“What about camp? Did she still have to go?” I said.

“Well, that’s where our problems really started. I couldn’t let her go. I just couldn’t.”

Elsie took in a shaky breath. “Got to check on something,” she said, and shuffled out of the room.

Mr Wetheral waited till she’d gone.

“Mother doesn’t like to be reminded of the whole business,” he said. “Hurts too much, you see.”

I tried my tea. It wasn’t so bad today. It was kind of her to make it.

“We were going to leave town, in secret, the four of us – and Mother too, I’d hoped.” Mr Wetheral wrapped his hands round his mug, just like Elsie had held her raspberryade at Jed’s party.

“Leave town? Beyond the boundary?”

“We were planning to find some wanderers. See if they’d help us.”

“Wanderers? But wanderers are—”

“There was talk of someone else from Fennis Wick having done it, years before. Different circumstances, of course. A couple with just one child. The child had gone to camp and they couldn’t bear to stay after that. So they left to become wanderers – to join others of like mind, others who couldn’t abide Andrew Solsbury’s system. Made a good go of it, if the stories were true. They weren’t bad people. Not dirty, or dangerous, or deceitful.”

“But you didn’t go. You’re still here – you and Mrs Weather.”

“No.” Mr Wetheral put his cup down beside him. “Mother feared the unknown, you see. Feared the cold winters, and the wild people. We all did, I suppose. But she refused to leave, warned us against it so much we began to doubt ourselves and fear for the girls and, well, I lost my nerve. We didn’t leave. Instead, I tried to hide the four of us away, the night before Bella was due to go to camp. I locked us all indoors. Bella and her little sister Mia, and my wife, Christie, and me – I bolted the doors, boarded up the windows. We were in a different house back then – right down on the South View boundary. Christie always liked to look out beyond the town, you see.” Mr Wetheral looked out of the window into his sprawling, spreading garden. “She was Mayor Anderson’s younger sister – did you know that?”

I nodded.

“But she was nothing like her at all.” He stared through the window.

I took a gulp of tea.

“Anyway,” he said, “I stocked up on food and water, and told them no one was going out and no one was coming in. Ridiculous really, to even think it would work. A whole group of townspeople gathered outside, ready to carry out the eldest edict.

“Support those who support the edict and punish those who do not,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Were they going to punish you?”