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their work again. It’s only a day since their last disagreement, and she can’t
     bear to start again. Vic has so many good qualities, but he can hold a grudge for weeks, the chill of his vexation filling
     the house with silence. She had been half afraid throughout her shift that their stupid spat might have kicked another episode
     off, until her discovery drove it from her head. It’s probably, she reflects, why he had the phone off. But I’m not going
     to push things by asking. Not when he’s being so nice.
    ‘So what was it like?’ he asks again, abruptly. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen anything like that, have you?’
    She turns and looks at him. She doesn’t know what she had been expecting, but his look of sharp enjoyment surprises her. He
     covers it quickly with concern, but she’s seen it now, and it feels ugly. It’s not a real thing to you, she thinks, any of
     it. Notthe girl under the pier, not the one they found in among the bins in Mare Street Mews, not this. In fact, now there’ve been
     three of them, and only a fool wouldn’t be asking if it’s the same person doing it, you’re probably just feeling a bit more
     excited – like Whitmouth’s finally on the map. It’s the same thing that keeps people reading the papers every day: if it’s
     not
your
family, if it’s not one of
your
friends, a murder is little more than a night out at the cinema; something to discuss gleefully at the pub.
    The girl’s face flashes through her mind again, pop-eyed and black-tongued, cobweb veins on livid cheeks. Death, so abnormal
     yet so familiar: the shock, the cavernous emptiness behind those reddened eyes; it’s what it always looks like. Nobody dies
     and looks like they’d been expecting it.
    ‘It was …’ She has to think about her words. Strives to recall her emotions, to separate her response to the scene in front
     of her from her panic on her own behalf. ‘I don’t know. It’s weird. It was like I was in a bubble. Watching myself. In a weird
     way, I felt like I wasn’t really there.’
    Vic leans back and opens the drawer in his bedside table. He fishes out his Ventolin inhaler. Takes a puff. ‘Bet you were
     scared, though,’ he says, his voice small from holding his breath. ‘Was there a moment when you thought they’d think you’d
     done it?’
    ‘Vic!’ She’s scandalised. ‘My God!’
    ‘Sorry,’ he says. Breathes out.

7 p.m.
    ‘We can’t go home like this.’
    They face each other in the field, waist-deep in cow parsley. The sun is low, but still bright, and they cut smeared and dingy
     figures now they’re out in the open. Bel looks down at her hands, and sees that her nails are cracked and black from digging.
     Looks back up at Jade. She’s filthy. Earth and lichen, scraps of leaf and twig, scratches from thorns and bark on her arms
     and shins
.
    ‘My mum’ll kill me,’ says Jade.
    ‘It’s OK,’ says Bel. ‘Just put it all straight in the washing machine. She’ll just put stuff on top. She won’t even notice.’
    Jade is appalled. There is no washing machine in the Walker household. She’s always thought of them as things you found in
     launderettes. That Bel would assume they had one underlines the gaping chasm of difference between them. Jade’s mother does
     the family wash by hand, soaking everything in a heap in the bath on Monday night, then squeezing and scrubbing it wheezily
     through before pegging it all out on the network of lines she’s rigged up across the yard on Tuesday. It’s just another thing
     that makes Jade stand out at school: that all her clothes, hand-me-downs from older siblings, are grey and threadbare compared
     with her peers’. Everyone knows that the Walkers are dirty and have no self-respect; someone makes sure to tell her so every
     day
.
    ‘I can’t, she …’ Even now she is unwilling, in front of this girl with her cut-glass accent and her Levi’s jeans, to admit
     the whole truth. She doesn’t