can’t take a dodgy poo in Marsden without it being written up in the Chronicle.” He paused, his hand outstretched to reposition a steak as though he had disgusted even himself. Then the moment passed and he continued. “People round here gossip faster than usual.”

“Is there anyone in the community who doesn’t like the Claypaths?” Robin said.