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forces. Deborah had commandeered the Wendy House again, and together they’d rolled a barrel over to it and jammed it endwise into the entrance, like the tunnel into an igloo, so that Toby could carry out a variant on yesterday’s acoustic experiments. Further up the slope Nell was helping Nelson use the slide, encouraging him to abandon himself to the pull of the earth and waiting to catch him at the bottom. Her love, his trust, were manifest in stance and gesture. Together they composed an idyll, sufficient to each other, Eden-innocent in the perfect afternoon.
    The thought itself must have been the serpent. Poppy sensed a change in the mood on the bench next door. Fran had stopped her recital. The girls had been muttering, notes of doubt and warning, and now their poses stiffened. They were all three gazing steadily towards the clump of trees outside the fence, between the play centre and the pond. She switched specs to see what was bothering them, saw, and joined her stare to theirs. This was how you dealt with this problem.
    Rapt in his own interest the man didn’t for the moment notice he was being watched. He was a silhouette, black as the tree-trunks against the grass glare and pond glitter beyond the patch of shade. He was slight, and was wearing a short, Burberry-style coat. He had a beard, but his other features were invisible in the shadow. He didn’t move. His stance, as he dragged on his cigarette and dropped the butt on to the ground, declared that this was not a casual passer-by, stopping for a moment to enjoy the pretty antics of the children as he might have enjoyed the bright-feathered ducks on the pond, but a watcher, serious, intent, motivated. He seemed to Poppy to be looking at Toby.
    Deborah was inside the Wendy House, singing through the barrel. The round bulge of Toby’s nappy-padded overalls, where he knelt to call back into the apparatus, was all there was for the man to study. There were no other children near. Poppy concentrated her stare. Any moment now he would realise, turn and go. It always worked. They couldn’t stand the focused gaze of twenty women. This sort of thing had happened a couple of times since she’d been coming to the play centre, and then, though disgusted at the necessity, she had found the power of this communal weapon actually exhilarating. Now, with the man seeming to be particularly intent on Toby, she felt only hatred, fright and shock.
    In less than a minute most of the enclosure, including some of the children, had joined the gaze. Without looking, Poppy was aware of the accumulation of energies. In her peripheral vision she saw someone wheel a push-chair through the gate, stop just inside and turn to stare too. Now the man’s concentration broke. He looked round, mimed a moment of bravado by tapping at his pocket as if for another cigarette and realising that he needed to buy a fresh packet, turned and walked away.
    Poppy’s heart was hammering. She watched him dwindling into the sunlight along the path by the pond, his pale coat flapping at his hams. The coat looked newish. His walk wasn’t a derelict’s shamble. She tried to summon up the proper thoughts into her mind—just one of those things, poor sod, something must have gone badly wrong in his life, way, way back … (They should be painlessly done away with and buried six feet deep in lime!)
    She shivered. The sun, so honest and strong ten minutes ago, had no warmth in it. She was aware of the girls beginning to talk again, a group of them now, five or six.
    â€˜I’d like to see them all hanged, that sort.’
    â€˜Hanging’s too good.’
    â€˜If I got my hands on him.’
    â€˜Probation’s all he’d get, till he actually went and did something.’
    â€˜Cut their cocks off, first offence, that’s what I say.’
    â€˜Got his eye on Toby, hadn’t he? You OK, Poppy?’
    She looked up.
    â€˜It’s all