Two other female faces, sunken and creased by age, peer from the windows of their homes on the lane, their pale flesh ghostly behind grey nets.

When Jess turns to confront the watchers, she might have released a pause function on a remote-control handset. The activity of the gardener resumes and she busies herself behind a symmetrical hedge with whatever task she’d paused when Jess came through the front door of the vicarage. The pair of thin faces at the windows dissolve into the gloom they recently prodded out of.

Behind her, the front door is yanked open and Morag roars, ‘Where’s my bloody chicken!’

Jess doesn’t break her stride, or even look back at Nerthus House.

13

The subsonic pulse of dance music throbs from the flat above. Beneath a ceiling that suggests it might be quivering like a drum skin, Jess looks up from the slip of paper she’s struggling to make sense of. A school Accident Report.

Penny, her child-minder, stands beside her with her arms folded tightly, her expression tense.

Leaning against the kitchen counter beside the stove, Tony stands and peers at his feet: the very picture of a concerned crestfallen father.

Jess directs all of her attention at Penny. ‘They said another child on the phone. This says children were involved. Children. An altercation. She been attacked?’

Breaking Jess’s encirclement, Penny looks to Tony and exchanges glances with him. ‘Tone saw the head, luv.’

When Tony finally catches Jess’s eye he appears sheepish, if not a little guilty at being fingered as the saviour. ‘School called me cus you couldn’t get away. I was right in the middle of a service an’ all. I took off so fast, fellas at work thought I found a bomb under the bonnet.’ He laughs and Penny smiles. Jess’s face doesn’t twitch.

Tony kills his grin. ‘Three girls. Not the first time they’ve gone for her neither. Apparently. I was shocked to hear it. Afraid I tore a strip off that head teacher for not dealing with it better first time.’

His remarks wither Jess with a shame she smothers by turning away from them and leaving the kitchen.

* * *

After her own exhausting day, the youngest member of this small family is already asleep. Izzy’s small battered shoes lie beside her bed. A toy and comfort muslin are tucked under the little girl’s grazed chin and top lip.

At the sight of the abrasion Jess gasps and instinctively touches the scar bisecting her own mouth. Her face crumples but she stifles her distress when her daughter stirs.

Jess picks up the pink spiral-bound notebook that Izzy keeps on the side table, beside a night-light and a collection of small unicorns who have been put to bed, tucked inside socks. Izzy draws in this book and has been using it today. She’s left the book open.