Well, she wasn’t there yet, just hedging her bets. But if she ended up believing, what then? If she’d kept up all the rituals the family used to follow – according to Nan, anyway – would Tony be alive? Liz couldn’t afford to think that. Better to believe he wouldn’t. Nan had always been clear that the rituals were a help, but never a guarantee.

She shouldn’t think of Tony at all just now. She kept seeing him, not as she’d seen him last, sloping out the door with a fag in his mouth, but as the little boy he’d been. He’d always been the handsomest of her kids. Different father from the rest, a notch or two above them in looks and charm. She’d felt something for Tony’s dad. Might even have been love. Maybe that’d made the difference in him.

Now Tony was dead, and she hadn’t even seen the body. Might never get the chance, if Nan’s stories were true.

But she mustn’t panic. Nan had told her: Mostly They sleep, but sometimes They wake. Always in winter, because that’ll be Their time.

How could she have told Ellie Cheetham Nan’s stories? Dumb cow would’ve laughed in Liz’s face.

Liz had never seen the inside of a church if she could help it, but of all the people who went in every Sunday, hearing the vicar prattle on, how many of them really believed? Oh, if you asked them, they’d tell you they did – believed in God and Jesus, maybe even the Devil too – but miracles? Even the ones in the Bible they’d probably claim were really parables or symbols, or some other bollocks. Whatever it took to avoid facing it. Show them a real miracle – an angel, or a demon – and they’d run screaming.

And who could blame them? There was the world you lived in, and the one you hoped for.

Or, if you weren’t so lucky, the one you feared.

Last night Liz had read the family Bible. A real Bible, one with things in it that’d make the vicars and pastors back in Barsall soil their jeans and cassocks. Things Jesus never talked about; those things weren’t in ordinary Bibles, which was why those Bibles wouldn’t do them any good.

We’ve our own faith, Nan had told her. Always have had. Had to learn it for ourselves. It’s all in here, she’d say, and pat the family Bible.

Liz wanted to believe Tony had been drunk – that he’d slipped and cracked his head, wandered off all dizzy and dreaming, waving his knife at something that wasn’t there. But she couldn’t. He’d been chased and cornered, left to freeze: so said Ellie Cheetham, and bitch or not, she knew her job.