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wore it on Day Three of his trial. I remember her in it. I cut it out.’ Ava kept voluminous scrapbooks full of newspaper-cuttings about notorious trials.
    â€˜Who did Mr Stone kill?’ asked Orlando.
    Again Ava glanced at the door. Despite their mutual dependency, she was frightened of my mother. ‘That’s the awful thing,’ she whispered. ‘It was a little girl. Nicola’s best friend. Said he didn’t mean to, well, of course, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Said he didn’t realize what he was doing.’
    â€˜Not the old red mist defence, I hope,’ said Orlando.
    â€˜Is he going to be hanged?’
    â€˜They don’t hang people for manslaughter.’ Ava gave a theatrical shudder. ‘I just hope he stays behind bars for the rest of his life. No one’s safe with monsters like that around.’
    â€˜How can he be a monster if he didn’t mean to do it?’
    â€˜How did he kill her?’ asked Orlando.
    â€˜Strangled her with . . .’ There was another of Ava’s dramatic pauses. ‘. . . her very own scarf!’
    â€˜Does it matter whose scarf it was?’ asked Orlando.
    â€˜Not as such, I suppose, but somehow it makes it all the more dreadful.’ Ava checked the door again, and leaned in once more. ‘Pulled it round her neck as tight as he could,’ she said graphically, ‘until her eyes popped and her tongue stuck out. They found the poor little mite lying on the floor of his daughter’s bedroom.’
    â€˜Horrible, Ava.’
    â€˜How could he not mean to do it?’
    Unsure, she moved on to safer ground. ‘Not that his name
was
Stone,’ she added. ‘Louise has obviously gone back to her maiden name or something. He was called Farnham, Geoffrey Farnham.’
    â€˜Gosh.’ We were speechless, plunged into the reality of the alien, morbidly exciting adult world that rarely intruded into our bookish lives.
    Belatedly, Ava realized that perhaps she had been indiscreet. ‘Now, don’t you go telling anyone what I just told you. It’s not fair to visit the sins of the father upon the children. Promise me, now.’
    We promised, but the knowledge only added to Nicola’s already considerable mystique and my own besottedness.
    That was also the summer when I woke one morning to find blood on my nightdress. I looked for scabs on my knees but found none so I went to Ava. ‘What’s this from?’
    â€˜Oh, Alice!’ She smiled in a way that made me uneasy and embarrassed.
    â€˜What’s the matter?’ I said.
    â€˜You’ve become a Woman!’
    â€˜Have I?’
    She nodded and winked. ‘Better not tell the boys.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Boys can be very silly about things like that,’ she said.
    Like what? How exactly had I become a woman? What was I this morning, that I hadn’t been last night? Adulthood had been something which awaited far off, and which did not affect my current existence at all. Now, I saw that only the thinnest of membranes separated the girl I was from the woman I had apparently become. Somehow, the barrier between my past and my future had been breached. Unusually, Fiona was more helpful than Ava. Matter-of-factly, she explained about menstruating and monthly periods, showed me a sanitary towel, which she helped me to tie on with a piece of string. ‘I’ll buy you a proper belt when I go shopping later,’ she said. ‘Of course, you won’t be able to go swimming.’
    â€˜Why not?’ I was appalled at this sudden curb on my freedom.
    â€˜Because it’s safer and easier for you not to, not while you’re bleeding. Don’t worry, darling. I’ll explain to the boys.’
    â€˜Please don’t. I’ll absolutely die if you do.’
    â€˜You’re being awfully melodramatic,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s a perfectly normal physical function.’ She