Charlie frowned. This didn’t sound like Sam. Normally he was determined to find potential and promise in every scrote that crossed his path. ‘Devout Quakers and GBH don’t often go together.’

‘However devout they went on to become, in April 2000 they tied a defenceless woman to a pillar in their back garden so that Gemma Crowther could spend three days forcing stones down her throat and launching them at her face and body—stones from a garden she’d designed for them. They didn’t feed her or allow her to drink, didn’t let her use the toilet, nearly suffocated her with a bath sponge and parcel tape. She was in hospital for three weeks, left scarred for life and probably infertile.’

Stones from a garden she’d designed . . . ‘Sam . . . oh, my God.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, exhaling slowly. ‘Makes it a bit harder to mourn Crowther’s passing, doesn’t it?’

‘The defenceless woman was Ruth Bussey,’ said Charlie, looking at Simon. ‘She was their victim.’

13 - Wednesday 5 March 2008

13

Wednesday 5 March 2008

When I wake, my head is clear. I know where I am straight away. All the details of this room are familiar, though I saw them for the first time only last night: blue and white checked bedspread and pillowcases, beige loop carpet, the loop so coarse it makes me think of a bathmat. Small, square pine cabinets on either side of the bed, a pine dressing table with a three-sectioned mirror at one end of the room, a wooden blanket chest at the other. Yellow curtains with red and gold tasselled tie-backs. I can hear banging coming from downstairs that sounds like crockery, and a radio.

I’m in Garstead Cottage, in the grounds of Villiers school—the cottage Martha Wyers’ parents rent, and allow Mary to use. We’ll be safe there—that’s what she said. I have fallen out of my life and into hers.

I pull back the bedclothes. I’m wearing the pyjamas Mary threw at me last night, too tired by that point even to speak: they’re pink, with ‘Minxxx’ printed across the top. The soft moans of animals from outside draw me over to the window. I open the curtains and look at the view in daylight: fields full of cows, a wall separating the farmland from the school’s land, the square-towered stone bulk of the main school building at the top of the steeply rising path. It’s the building Mary painted, the picture I saw in her house.

Garstead Cottage nestles in a dip beside the path, a few metres beyond Villiers’ main gates. It’s down a level from the land around it and has an air of being hidden. Last night, Mary told me I didn’t need to bother closing the curtains. ‘No one ever looks in,’ she said. ‘Not girls and not teachers. It’s like being in the middle of nowhere.’