As Tony left to go about his work, she opened the first newspaper, feeling it dry and decayed against her skin, the words spidering across the pages, spelling out the horror.

She sat on the stool and read.

Sara spent more than two hours reading through the articles, following the events as best she could. Not only what had happened in this house, but outside, in the streets and towns of this place. A history of which she was only vaguely aware. The turn of the decade, the fifties turning to the sixties, and like the rest of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland was recovering from the ruination of the Second World War. Austerity was the norm, except for the most wealthy, and even the rich found some luxuries hard to come by. The IRA were active along the border, moving from the Republic into the North, targeting police and military outposts. Headlines spoke of attacks and assassinations, and men interned without trial by both governments.

In the midst of it all, little Mary Jackson, believed to be at most twelve years old, though no one could be entirely sure. A girl who didn’t exist until she wandered into a grocer’s shop one early morning, dripping in blood.

Sara worked her way through the pieces, stitching together a picture of what had happened. At first, they knew nothing about this child, where she had come from, what she had endured. As Buchanan the grocer had told Sara, it was a few days before the girl spoke, and even then, she gave the doctors and the police nothing coherent. A week passed before she spoke a name, and then an explosion of headlines, each more frantic than the last.

The first piece focused on the child, as if she were some bloodied angel who had appeared from nowhere. Then the bodies were found, and the glee between the lines of the stories was almost tangible.

The men were identified straightaway: Ivan Jackson, sixty-two, and his sons, Thomas, forty-one, and George, thirty-nine. The identity of the two dead women remained a mystery for several more days. Ivan Jackson had been widowed years ago, left to rear his sons on his own. Word around the village was that there’d been a daughter, but no one could say for sure. Neither of the younger Jacksons had ever married, not even courted any of the local girls, as far as anyone knew. The police continued to work with Mary, trying to build a picture of what went on at the farmhouse. Eventually, she gave them two names: Joy and Noreen. Finally, the women were identified.