The top shelf held nothing which might not be expected to be there, nor did the second, and the third seemed unrewarding, too, until Miss Mayfield, reaching in to pull out a paintbox, felt the back of her hand brush against something that was fastened to the division between the second and third compartments. She closed her fingers about it – it felt like a small box – and pulled. There was a ripping sound, and there in her hand was a little cardboard box, with the ends of the surgical plaster which had held it to the top of the compartment falling limply on either side.

She noted, with a curious detachment, that her fingers had begun to tremble and had turned hot, damp and limp. She had been curious to know what it was that had been distracting Ethel’s attention, and she had looked for it and found it. But now . . . now she was reluctant to push forward with her investigation. She stood there holding the little box slightly away from her, as though it might explode.

At last she opened the lid and saw some harmless cotton wool. The thought came to her that this was something which a girl, a pupil of hers, treasured, had wrapped in cotton-wool and tried – not without skill – to hide. What right had she to pry? What right? What reason?

Using the very tips of her finger and thumb, she lifted the cotton-wool covering and looked down at the object thus revealed without any surprise, with, indeed, a momentary satisfaction – I knew it! I knew it all along!

It was a little figure made from a length of softened-down candle, greyish white in colour and semi-opaque. It was male – indeed, its sex was exaggerated out of all proportion – and it was in two parts; the whole of the top of its head had been cut off and was still separate, like an Indian scalp, but pressed into position by the bolstering of the cotton-wool in which it lay, cotton-wool that was specked and flecked with little bits of something that looked like the broken brittle remains of some green leaf.

The voice in Miss Mayfield’s mind said, This is Sydney. Granny Rigby made it and severed the top of the head. Cut off his consciousness. Ethel put the whole thing together and wrapped it in cotton-wool to keep it safe.

What madness is this? This is the year nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. Nobody has believed in witchcraft for at least two hundred years; the laws against it have been repealed; and here I stand, an ordinary God-fearing village schoolteacher . . . with the evidence in my hand.