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a hand. The fingers were fat and stubby, the nails encrusted with mud. Matt didn’t take it.
    “Noah works for me on the farm,” Mrs Deverill explained. “He has very little conversation, so I wouldn’t bother talking to him.”
    The farmhand was still staring at him. His mouth was open and there was saliva on his chin. Matt turned away.
    “Get in the car,” Mrs Deverill said. “It’s time you saw your new home.”
    They drove for an hour; first on a dual carriageway, then on a B-road, then on a twisting country lane. The further they went, the bleaker the landscape became. Lesser Malling seemed to be hidden somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, but Matt didn’t see a single sign. He was feeling even sicker than before and he wondered if it was Noah’s driving or some sort of virus that he had picked up.
    They came to a crossroads – a meeting of five roads, all of them identical. There were trees on every side. Matt hadn’t noticed them enter the wood but now it surrounded them, totally enclosed them. The wood had obviously been planted recently. All the trees were the same – some sort of pine. They were the same height, the same colour and they had been set in dead straight lines with an identical amount of space between them. No matter which direction Matt looked, the view was exactly the same. He remembered what his social worker in London had told him. The LEAF Project wanted to keep him out of urban areas, away from temptation. They certainly couldn’t have chosen anywhere more remote than here.
    A single signpost stood at the intersection but the top had been broken off. A splintered pole was all that remained.
    “Lesser Malling is ten minutes up the road,” Mrs Deverill said, gesturing to the left. “I’ll show it to you when you’ve settled in a little more. But we live the other way.”
    Noah twisted the steering wheel and they turned left, following one of the other lanes for about fifty metres until they came to a gateway. Matt just had time to see a name, written in dull brown paint: Hive Hall. Then they were following a gravel drive between two barbed-wire fences that ran down to a courtyard and a complex of barns and buildings. The car stopped. They had arrived.
    Matt got out.
    It was a miserable place. The bad weather didn’t help but even in the sunshine there would have been little to recommend Hive Hall. The main farmhouse was made out of great stone slabs, with a slate roof that was buckling under the weight of a single, large chimney. The barns had been built with wooden planks that were so old and sodden, they were rotting where they stood, with dark green moss spreading across them like a disease. The farmyard itself was an irregular square of land that was as much water as earth and gravel. Chickens limped to and fro; they had scarcely moved to avoid the wheels of the Land Rover. Six pigs stood in the mud, shivering.
    “This is it,” Mrs Deverill announced as she got out of the car and stretched her legs. “It may not look much but it’s my home and it does well enough for me. Of course, there are no computer games here. There’s no television. But once you start working, you’ll find you’re too tired for these things. We go to bed early in the country. You’ll get used to our ways in time.”
    They went into the farmhouse. The front door opened into a long kitchen with a flagstone floor. There was an Aga stove at one end, with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, and dozens of jars and bottles on wooden shelves. From here, Mrs Deverill led Matt into a living room with old and battered furniture, shelves full of books and, above a massive fireplace, what looked like a portrait of herself, though it must have been painted hundreds of years ago. It had the same cruel eyes, the same sunken cheeks. Only the hair was different, running loose as if caught in the wind.
    “My ancestor,” Mrs Deverill explained.
    Matt looked past the figure in the canvas. She was