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Tina is a thin, mousy woman with bandy legs, no waist, and a face like a collie dog.
    It is that face that she hunts for in the crowd, sitting in her car on Glasshouse Lane at five past eight in the morning. She has got up especially early to be here on time. Dishevelled mothers, their messy hair stuffed into hoods, haul their offspring around as if they are sacks of soil. Grooves of exhaustion carve the women’s faces into defeated chunks. And these are the lucky ones, she thinks. These are the ones whose children will not be killed. Tina has not arrived yet.
    She contemplates what she intends to do, the effect it will have. Sol’s life will be ruined, which is what she wants, so there is no problem there. But when she thinks about Tina, or the children themselves, she is surprised to find that she feels no anguish, no empathy. Even when she puts the matter to herself in a deliberately emotive way (which she does often, as an experiment), she is unmoved. All she has is a cold sense of necessity. This is what has to happen. She must harm Sol more than he has harmed her. Her heart is a brick; therefore, in order to win, she must turn his into a vast purple lesion, a pulsating carnivorous tumour.
    And she can do it, that’s the beauty of the scheme. She has the ability. Anyone can harm another person, if they don’t care what happens afterwards. She might not be able to fit a kitchen or a carpet, rehang a door or remove an oil stain, but she is confident that she can kill Sol Barber’s children.
    Not today, though. She will not murder Agnes and Wilfred today. She doesn’t even know what they look like, and she hasn’t brought an implement with her. As yet, she has given no thought to the practicalities of ending two lives. All she wants, at this stage, is to see the children’s faces.
    She yelps when she spots Sol walking down the road towards her car. Although there are a few other men in the playground, it didn’t occur to her that Sol might bring his children to school. Agnes and Wilfred are on either side of him, holding his hands. He is talking to them, smiling. She draws her knees up to her chest and buries her face in them.A moment ago she was a woman; now she is a ball of fear, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat of her car. What if he sees her? Instinctively, she knows that it would be worse than last time.
    A few seconds later, or it might even be minutes, she dares to look up. She sees his broad back. He is kissing his children goodbye. She cannot see them clearly because of all the people, but she notices Agnes’s coat. It is brown with a fitted waist, and has a ridiculous collar made of some shaggy, trailing, furry material, as if someone has skinned an animal and draped the scrapings around Agnes’s neck.
    None of the other girls has a coat like that. It will be easy to spot at break, or lunchtime, when Sol isn’t there. She ducks when he turns to leave, keeping one eye half open to check that he doesn’t look in her direction. He doesn’t. Her body feels as if it has been shaken in a hard box.
    Gradually, she recovers her composure. She settles in for the wait, feeling guilty because she could and should be working. She has done nothing, achieved nothing, since Sol attacked her, and she must achieve, substantially and soon. She must prove that she is not worthless. Also, there is something else bothering her. Why are the children called Wilfred and Agnes? What sort of names are those for young, happy, twenty-first-century children?
    Agnes and Wilfred. Exploited worker names, victim names, early-tragic-death names. She pictures a downtrodden Victorian servant girl in an apron, curtseying before a tyrannical master; a tubercular chimney sweep or coal miner with a searing cough, broken shoes and a face black with dust from being forced to crawl into holes noone would choose to enter. Agnes and Wilfred. She knows, absolutely knows beyond all doubt,