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what had happened there and they came to gaze ghoulishly or to ask themselves if they could live with that knowledge. One woman stared at the hail floor as if looking for a blood-stain. In the end the house was sold for a much lower price than its market value. Because she couldn't speak, and her reading and writing skills were very limited, Francine could barely communicate with anyone. She couldn't tell her father about the video cassette or write down that she had found it. She could have handed it over to him, but for some reason she didn't do that. Even then, young as she was and mute as she was, she sensed that there was something wrong about that cassette and it would make him unhappy. Perhaps it was because it had been so careffihly hidden. She had been sure the hiding place was her discovery and hers alone, her father didn't know about it and maybe her mother hadn't known either. There was an old cupboard in the wall of the chimney which was called a wig cupboard because in olden times, before he went up to bed, the man of the house took off his wig and put it inside there for the night. Her mother had kept her sewing box in there and a pair of scissors. The floor of the wig cupboard was of wooden boards which looked as if they fitted tightly together, but if you pressed one of them in a certain way it lifted a little, you could get hold of it in your fingers and prise it out. Underneath was a small hollow space. When first she found it there was nothing inside. She wanted to use the scissors and in reaching for them rested her hand on the secret board and tilted it up. Her mother had seen her with the scissors and, although she wasn't cross, she hadn't sounded very pleased. 'You are not to use my scissors without asking first, Francine. You aren't old enough to use scissors on your own. So was that what she had done and for which she had been sent to her room? Used the scissors without asking? Perhaps. But she had never in fact used the hollow space for hiding things. She had never raised the board again until the day they moved away. On moving day, collecting up her things, she looked in the wig cupboard, but her mother's sewing box and the scissors were gone. Richard Hill was outside in the front garden with the removal men and there was no one to see her. Francine put her hand into the hollow and found inside a video cassette. Or, rather, the rectangular plastic container of a video cassette. On the outside were a picture and some large printed letters. She could read the word 'to' but that was all. She put the cassette into the bag that she would be carrying with her with all her special things in it, the things that would not be going in the removal van but coming with her and her father in the car. They were moving to a house as different as could be from the old one. About two hundred years younger, for one thing. It was a big suburban semi-detached on a wide road in Ealing. Buses ran along the road and cars were always passing. Neighbours were on the left side, neighbours were joined to the house on the right side Fand more neighbours were all along the street. Their house was number 215. It wasn't the sort of place where a man could come to the door and be let in and kill someone's mother with a gun. A few days after they had moved into the new house she talked again. It was about nine months after the murder. She had long unpacked the bag she brought with her and, without looking inside the case, had put the video cassette on to a shelf with some of her books. She and her father were still unpacking things out of the boxes and there, among combs and brushes and hair slides in a tin that had once contained chocolate bicuits, she found the broken pieces of a record, a single of Come Hither's 'Mending Love'. Richard wept when he saw it. The tears rolled down his face. 'It was her favourite,' he said. 'She loved that rune. We once danced to it., And Francine, who hadn't uttered a word for nine months, said