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volunteered at the Centre. This caused them
to do more than full-time jobs anyway but they could do them in
their time, at their pace.
    Jem phoned Kyle and then she
and Sibyl cleaned, then scrubbed, then vacuumed Annie’s little
house while the children entertained the old woman. They left,
politely declining Annie’s offer of a chocolate from a box since
thrown out. While they were leaving, Kyle shouldered his burly body
through the door, his hands filled with bags of groceries.
    “Get the kids home,” he ordered
his daughter gruffly, as only a father would do to a daughter who
spent her afternoon cleaning the home of an old lady she barely
knew. “Sibyl, luv, you go home too. Tina and I have this covered,”
Sibyl turned her head and caught Tina waving from the passenger
seat of Kyle’s beat-up Ford Fiesta.
    Sibyl waved back as the kids
ran to greet their grandmother.
    “Thanks, Jem,” Sibyl said to
her friend, not knowing how to express her gratitude at sharing
their awful task.
    “We must take care of our own,”
Jemma muttered, clearly disturbed by what she had seen. She called
her kids, blew a kiss to her Mum, gave Sibyl a wave and they walked
off in the opposite direction while Sibyl stood for a moment to
watch the clouds forming.
    Another storm was coming. It
was late February and spring rains had come to Somerset.
    Mentally making plans to talk
to Social Services the next day about Annie and give a piece of her
mind to the minibus driver, Sibyl drove to Brightrose to let
Mallory out for his comfort break. She’d wanted to change out of
her work clothes to something more comfortable, but she no longer
had time. She could wear jeans to the Centre but she took her work
seriously and wanted her oldies and the kids to know that she did.
Therefore, she dressed for work, not in a suit but well enough that
they knew she gave her job her respect.
    She was wearing a long,
cocoa-coloured corduroy skirt, a pair of red cowboy boots, a long
sleeved, fitted, v-necked, red t-shirt and a deep magenta, twill,
tailored jacket. She had a strap of brown leather tied as a choker
around her throat and from it hung a small silver disc with the
tiny word “Peace” placed subtly and artfully on it in bits of
battered bronze (this, a beloved gift from her mother). And she had
heavy, dangling, ornate earrings of garnets and silver dripping
from her ears. Her long, heavy hair hung in a mess about her
shoulders.
    She only had time to pull a
brush through her hair and spray herself with a perfume of her own
styling scented with bergamot, musk and lilies of the valley.
    She allowed Mallory into the
garden when Bran, unusually, darted out the front door.
    She had a cat door in the
bottom half of the split farm door that led from the kitchen to the
back garden where Bran liked to hang about and spend his hours in
the sun. Bran rarely ventured out front, for some bizarre cat
reason, always keeping close to the house in the back. Off he went
through the front, though, quickly becoming a shadow in the dark
night.
    There was nothing for it, she
was already late. Bran would have to brave the unknown wilds of the
front garden and wood until she came home and Sibyl had to trust
that her clever cat would survive (though she had little doubt he
would). Sibyl trudged back to the car, Mallory, as ever, loping hot
on her heels. She opened the car door to retrieve Mallory’s treats
that she’d bought that morning (he always received a treat if he
did well on his comfort breaks and got himself a little exercise,
or, because of her soft heart, even when he didn’t which was far
more often). But, upon opening the door to the car, Mallory shifted
his enormous bulk into the passenger seat and sat, staring forward,
obviously thinking it was time to take a joyride.
    She was about to order
him out, when, to her astonishment, Bran, who hated the car and
anywhere Sibyl might take him in it, darted into the car and curled
up on the driver’s side floor.
    Any