The Stranger House

1. Into the light

Early next morning Sam finally left Illthwaite.

There’d been no question of her leaving the previous evening. It took nearly an hour for the first CID officer to turn up. Unimpressed by assertions that the bones were too ancient for this to be a crime scene, he called in a forensic team to do a full appraisal.

By the time they’d finished and Sam had given her statement for the third time, it was too late to contemplate driving to Newcastle.

Somehow she and Madero hadn’t bumped into each other again that night. From the fact that she didn’t see him being led away by men in white coats, she assumed he’d omitted from his statement any reference to communion with the spirits. Before she went to bed she’d scribbled out the key to the Mary Queen of Scots cipher and pushed it under his door.

The following morning as she started up her car he came out of the pub with a long black sweater pulled hastily over his pajamas, which she was entertained to see weren’t black but striped red and yellow. She bet his mother had bought them.

“You were going without saying goodbye,” he said accusingly.

“Don’t expect we’ll ever meet again,” she said.

“All the more reason to say goodbye,” he protested.

“Nah,” she said with the certainty of one who understands the difference between real and apparent logic. “All the less.”

He shook his head slightly as though to clear his mind and said, “Thank you for writing out the code.”

“Nomenclator,” she said. “No problem.”

She put the car in gear and began to pull away.

“Good luck in your quest,” he called.

“And you. Love the jarmies. If you’re going to buzz around like a bee, you might as well look like one. Ciao!”

And that had been that. Last sight of Madero, followed very shortly by last sight of Illthwaite.

No reason why she should be troubled by either the place or the man again.

The journey to Newcastle took her through lovely countryside, but she was driving eastward into the morning sunlight and, even with her Ray-Bans on, she needed to keep all her attention on the road. On the fringes of the city, she stopped at a service area, bought a street map and checked out the address Betty McKillop had given her in a northern suburb called Gosforth. It was her mother’s flat, the woman had said, sheltered accommodation which was why she had to vacate it so soon after the funeral.

It took another forty minutes to reach what turned out to be a cul-de-sac consisting of four two-story blocks of flats, purpose built for the elderly. They could have looked barrack-like, but the use of a warm red brick with a variety of pastel colors for doors and windows gave them an attractive air, and the lawned areas between them were generously planted with ornamental shrubs. On the whole, not too bad a place to attend death.

She was well ahead of her appointed time so she drove on till she reached the edge of the urban area and found a pub with a beer garden. Here she sat, letting the autumn sun fill her hair with colors to match the changing trees. On impulse she took out her mobile and rang home. It would be late evening there, her parents if not already in bed would be thinking about it, but the desire to hear their familiar voices was strong.

Lu answered.

“Hi, Ma.”

“Sammy! Hi, hon. How’re you doing? Everything OK?”

“Fine. Just felt like a chat. Sorry it’s so late.”

“It’s not late. What do you think we are? Pair of clappedout geriatrics? So how’s it going? You in Cambridge yet, or are you still rubbernecking?”

“Still touring around, getting the feel of the country.”

She felt uncomfortable not being straight with her mother. Eventually she’d come clean with her, but not before hearing what Betty McKillop had to say. Then and only then would she take a decision about what, if anything, to tell her father. Or more likely she’d off-load the decision on to Lu.

“Yeah? And how does it feel?”

“Fine, but not like home.”

“Hope it never feels like that, hon, but give it time and I’m sure you’ll find plenty to like. Hang on. Here’s your pa.”

A pause, then that quiet voice which packed more authority into monosyllables than most politicos and preachers got into a sixty-minute harangue.

“How’s tricks, girl?”

“Fine, Pa. I’m doing fine.”

“Not ready for home yet?”

“Pa, I just got here last week!”

“Yeah? Seems longer. Missing you, girl. Here’s your ma.”

Missing you, girl. The simple statement provoked a longing for home more powerful than any she’d experienced since her departure.

She spoke with her mother a few minutes more, keeping it light and chatty. When they said goodbye and she’d switched off her phone, for a few moments the autumn sun seemed to have lost all its heat and the trees and buildings and people around her faded to a ghostly tableau into which she had somehow strayed.

Then a girl appeared with the sandwich she’d ordered and as she set it down she said, “Hope you don’t mind me asking, but is that hair color natural, ’cos if it’s not, I want to know where I can buy some!”

“Sorry,” said Sam, laughing. “That’s the way it came.”

“Oh well. Just have to get a wig then, won’t I?”

In fact the girl’s hair was a pleasant shade of brown and so fine that the light breeze drifted it across her face in a manner Sam guessed young men would not find unattractive. But she knew from experience that persuading yourself that what you had was in fact OK was not the easiest task a young woman faced.

But the exchange had served to bring her back to where she functioned best, in the here and now. She ate her sandwich, followed it up with a coffee, then killed time strolling along a nearby riverbank and making conversation with the anglers before she headed south once more to Gosforth.

The flat was on the ground floor. She rang the bell and waited. After a moment she saw a figure behind the frosted-glass panel. Then the door was opened by a woman in her fifties, broad in the bust and beam, with henna’d hair and a full fleshy face fraught with enough makeup to launch an amateur production of The Mikado. She looked at Sam, nodded, and said in a strong Australian accent, “I’m Betty McKillop. No need to ask who you are. You got the build, and of course the hair. Lucky girl. Come on in.”

“It’s good of you to see me at a time like this, Mrs. McKillop,” said Sam, following the woman into a sitting room still containing a three-piece suite and a low table but denuded of pictures and ornaments. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

“Call me Betty. Yeah, well at least I knew her for a few years. Those bastards told me she was dead, you know. If it hadn’t been for the Trust… angels them people are, angels. I’m surprised they haven’t been able to help you more.”

“To tell the truth, I haven’t really bothered them, Betty,” said Sam, sitting down. “It was just the coincidence of Gracie being the aunt of a friend of mine that got me wondering. And when she mentioned you, and I was coming over here anyway…”

“To Cambridge Uni, you say? Bright girl. Good onya. World needs bright girls. Sorry I can’t offer you a cuppa. Everything’s packed up or junked. Just the furniture to go, and someone’s coming round to clear that out later on. So let’s enjoy the comfort while we can. It’s your show, Sam. What do you want to ask me?”

“That’s easy,” said Sam. “What I want to hear is anything you can tell me about my grandmother, that’s Sam Flood, who sailed to Australia with you. Gracie said you and her were pretty friendly.”

“Yeah, we got that way, as far as it was possible with little Sam.” She hesitated then went on, “You want the lot? Some of it won’t be pleasant, you appreciate that?”

“From what little I know, I’ll be surprised if any of it is,” said Sam.

“Then you won’t be very surprised. OK, where shall I start? The beginning, why not? The journey out.”

She settled back on the sofa, lit a cigarette and began to talk.

2. Betty

All told, the voyage out wasn’t so bad, though there were plenty of bad times. Like being sick. And realizing after a while that we’d gone too far ever to turn round and go back.

But I made new friends, and most of the sailors were kind. And, looking back, and knowing now what was waiting for us after we arrived, those days seem like a pleasure cruise.

For years I could never remember much of this stuff, you know, not even the voyage. Not because I’d properly forgotten but because I reckon I made myself forget. It was like looking back into a dark pit you were trying to climb out of. There were faces in there and little hands clutching and voices calling out in fear and pain, and all that any looking back did was start you sliding down into the pit, and you knew it had no bottom because wherever you’d been before or whoever you’d been before was out of your reach forever…

Sorry. I’ll be all right in a minute. But it’s been hard. I brought up a daughter and she was always asking questions about the way things were when I was a little girl, the way kids do, and that got me looking back into the pit even when I was laughing with her and telling my made-up stories. Then she grew up and got married and gave me a granddaughter and I thought it’s going to be the same again, her curious, me telling stories, but always skirting round the truth because I couldn’t talk about it, not even to my husband, not even to my own child…

I think if I thought anything I thought I must have done something really terrible to deserve such punishment. Yes, that’s it, I felt guilty. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? I felt guilty! Makes you cry.

Then one day I read in the paper about this Migrant Trust thing that this English woman had started. It was funny. I’d got so used to trying not to think about it because there was no point that it was real hard to start thinking about it again. Suppose it turned out I was right and I deserved what happened to me? But in the end I had to write to the English lady and I got this reply inviting me to go and see her next time she was in Australia, so I went.

There were a lot of other people there waiting and one of them kept looking at me and finally she came over and said, “Aren’t you Betty?” And then I remembered, we’d been on the boat together, and we started crying. Jesus, we must have cried a whole bucketload of tears, and it was like they started washing stuff away, and the more we cried and the more we talked, the more I remembered…

Not being alone was better and it was worse. When I realized just how many of us there’d been – not just one boatload but whole convoys over whole decades – for the first time I began to think maybe I wasn’t so specially bad after all. But then you start to ask, if we weren’t so specially bad, what in the name of God were we doing on those boats? Who decided we should be on them? Where did we all come from?

But you know all about this. There’s been newspaper articles, there’s been books, there’s been commissions of inquiry. You want to know about your gran, the little sick girl. I keep calling her little. She wasn’t all that big but she was two years older than me. I was ten. Can you imagine that? Ten, and they put me on a boat and sent me so far away from home, if we’d gone any further we’d have been coming back! But the girl, Sammy – that’s what we called her because when you asked her about herself, she never spoke but just pulled this piece of paper out of her pocket and when you unfolded it you could just about read this name. Sam Flood. One of the girls thought it must be short for Samantha, which sounded a real fancy name back then. The sick girl didn’t say anything, so we called her Sammy anyway.

There was some kind of address on the paper too, but it had all got so scrunched up it was hard to read. Didn’t seem important, anyway. What did addresses in England have to do with us anymore? Names were different. You had to be called something. Everyone needs a name. Once you let the bastards just call you a number, they’ve really won, haven’t they?

What was I saying? Oh yes, her age. That was the first word she ever spoke to me. I kept asking her how old she was, just for the sake of making her think someone was interested in her, I suppose. Really I reckon I was more interested in myself. When you’re heading down, one way to stop yourself hitting bottom is to find someone worse off than yourself and take care of them. I see that now. I’m not saying I wasn’t really sorry for the girl – I was – but I was really sorry for myself too and this helped.

Twelve. She said she was twelve. Two years older than me. But that didn’t stop me thinking of her as some kind of helpless kid sister I had to look after. Maybe they thought we really were sisters or something, because when we got off the boat, me and Sammy got sent off together with three others, none of them girls I knew well. The ones I did know, like Gracie, got sent off somewhere else. There was no time to say goodbye to her or any of the others. Off we were pushed in different directions, like sheep at a market.

The woman who took us away with her was a nun. I knew about nuns. I’d been brought up a Catholic. It was with the nuns in Liverpool my mother left me when she couldn’t manage anymore, and when she came back to get me, I was gone… but that’s my story. All of the other kids on that boat were Catholic too from what I remember. I doubt if many of them are now. I lost any faith I had a long time ago, but sometimes I hope I’m wrong and they’re right. I’ll tell you why. Because if they’re right, there’s a whole bunch of them burning in hell this very minute for the way they treated us. Oh yes, this minute, and every minute from now till the end of time if there’s justice in heaven, which there certainly didn’t seem to be down below.

But little Sammy wasn’t a Catholic. I don’t think she’d ever seen a nun. What I think she had seen somewhere was a picture with Death in it, wearing a hood and a cowl, so she thought it was Death was taking us away. Maybe she was right.

When we got to this place, I knew what it was straightaway. It was a kids’ home run by the nuns, like the one I’d been in back in Liverpool. I remember thinking, why have they brought me all these thousands of miles across the sea to stick me in the same kind of place I’d been in back home? But I soon found I was wrong. There were differences. That one back in Liverpool was a five-star hotel compared with this place.

It was called St. Rumbald’s. We had to learn all about St. Rumbald. Seems he got born, said, “I’m a Christian,” got baptized, took Holy Communion, preached a sermon, arranged his own burial, then died, all in three days. We used to joke that the poor little sod knew if he’d lived any longer he’d have been sent to somewhere like St. Rumbald’s, so he took the easy way out. Even in hell, you try to joke.

That first day when we arrived, they lined us up to take our details, meaning our names and ages – what else did we have? None of us had any papers or photos or anything. It was like the people who sent us hadn’t wanted us to have anything that could be traced back to them. Only Sammy had her pathetic little scrap of paper. She was in front of me. When the nun at the desk asked her name, she just stood there. Another nun standing beside us started to shake her. I piped up that her name was Samantha and she was twelve and this nun just lashed out with her hand and caught me such a blow across the mouth, I fell over. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” she said. I lay there with my mouth bleeding and watched poor little Sammy pull her piece of paper out. The nun at the desk took it, read it, and said, “Sam Flood. What sort of name is that for a Christian girl? Samantha, is it? I think that’s a kind of Jewish name. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, girl.”

She wrote something down in her ledger, then scrumpled up the piece of paper and dropped it into a wastebasket. I saw little Sammy’s gaze follow it like it was her life she saw being dumped. Then she was pushed away and I was dragged to my feet and made to give my details through my bleeding mouth.

One thing about them nuns, they kept their promises. They said they’d keep an eye on Sammy and they did. Her not being a Catholic meant she was always drawing attention to herself anyway. All that crossing yourself stuff, and knowing when to stand and when to kneel, and singing the responses, none of it meant anything to her. Jesus, I saw her take blows that would have felled a prize steer. But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long way.

I tried to help her, I know I did. But soon it became hard to think of anything but getting myself through to the end of every dreadful day. And, like I said before, each day I got through became part of that stinking pit I was trying to get out of and if you looked back at all, you just saw stuff to make you despair, so I parceled it up as I went along and left it behind me and willed myself never ever to remember.

But all that changed after I went to that first meeting. Now at last there was a reason for remembering. Now someone was trying to do something about it. That English woman, she’s a saint. At least if I still believed in saints, she’d top my list. After I got in touch with the Trust, nearly every day I recalled something new. And the Trust found things out for me that I thought I’d never know. About my mother. I was one of the lucky ones. She was still alive and I got to know her, and I’ve been able to spend these last few weeks with her. My mother. And the bastards told me she was dead.

But you don’t want to know about that… No, it’s all right, don’t apologize. It’s not selfish, it’s focused. I know what it’s like tracking back this stuff, remember?

So, Sammy, the little sick girl, my kid sister who was two years older. We’ve all got personal, individual horrors that we’ve stored up, but what happened to her is a horror shared by every one of us that saw it. I managed to put a lid on most of what happened to me, but that was something I could never blot out. It was the same for the others, I’ve discovered. We all remember that day…

Like I say, Sammy never looked well. After a while we didn’t pay much heed. None of us were all that well, what with the food we had to eat, the work we had to do, the conditions we had to live in. To us, being unwell was normal. But in the end it was bad enough with Sammy for the nuns to take notice. They got their doctor to take a look at her, not so much out of any sense of care, I’d guess, as to check she wasn’t swinging the lead.

Next thing we know is we’re all called into assembly and there’s little Sammy standing in front of us with the nuns behind her, and Mother Posterior (that’s what we called the boss nun who was a big fat cow) stood up and went into this rant which was all about mortal sin and eternal damnation and such, the kind of stuff we got by the bucketload, so normally we tried to look pious and switched off. But this time we listened ’cos gradually we realized she was telling us something completely incredible.

She was telling us, though she couldn’t bring herself to say the word, that little Sammy was pregnant!

And when she finished, you know what those bitches did?

They cut off Sammy’s hair.

She had this lovely red hair, just like yours. That’s how I knew you soon as I saw you. On the boat it had been almost as long as yours. At St. Rum’s we all had our hair cut shorter, but Sammy’s was still a sight worth seeing. Now they set about her, two or three of them with garden shears, and they hacked and hacked till you could see the white skin among the stubble, only in places it wasn’t white but red ’cos they’d stabbed right through and drawn blood.

Sammy just stood there, tears and blood streaming down her face, but she didn’t utter a sound, till finally they were done. Then they marched her out and that was the last any of us saw or heard of Sammy.

So what happened to her? She didn’t look in any state to make it through to the next day, but you being here means she must have done. I still see her in my nightmares after all these years, standing there quietly weeping while her red locks drifted to the floor like autumn leaves around her.

What happened to her, Sam? What happened?

3. Scary stranger

Betty McKillop had chain-smoked as she talked, lighting one cigarette from another and throwing the butts into the grate. Now she threw the last one, followed by the empty packet, and leaned forward to look Sam right in the face.

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “I don’t know what happened, except she died having my father. He got adopted, grew up, got married, had me.”

She spoke quickly, plainly. That was her story, that was all she had to tell. She looked at the older woman and saw her eyes were brimming with tears. Then her arms reached out offering to embrace her, but fell back as Sam sat stiff and upright, her face stony. There would be a time for grief, for anger. But for the moment she needed to keep her wits about her. There were things here that didn’t add up. What she wanted was information not consolation.

“How long did all this take?” she said. “I mean, how long had you been at St. Rumbald’s before they assaulted my grandmother?”

“I can’t be exact. Time didn’t mean much there. Sometimes an hour could seem like a week.”

“You must have some idea,” said Sam impatiently. “A year? Longer? It had to be a year at least, didn’t it?”

Betty looked at her in surprise.

“Hell no,” she said. “Nothing like that. This all happened in the first few months we were there.”

The statement was so self-evidently wrong that for a shocked second it brought everything else Betty had told her into doubt. But why invent a story like that? No, this had to be a simple misunderstanding.

“But that doesn’t compute,” said Sam, shaking her head. “My pa was born in September the year after you arrived. Why should those bastard nuns lie about that? So Sammy got pregnant a few months after she arrived. Pa reckons it was a priest. I bet those nuns didn’t let any other men get close to you. I bet they kept you closer than a duck’s arse.”

“You’re right there, dear,” said the woman, drying her eyes and blowing her nose. “Getting knocked up at St. Rum’s, you’d have had to do it on the wing, like a swallow. Some of the nuns had roving hands and some of the priests too, from what I heard. But I never heard of anyone going the full hog. Anyway, I’m sorry, but you’ve got things mixed up. Like I said, we’d only been there a few months when they savaged little Sammy’s head, may they spend hell with redhot skewers up their backsides. No, she must have been pregnant already when I met her on the boat. That’s why she was so sick, I see that now.”

Sam shook her head again, this time as much in desperation as denial.

“No, it’s you who’s getting mixed up,” she insisted. “Pa was born in September 1961, I’ve seen the certificate. And your ship sailed from Liverpool in the spring of 1960 – ”

“Spring 1960?” Betty McKillop laughed. “Who told you that? Gracie, was it? I bet it was Gracie!”

“Yes. And she was so positive about it. Elvis was top of the charts with ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, and Kennedy became president that year. She remembers seeing it on television, and that was definitely 1960, I checked it out.”

“Now just hold on there,” interrupted Betty. “This is my life you’re trying to tell me about, remember…”

Then she paused, let out an exasperated laugh and said, “Hang about, I think I see what’s happened. Kennedy, you say? Yeah, it was 1960 when he got elected. November 1960. But what Gracie would have seen was his inauguration in January 1961. We all did, at the orphanage in Liverpool. Generally those nuns kept the telly to themselves but this was special, a good Roman Catholic taking the oath as president, next best thing to getting a new Pope. So we were all wheeled in to watch and give thanks. As for Elvis, I bet if you check that song, it came out in ’61, not ’60.”

“But she was so sure,” said Sam, thoroughly bewildered. “She said she was born in 1950 and she was ten when she came to Australia.”

“She was ten when she got on the boat, all right,” said Betty. “But she’d turned eleven by the time we landed. Not that we had birthday parties, anything like that. No, it was hard for any of us to keep track, even if you had a mind for it. We lost a whole summer on that trip. But it was definitely 1961. Poor Gracie. Don’t be too hard on her. We all need to find our own way to deal with things, and from the sound of it Gracie’s way was just to get even vaguer about things than she was when I knew her.”

“She wasn’t so vague she didn’t remember about Sammy,” protested Sam, still reluctant to accept this radical rearrangement of all her timings.

“No, but then the combination of your hair and your name is a pretty strong nudge! Look, dear, I don’t know if it matters, but one thing you can be sure of is that poor little Sammy was definitely already knocked up when she got on the boat. Them nuns at St. Rum’s didn’t do a lot for us, but they certainly kept us virtuous.”

Sam’s face registered shock and bewilderment as she tried to take in this new information. Betty regarded her with shrewd compassion and leaned forward to pat her knee.

“Don’t take it so hard, dear,” she said. “Does it really matter? It was a long time ago and little Sammy’s dead. At least it means your grandfather wasn’t one of them bastard priests. As to who the bastard really was, some things you’re better off not knowing. What my mum told me about my father didn’t make me want to rush off and find the rotten bugger even if he is still alive, which don’t seem likely.”

She watched Sam as she spoke and she could see her words were falling on deaf ears.

She leaned forward again and said, “Listen, Sam, if you’re really determined to find out more about her, you should talk to the people at the Trust. They know the ropes. They’ll keep you straight. And even if they can’t help you find out any more, they understand how important it is to help you let go.”

With a great effort Sam got herself together. Now it was more important than ever that she asked the right questions, set out the right equations.

“Yes, thank you very much. I’ll remember that,” she said. “Just one thing more, Betty. That bit of paper with her name on it – Gracie thought there was an address on it too. She tried to remember but all she could come up with was that the town name ended in thwaite, and she wasn’t too sure about that.”

“No?” Betty laughed. “Well, for once, Gracie got it right. Nowhere I’d ever heard of. Illthwaite, that was it. In Cumberland.”

“ Cumberland? That’s the same as Cumbria, right? Was that on the paper too?”

“I don’t recollect. I don’t think so. Sam Flood, the Vicarage, Illthwaite, is what I remember.”

“The vicarage?” said Sam through dry lips. “Gracie didn’t say that.”

“Not surprising. I’ve just recalled it myself. Yeah, it definitely said the vicarage.”

“But not Cumberland? So why did you say Cumberland?”

“Because that’s where Sam said she came from,” said Betty.

“You talked with her about her background?” said Sam eagerly. “What else did she tell you?”

“Not much. You’ve got to understand that talking to Sam was a bit like talking to a frightened kitten. If you kept at it, you might get it to give a little purr, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to start talking back. So it was me who did most of the talking when we got a chance to talk, which wasn’t all that often. If them nuns could have cut our tongues out and sewn on extra ears to pour their talk of hellfire into, that’s what they’d have done.”

“But she did tell you something about her background?” pressed Sam, desperate for every scrap.

“Nothing much, apart from living in Cumberland. Nothing about parents, but that wasn’t surprising. Lot of the kids knew next to nothing about where they came from. Like I say, she didn’t say much and what she did didn’t make much sense. Sometimes it was hard to make out if she was talking about herself or someone else called Sam. She’d say something about Sam being warm in bed, Sam taking care of her. She answered to Sam, but that could have been because none of us ever called her anything else. For all I know, this name Sam Flood on her piece of paper referred to someone else entirely. It’s just a possibility, but worth keeping in mind if you are going to carry on looking.”

It’s strange, thought Sam. People could say things that changed the shape of your universe without them ever realizing it.

She stood up abruptly. She needed to be away and by herself.

“Yes, I’ll definitely keep it in mind. Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” she said formally.

Betty was looking surprised. And concerned.

“Don’t rush off,” she said. “I’ve got to hang on here till they come for the furniture. Let’s just sit and yack, OK? Tell me about your family. And Gracie – tell me about old Gracie.”

“My family’s fine, Gracie’s fine, I’m fine. But I’ve got to go. I’ve got things to do. Thanks a lot. Really. Thanks.”

She headed for the door. She knew she was being rude. There was nothing but sympathy and kindness on offer here.

She stopped and turned back and said, “Betty, thanks a million. It’s been really kind of you to take time to see me, especially with your ma just dying. I’m real sorry about that.”

Betty’s arms came round her and drew her into her ample bosom. Feeling that strength, that warmth, hearing soothing words being murmured in that home-evoking accent, it would have been easy to let go, relax, let the tears come.

But beneath her pain there was anger and hate. She didn’t want them to be assuaged, she didn’t want their edge to be blunted.

Still dry-eyed, she began to disengage.

Betty said, “Now you take care of yourself. Keep in touch, won’t you? I’d really like to get to know you better. Maybe your pa would like to talk to me…”

Sam kissed her and broke loose.

“Yes, I will. Thanks again. ’Bye.”

As she walked from the door, she didn’t look back till she was in her car with the engine started. Then she waved and drove away.

She didn’t feel she could drive far. Round the corner there was a parade of shops with parking spaces in front of them. She brought the car to a halt. She felt something, but didn’t know what it was. She’d felt like this as a kid when she’d run around too long hatless in the midday sun. She didn’t know whether she was going to be sick or faint.

Finally she leaned forward with her head against the steering wheel and, without forewarning, tears came.

After a couple of minutes she sat upright and wiped her eyes. She looked around, half expecting to be a focus of attention, but there weren’t many people about and those that were didn’t show any interest in her.

That was OK. That was how she wanted it. Take care of your own business. That was the way of the world. She certainly planned to take care of hers.

One of the shops in the parade was a hardware store. She got out of the car, went inside and bought a pair of kitchen scissors. Then she returned to the car and drove away and kept on driving till buildings thinned out and were replaced by fields and trees.

She turned up a quiet side road then parked close against a hawthorn hedge. She pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the small vanity mirror. The slate blue eyes that stared back were like a stranger’s.

Finally she took hold of a tress of her rich red hair, stretched it out to its full length, laid it over the saltire of the scissors, hesitated for a long moment, then brought the blades together with a savage click, and let the long tress fall to the floor.

The first cut was the hardest. Wasn’t it always? After that it was as if the scissors controlled her hand, dancing a mad cancan over her head, blades kicking high and closing hard, hair flying to left and right like sparks from a raging bonfire. From time to time the sharp metal grazed her scalp but she never paused till not a lock of hair longer than half an inch remained to be seen.

Now the woman in the mirror really was a stranger to her. A scary stranger.

Scary was OK.

That’s what she wanted to be, scary.

Back in Illthwaite they prided themselves that they didn’t scare easy.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” said the woman in the mirror.