‘You left the back door unlocked again,’ Mum says in answer to my unasked question. I brush past her into the kitchen, sitting in the chair closest to the door and latching the baby on. ‘You could be murdered in your beds.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ I say, sighing as a cool breeze wafts in from the garden, lifting my hair off my face and winding its way round my bare legs. ‘Rav must have opened it this morning.’

‘You need to be more careful.’ My mother’s face is serious. ‘You don’t know who is out there.’

‘Did you see someone?’ My shoulders tense, and the scent of lavender and mint wafts in through the open door. I struggle to turn to look out on to the woods, the baby squirming as I move my body.

‘No. I’m just saying you need to be careful. What’s the matter? You look pale, something has happened.’

I should have known that she would know, without me even mentioning it. She has always had a knack of reading me like a book, an open book with fully illustrated pictures. I wait until the baby has finished feeding and I have laid him in his bouncy chair, before I go upstairs to the drawer of trinkets. I pause for a moment, the drawer opened in front of me, not wanting to put my hands inside, not wanting to touch the bones and hair secreted away in there, before I shake myself.

Ridiculous, I mutter under my breath, it’s just bones. Hair. It can’t hurt you. Even so, I wrap the items in the blue blanket before carrying them down and laying them on the table in front of my mum.

‘What is that? This … horrible thing.’ She points at the witch’s ladder, the ‘h’ sliding from ‘horrible’.

‘I found it in the chimney. It’s some sort of … witchy ritual. Curse. Witches used to use them to cast spells.’ Looking at it, a familiar chill creeps up my spine, that thick, oily badness seeping from it into the air around us, and I can’t bring myself to use the word death. ‘Mum, I wish we’d never come here. I wish I’d told Rav I wanted to stay in Ebbsfleet.’ Tears make my throat thicken, making it hard for the words to come out. ‘I don’t care about the garden, the village life, the space. I don’t want a garden full of toxic plants and a house with a history of witchcraft. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’

‘But this was what you wanted. You were excited to move here,’ my mother says quietly. ‘I thought you wanted what was best for the children.’