In my dreams I have seen what’s coming and know how to prevent it. In my dreams I am quicker and stronger than they are – I do not stand there in the garden like a frozen lump, shocked and terrified and appalled.

In my dreams I do not have a new girl who comes to polish my head – in my dreams the mayor does not come with her in the early mornings to unlock my door; he does not stay to keep an eye on things when the people arrive with their gifts. He does not drive me himself to whatever functions are on in the afternoon and evening, he does not return with me to lock up my apartment for the night, he does not post his beefy guards beside both elevators, front and back, he does not tell me that I must never think of trying to leave them. He does not remind me that I am dear to them, that they love me and cannot live without me – that outside beyond the tall iron gates of his mansion, armed bands roam the countryside, hunting down anyone who dares to insult the name of The Bald One.

The Taking of Bunny Clay

The Taking of Bunny Clay

NANCY LIKED THAT there were no fences between the houses, that everything was open.

Maybe when Bunny was older they would need to put something up, so he could play out, but for now she liked it the way it was – the wide, quiet, almost car-less avenue in front that ran down to the harbour and the town.

Sometimes at night, on the hot July evenings in the weeks before Bunny was born, she and Beecham used to walk down to the harbour and sit near the tethered boats, their tinkling masts, look out across the calm silvered water, and it was hard to believe they could be so close to any kind of city; that the moving lights in the distance beneath the canopy of stars belonged to the planes dropping down one after another into the airport, and weren’t the last gently cascading points of a ship’s flare way out in the middle of the ocean.

Into this unfenced and starlit world Cheryl had come, a recommendation from a neighbour of Nancy’s friend Mary-Katherine in New Rochelle.

‘Heavy but reliable’ was this neighbour’s description of Cheryl, which at the time had sounded to Nancy like faint praise, but in the event she’d fallen instantly and gratefully under the spell of the girl’s statuesque solidity, the calm and solemn expression that covered her broad mahogany-coloured face.

A European girl had arrived two weeks after Bunny was born but she’d been so volatile and unpredictable in her moods they’d sent her back. After that, Cheryl’s slow-moving steadiness, her absolute evenness of temper, had felt like a balm.